Software-assisted systemic socio-semantic stylistics – Appraising tru* in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe

This paper reports recent findings in ongoing research into the limits of applying the methods of corpus linguistics (CL) to the analysis of ‘verbal art’ using Hasan’s Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics framework (SSS; Hasan 1985). The text investigated is Coetzee’s novel Foe – a post-colonial rewriting of Robinson Crusoe. Focus is on the evaluation of the notion truth' in Foe by means of APPRAISAL SYSTEMS (Martin and White 2005) and identification of appraisers, appraisees/eds, also considering what Thompson (2014) calls the ‘Russian Doll’ dilemma: the overlapping of different Appraisal categories. The comparative wordlists and keywordlists compiled, for both Foe and Robinson Crusoe as reference corpus, reveal potentially relevant lexical items, including silence/word/story/tru* (truth/true/truly), subsequently analyzed in concordances for meaningful patterns of evaluation and significant textual location. Findings bring us closer to the novel’s Theme, defined by Hasan as a meaningful reflection about human existence. This is tentatively formulated as the complex and relative connection between silence/words, authorship (in both fiction and history) and veracity. Our findings also show how CL plays a valuable instrumental role in SSS: a means for identifying significant features which, however, call for further manual scrutiny, also - crucially - taking into account the text’s ‘context of creation’.