Lexical Style and Profession: The Use of Nouns in Tawfik’s Short Story “The Uninvited”

رجب, رغدة

doi:10.21608/jfask.2025.349919.1196

Lexical Style and Profession: The Use of Nouns in Tawfik’s Short Story “The Uninvited”

المقالات الجاهزة للنشر

نوع المستند : المقالة الأصلية

المؤلف

رغدة رجب

جامعة السويس قسم اللغة الإنجليزية

10.21608/jfask.2025.349919.1196

المستخلص

This paper investigates Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s short story “The Uninvited” from the Now We

Open the Box short stories collection. The story undergoes a statistical lexical stylistic analysis

following Leech and Short’s (2007) Checklist of Linguistic and Stylistic Categories

investigating the use of nouns throughout the story in order to explore the existence and the

depth of the professional influence on Tawfik’s lexical style, being a physician-writer. The

excerpt investigated comprises a range of 403 nouns, of which 61 are pronouns, and 43 are

proper nouns (10.7%). The 403 nouns are categorized into 108 abstract nouns (31.6%) and 234

concrete nouns (68.4%). The text is analyzed separately then the statistical results are

compared to reach general conclusions about the author and his lexical style. The nouns have

been analyzed to reach a quantitative result followed by some qualitative analysis of some of

the apparent stylistic features in the text. The analysis shows significant use of proper nouns

denoting medical references, as well as a high correlation between concrete nouns and medical

context throughout the story, being the reason behind Tawfik’s dominant stylistic choice of

concrete words. The use of nouns, hence, reflects the deep professional influence on Tawfik’s

writing.

الكلمات الرئيسية