Plays of the pen

2019 ◽  
pp. 125-151
Author(s):  
Hugo Bowles
Keyword(s):  
Consonant Clusters ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Bleak House

This chapter explores representations of shorthand in Dickens’s life and work, providing examples of stylistic areas that were influenced by his shorthand learning. These include his use of consonant clusters to obtain phonaesthetic effects in character names (section 7.1), reported speech in Doctors Commons (section 7.2), stenographic direct speech in Bleak House and Little Dorrit (section 7.3), the construction of verbal puzzles in Pickwick, Great Expectations, All the Year Round, and the Uncommercial Traveller (section 7.4), and stenographic episodes of reading and writing in Great Expectations, Dombey and Son, The Haunted Man, and Bleak House (section 7.5). The last two sections hypothesize that Dickens may even have adopted a stenographic perspective in the construction of plot (section 7.6) and of his own identity as an author (section 7.7). The chapter argues that the stenographic representations pervading Dickens’s work directly reflect his experience of learning and using shorthand.

scholarly journals Redewiedergabe in Online-Pressetexten – kontrastiv

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-176
Author(s):  
Anneliese Pitz ◽  
Kåre Solfjeld
Keyword(s):  
Structural Variation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Structural Variety ◽  
Other Hand

Abstract This article looks into what structures are used to report longer sequences of speech in German, English and Norwegian online press media. In German the subjunctive is used to signal speech report, and so there is a wider range of structural possibilities in German than in English and Norwegian, which have no counterparts to the subjunctive. The study is corpus-based and identifies and compares recurring patterns in reported sequences in the three languages, as well as type and range of verbs of utterance. The concept of syntactical integration of the reported speech and markers of report (Leistner 2016) is central. The study shows that also in the two languages without subjunctive the source of a text part is in general clear: The reader knows whether the text part stems from the journalist or from a reported person. The structural variety in German is outweighed by long sequences of direct speech in English and Norwegian, unambiguously identified as report. This seems to entail a stronger obligation to the wording of the original in English and Norwegian than in German, which on the other hand displays a stronger structural variation.

AUTHENTICITY AND NON-STANDARD SPEECH IN GREAT EXPECTATIONS

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 637-669
Author(s):  
Margaret J-M. Sönmez
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Great Expectations

Susan L. Ferguson shows how Victorian novelists used the reported speech of their characters to create a “ficto-linguistics” wherein “the systems of language that appear in novels . . . indicate identifiable alternative patterns congruent to other aspects of the fictional world” (1). These novels present self-contained systems, she says, in which “speech relates in style as well as content to the speech of other characters, [and] all quoted language in a novel is contained within and potentially interacts with the language of the narrator” (1). Ferguson's interpretation of novelistic speech enables more convincing analyses of reported dialect speech than earlier efforts, which compared them directly to real-life dialects – a tendency that itself reflects the “grand narrative” of “authenticism” (Sanchez-Arce) – and which assumed that discrepancies and inconsistencies were stylistic weaknesses due, for instance, to over-sentimentality or “lowness” (Quirk 5), or to the writer being reluctant to depict virtuous characters as speaking non-standard English, regardless of the likelihood or possibility that characters from badly educated backgrounds would speak anything else.

Charles Dickens’s Reactionary Reform

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-174
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Progressive Change ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
The Future ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Colonial Institutions

This chapter demonstrates how Charles Dickens’s novels embrace ‘reactionary reform’: a vision of the future that is actually a return to an anachronistic past. Reactionary reform restores origins that institutions erase in their drive towards futurity, whether those origins are Sissy Jupe’s life with her father in Hard Times, Esther Summerson’s parentage in Bleak House or the humble home that Pip mistakenly disavows in Great Expectations. Reactivating origins allows a different stance towards institutions: instead of settling down and accepting their established rhythms, characters inhabit institutions, dwelling temporarily in them without acceding to their terms. But Dickens’s vision of reform does not extend to everyone. He reinforces settler colonialism by representing particular groups of people as outside of history and futurity altogether. Validating anachronisms and criticising them in turn, Dickens imagines progressive change that rejects modern institutionalism but, in the process, shores up the racialised abstractions upon which settler colonial institutions depend.

Parliament: More Bleak House than Great Expectations

2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Cowley
Keyword(s):  
Great Expectations ◽  
Bleak House

scholarly journals Does reported speech influence listeners’ choice of perspective in the interpretation of spatial prepositions?

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 83-98
Author(s):  
Ariska I. Bonnema ◽  
Vera Hukker ◽  
Petra Hendriks
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Verification Task ◽  
Reported Speech ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
Indirect Speech ◽  
Spatial Prepositions ◽  
Linguistic Cues ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Mere Presence

Abstract Linguistic cues can encourage adults to adopt an other-centric rather than an egocentric perspective. This study investigated whether the presence of direct speech compared to indirect speech influences listeners’ choice of perspective when interpreting the Dutch spatial prepositions voor ‘in front of’ and achter ‘behind’. Dutch adults and 10 to 12-year-old children were tested in a sentence-picture verification task. Contrary to expectations, we found no difference between direct and indirect speech (Study 1), nor did we find a difference between reported and non-reported speech (Study 2). Most adult listeners adopted the contrasting perspective of the speaker, irrespective of how the information about the reported speech was expressed. We did find a difference between adults and children: children adopted the other person’s perspective less often than adults did. Overall, the results suggest that the mere presence of a reported speaker already is a cue for taking this speaker’s perspective.

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