The creative use of absences.

In an article published in this journal, Partington (2014) addresses the criticism often made against corpus linguistics that it is apparently unable to cope with absences. He convincingly argues that corpus linguistics is better suited to account for absences than has been claimed. I resume the debate by discussing a type of absence not fully addressed in Partington (2014) which I have termed 'creative absences'. With a focus on corpus stylistics, I consider the way in which the author Henry Green dispenses with a compulsory element in the grammatical structure of Standard English, i.e. the determiner (mainly, the definite article). By means of a manual analysis as well as two corpus stylistic analyses (keyness and text-type analysis) of the novel Living (Green 1929), I explore the effects of such an unorthodox use and argue, alongside Partington (2014), for the usefulness of corpus approaches to account for at least certain types of absences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]