Exploring Lexical Luxury in Scott Fitzgerald's Novels: A Corpus-Based Stylistic Analysis

This study is based on corpus-stylistic techniques and measures the concept of lexical luxury being considered as a stylistic marker in literary work represented by Scott Fitzgerald's novels. This study aims to investigate the feasibility of measuring lexical luxury using corpus-based methodologies and techniques. It looks at how lexical luxury is used as a stylistic marker in literary works. The study hypothesizes that corpus stylistics frames a rather reliable source of verifying the validity of controversial issues about lexical luxury measurements; Type/Token Ratio is a measure that can efficiently determine the size of the lexical luxury when an analyst analyzes a text; the high percentages of lexical luxury are based on the high concentrations of lexical items resulting in a denser lexicality. The corpus in this study is designed and compiled on the principles of corpus linguistics as well as corpus stylistics, then, processed via WordjSmith Tools (8.0) to get the tokens; types, and word frequencies. The lexical items and function words are analyzed using Ure's method, then percentages of lexical luxury are obtained. The percentages represent lexical luxury profiles for each novel. After that, the whole statistical output is graphically plotted using Microsoft Office Excel. This study found that corpus-based stylistic studies have proven to be effective in exploring specific aspects of style. However, corpus stylistics makes significant use of statistical descriptions offered by trustworthy and authentic measures such as Type/Token Ratio.