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Drawing on corpus linguistic methods, this study attempts to specify crucial textual resources with which reader expectations are guided and changed in the course of reading modern short stories.This is a major contribution to the exciting new field of corpus stylistics and narratology. It seeks to justify every analytical step and claim, with copious textual evidence. It re-asserts the importance to literary stylistic analysis of detailed scrutiny of the language in the text. It throws a new light on some familiar short stories and some contemporary masterpieces. It explores the potential and the limits of present-day, digitally-enabled, analysis of narrative text. It grapples with a fundamental unsolved problem in linguistics: to what extent can the earlier part of a text or discourse make the later parts predictable or foreknown?Why do readers have such rich emotional and intellectual reactions to a story, especially in the course of reading it? This book attempts to identify the crucial bases, in the language of a short story's text, for reader's real-time forming of expectations about how the story will proceed.