Robert Frost’s poems: some light from corpus analysis

Resumo

Linguistics and literature seem distant fields, but they can be related. This study aims at doing a discourse analysis of Robert Frost’s poems using a corpus to investigate the most frequent semantic domain in his poetry. This analysis should also allow us to make connections with his personal life. A corpus composed by 35 poems of Frost (3,725 words) was investigated focusing on nouns. The corpus was tagged by CLAWS 7 and AntConc was the software used to generate the frequency lists and concordance lines for the analysis. Results of this research indicate that 26% of the nouns are related to nature. A connection between people and the nature elements was verified in 91% of the poems, which suggests that human experiences are portrayed through this relation. Furthermore, nature nouns may be found in different linguistic environment, affecting how they are portrayed: 31% is positive (e.g. bright flowers), 32% is negative (e.g. heavy sky) and 37% is neutral (e.g mowing field). Therefore, nature nouns can also be understood by their semantic prosody. If nature is depicted positively, negatively or neutrally, it is where “man finds himself” (LYNEN, 1962, p. 177). Frost’s poems consider all the conflicts that surround a man’s life.Key words: Robert Frost, literature, corpus linguistics, nouns, nature.