ИСТИНА

American writer and activist Maya Angelou (1928-2014) lived a long and fulfilled life. What remains after it is a complete corpus of her works, among which poetry is of particular interest to a corpus stylistician. A poet’s complete corpus may be researched in two directions (Simpson 2014: 48-49), both of which will be pursued in this paper, each complementing the other. First, a searchable corpus of a poet’s work will contain idiosyncratic tendencies of usage. Secondly, these tendencies, as well as any other instances of foregrounding, may be studied against the background of a large and representative reference corpus of the language. The methodology of such searches will hinge on collocation (Sinclair 1991; Louw and Milojkovic 2016). Lexical collocation will be understood as co-occurrence of two or more lexical items with up to four words intervening. Co-selecting such items in the poet’s corpus, or in the reference corpus, will yield ‘states of affairs’ – a term borrowed by Louw (2010) from Wittgenstein and referring to types of the context of situation (Firth 1957: 182) in the reference corpus and in authorial text. Such a technique was successfully adopted in the study of Philip Larkin’s corpus (Milojkovic 2011). Wildcarding will ensure that a grammar string’s most frequent lexical collocates will come up in the reference corpus to show how they determine the string’s logical semantic prosody, or subtext, as was done in the study of a poem by Yeats (Louw and Milojkovic 2014). Consistent lexico-grammatical usages in a poetry corpus that deviate significantly enough from the reference corpus norm to warrant the notice of a literary critic are a possible area of study. Davies, M. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ Firth, J. R. 1957. Papers in linguistics1934-1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Louw, W.E. 2010. Collocation as instrumentation for meaning: A scientific fact. In Literary Education and Digital Learning: Methods and Technologies for Humanities Studies, W. van Peer, V. Viana and S. Zyngier (eds), 79–101. Hershey PA: IGI Global. Louw, W. E., and Milojkovic, M. 2014. Semantic Prosody. In The Cambridge handbook of stylistics, P. Stockwell, and S. Whiteley (eds), 263-280. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Louw, B. and Milojkovic, M. 2016. Corpus stylistics as Contextual Prosodic Theory and subtext. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Milojkovic, M. 2011a. Quenched light, or seeing through a glass darkly – a collocation-based view of Larkin's atheism and depression. Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies 3: 127-144. Simpson, P. 2014. Stylistics. London: Routledge. Sinclair, J. M. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP.