Grammatical agency and ironic persona in Emily Dickinson: an interdisciplinary corpus originated study

This study uses a combination of computational, corpus and qualitative stylistic methods to isolate and analyse, from my own corpus of Emily Dickinson’s ‘fascicle’ poems (Miller, 2016), some syntactic and morphological markers which potentially construct the effect of an ironic authorial persona. Based on the results of a user designed set of syntactic and morphological queries performed on the corpus by a rule based NLP software package called NooJ (Silberztein, 2016), I intended to suggest ways in which selected concepts from Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2009) might be used to develop those computational results into a qualitative theory of how grammatical markers related to person and agency can be seen to instantiate some forms of irony.