Dr Tino Oudesluijs

Abstract

The past two decades have seen an increase in studies on various aspects of Kazuo Ishiguro’s works, including narratives of memory and identity, (im)politeness, colonialism, history, ethics, and metaphors (see e.g. Lewis 2000, Beedham 2010, Wong & Yildiz 2015, Shonaka et al. 2024). An extended study of Ishiguro’s linguistic style across his works, however, is still wanting, as studies on this aspect are confined to only a handful of articles and book chapters on individual texts. As such, Dr Sara Whiteley is currently working on “The Language of Kazuo Ishiguro”, a work which aims to include corpus linguistics methods to investigate the language from all of Ishiguro’s novels (and one short story collection) and compare his style to that of other (contemporary) novelists, as well as identify any changes in his language over the course of his writing (1982–2021).

For the past 4 months, I’ve been involved in assisting Dr Whiteley with a corpus analysis of Ishiguro’s works, which has proved to be a highly interesting project so far. In this talk I hope to share some of my experiences in not only deciding how to go about analysing Ishiguro’s works, but also in choosing the appropriate tools, as well as preparing the corpus files. The talk will last for about 25 mins, leaving a bit more time for a Q&A if anyone has any questions, not only about the Ishiguro project but also about corpus linguistics more generally.

Biography

Tino Oudesluijs is a sociolinguist with an interest in diachronic aspects of language variation and change across the history of English. He is particularly interested in how linguistic behaviour changes over time in specific socio-historical contexts, both on a micro and macro level, and in a variety of registers. He has worked on different text types from various historical periods, including Middle English indentures, Early Modern notebooks, Late Modern private letters, and contemporary fiction. The focus of Tino’s research has thus far been on supralocalisation and standardisation processes, the effects of copying texts, and personal writing styles. 

He currently works as a Research Associate on Dr Sara Whiteley’s project on the language of Kazuo Ishiguro, where he employs corpus linguistic methods to help analyse Ishiguro’s unique writing style.