Thompson Article

Paul Thompson and Allison Sealey conducted an analysis of a small corpus of fiction that was written for children. The text used for these corpus' were taken from the British National Corpus. The first corpus was named 'CLLIP' which is an acronym for 'Corpus-based Learning about Language In the Primary-school'. CLLIP represents imaginative fiction written for children. The second group, or corpus, was called COMP which represented imaginative fiction written for adults. The third corpus was a collection of newspaper texts, used to "contrast the features of imaginative fiction writing in general with those of newspaper writing" (Thompson,3). The question being asked in this research was, "Does writing for children demonstrate different linguistic properties from writing for adults?" (Thompson, 2). Of course there are differences between adult/children fiction, but this study looked further in terms of counting frequencies of words, phrases, descriptions and the uses of these variables.

I will admit, that this article used a lot of jargon to simply say that it was counting words, phrases,adjectives etc to compare adult/children fiction. In this way, it came off rather confusing. However, after reading it over again I gained a better understanding. I enjoyed the comparison of the way the word neck was used in CLLIP and COMP. "Neck occured 90 times in the CLLIP corpus and 1897 times in the COMP corpus" (Thompson, 16). I thought it was interesting that the word neck was used to describe other things besides being associated with they body. CLLIP used the neck in a figurative sense as well. However, from other collected data in the article, using figures of speech doesn't happen as often in children literature. I thought that using expressions or figurative speech could be one of the factors that separates adult fiction from children fiction. This probably happens because children aren't at the level in which they can discern literal meanings from figurative meanings. I thought it was interesting that this could be pointed by showing the use of the word neck in two different corpus'.