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Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus

Mahlberg, Michaela; Smith, Catherine

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Authors

Michaela Mahlberg

Catherine Smith



Abstract

This article presents a computer-assisted approach to the study of character discourse in Dickens. It focuses on the concept of the ‘suspended quotation’ – the interruption of a character’s speech by at least five words of narrator text. After an outline of the concept of the suspended quotation as introduced by Lambert (1981), the article compares manually derived counts for suspensions in Dickens with automatically generated figures. This comparison shows how corpus methods can help to increase the scale at which the phenomenon is studied. It highlights that quantitative information for selected sections of a novel does not necessarily represent the patterns that are found across the whole text. The article also includes a qualitative analysis of suspensions. With the help of the new tool CLiC, it investigates interruptions of the speech of Mrs Sparsit in Hard Times and illustrates how suspensions can be useful places for the presentation of character information. CLiC is further used to find patterns of the word pause that provide insights into how suspensions contribute to the representation of pauses in character speech.

Citation

Mahlberg, M., & Smith, C. (2012). Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus. Language and Literature, 21(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947011432058

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Apr 9, 2012
Deposit Date May 15, 2014
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Language and Literature
Print ISSN 0963-9470
Electronic ISSN 0963-9470
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 21
Issue 1
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947011432058
Keywords Character discourse; corpus stylistics; Dickens; suspended quotation
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/709989
Publisher URL http://lal.sagepub.com/content/21/1/51.refs

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