Stepanova D.V. Author's corpus‑based tools: explicating and interpreting theme of money in novel "The Clown" by H. Böll

The article deals with the results of a corpus-based study of the novel The Clown by Heinrich Böll. The research is conducted using the author’s corpus-based tools. The relevance of the study is determined by the sustained interest in formalized methods of fictional text and discourse analysis and the growing demand for corpus technologies in contemporary linguistics. The aim of the study is to examine the representation of the theme of money in Heinrich Böll’s novel The Clown using modern applied linguistics techniques. The research employs corpus analysis based on the method of professionally oriented programming, as well as contextual analysis and semantic interpretation. The results demonstrate that the application of different operation models of the author’s corpus manager makes it possible to identify both direct and indirect linguistic representations of the theme of money and to reveal new semantic similarity, between the thematic domains of money and the relationship between the protagonists, Hans Schnier and Marie, in particular. The conclusion is made that the author’s based corpus tools possess considerable heuristic potential and that the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods is effective for the interpretation of fictional text and discourse.