THE CONCORDANCE AS AN AID IN THE HISTORICAL STUDY OF STYLE

Although literary concordances are often thought to be mainly useful in analyses of symbolism and imagery, they can also be of significant assistance to students of style. Concordances may facilitate studies of word usage and distribution; they are also helpful in the examination of parameters of style lower in linguistic rank than the word as well as in syntactic analyses and in investigations based on the principles of affective stylistics. Since more than 150 such indexes have been compiled for a variety of works written in different literary periods, concordances can aid historians of style in comparing authors who are contemporaries, in defining norms of style for periods and genres, and in studying the evolution of style over the centuries. The availability of many concordances, the ease with which they can be used, and the value of the facts they make accessible, all suggest that historians of style should not neglect these valuable tools of research.