A Corpus Linguistic Study of Drug Addiction Perils in William Burroughs’ Junky

Abstract The history of the world shows that addiction to drugs is a growing problem every day. The perils of addiction extend beyond the individual, profoundly affecting families, communities, and the socio-economic landscape of societies. This corpus linguistic study investigates the representation of drug addiction perils within literature, specifically a novel. This study aims to identify linguistic features, word frequencies, and collocations associated with drug addiction and explore variations in its representation in William S. Burroughs's novel "Junky”. A corpus linguistic approach comprising quantitative and qualitative analysis of the selected novel is employed to analyse linguistic features. The study adopts Csomay and Crawford (2024) framework to examine the data. The quantitative analysis is achieved by using Wordcruncher software to gain an objective, systematic statistical overview of the corpus. The research focuses on collocations, word frequencies, and concordances. The main finding of this study is that the selection of vocabularies, word frequencies, and collocations associated with drug addiction reveals the significant role of language in shaping the perils and negative influences of addiction.