A corpus-based approach to mind style

Fowler s (1977) original definition of mind style emphasised consistency as a defining feature of the phenomenon something that is (i) difficult to measure and (ii) often missed in qualitative analyses In this paper we investigate how a computational semantic analysis might be used to address this difficulty with particular reference to McIntyre s (2005) analysts of the deviant mind style of the character of Miss Shepherd in Alan Bennett splay The Lady in the Van To do this we analyse the speech of all the characters in The Lady in the Van using Wmatrix (Rayson 2003 2008) to see whether it provides quantitative support for the interpretative conclusions reached by McIntyre Wmatrix utilises the UCREL Semantic Annotation System (USAS) which has been designed to undertake the automatic semantic analysis of English The initial tag-set of the USAS system was loosely based on McArthur s Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (McArthur 1981) but has since been considerably revised in the light of practical tagging problems met in the course of previous research, and now contains 232 category labels (such as MEDICINE AND MEDICAL TREATMENT, MOVEMENT, OBLIGATION AND NECESSITY etc) We use Wmatrix s facility for identifying key semantic domains in pursuit of our two main aims (i) to determine whether Miss Shepherd's odd mind style is consistent as Fowler's definition suggests it should be and (ii) to determine the usefulness of computational semantic analysis for investigating mind style