The Lexicogrammatical Company that James Joyce Keeps

This chapter analyses how James Joyce has been represented in the British press by investigating a large corpus of British newspapers from 1993 and 1995, using the tools of corpus-assisted discourse analysis (for example, see Morley and Bayley eds 2009) and accordingly its focus goes beyond the nine-word window typical of a great deal of corpus linguistics. The chapter first describes the corpus we used for the study, the procedures used to narrow down the data, and the quantitative data resulting from a query for ‘Joyce’. Secondly, it offers an analysis of the semantic sets that are associated with mentions of his name, which means searching through the concordances not for collocates but for co-occurrences of items with similar meanings or with similar grammatical configurations. Finally, it probes what is at stake in the use of a word that does not refer to the author himself, but rather is applied primarily to objects represented as similar to him – Joycean