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A piece from Ruthann Robson.

Abstract: The aim of this essay is to observe to what extend the contemporary Scottish poet Jackie Kay uses the language in the Scottish comic strip ‘The Broons’ so as to create the poetic voices in five of her poems, in which reference is made to the characters in this comic strip. For this purpose, we use these five poems as our main corpus and compare it to a source corpus, which includes fifty comic strips. Using the programs ‘Wordsmith’ (Scott, 1999) and ‘W-matrix’ (Rayson, 2008), key words and concordances in the poems are studied. This work highlights a different lexical selection in the poems in contrast to the comic strips as regards the topics, the use, or the presence of Scottish terms. This divergence arises due to Jackie Kay’s new representation of the characters as well as the transgression of the traditional values that the comic preserves.

Key words: Jackie Kay, The Broons, Scotland, corpus stylistics, contrastive study, culture