A Corpus Based Analysis of Sympathy in Language: Constructed Victimhood in Fiction

This study identifies the discursive strategies used by Shamsie in portraying two male characters as victims of oppression. I identified the recurrently occurring process types like mental and modal verbs, as well as rationalization, distillation, and over-determination. Two male characters from two novels by Pakistani Anglophone novelist Kamila Shamsie are chosen. Van Leeuwen's discourse-analytical categories (2008) are identified with the help of corpus tools. The study investigates how language constructs victimized characters to evoke sympathy in the reader. The use of Word Sketch to investigate the language of literature is also demonstrated in this research. The current research not only explores the discursive techniques but also proposes the corpus methodology which is used to identify these techniques. The study suggests further exploration into the phenomenon to understand whether the identified discursive techniques used for portraying victim characters are unique to Pakistani anglophone literature or it is used by English fiction writers in general. This research opens new avenues for future studies to understand the language of victimhood in larger corpora.