AI-Assisted Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Lexical Choice and Discursive Style in Virginia Woolf’s Essays

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18133537

Abstract

This study investigates lexical choice and discursive practice in selected essays by Virginia Woolf using an AI-assisted corpus linguistic and qualitative discourse-analytic approach. The study is grounded in the premise that Woolf’s essayistic prose reflects modernist concerns with consciousness, subjectivity, and reader participation, which can be empirically examined through patterns of word frequency and discursive organisation. The objectives are to identify dominant lexical patterns, examine the distribution of lexical and functional terms, and analyse how these linguistic features shape Woolf’s reflective and exploratory discursive style. Methodologically, a compiled corpus of Woolf’s essays was analysed using corpus tools to generate keyword frequencies and lexical density measures, followed by close qualitative analysis of discursive practices in essays such as Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, The Common Reader, The Death of the Moth, and A Room of One’s Own. The findings reveal a high density of lexical words and recurring cognitive and abstract keywords related to mind, art, life, character, and reading, which collectively support a discursive mode centred on introspection and provisional meaning-making. Discursively, Woolf’s essays resist authoritative closure and instead construct knowledge through reflection, observation, and dialogic engagement with the reader. The study concludes that Woolf’s lexical and discursive strategies are closely aligned, producing a modernist essay form that privileges process over conclusion. It is recommended that future research extend this approach to comparative studies of modernist essayists or integrate multimodal and larger-scale corpus data to further explore the relationship between language, consciousness, and literary form.