Suspended Quotations

Abstract

By joining manual analysis and corpus linguistics methods, this paper compares and contrasts the use of suspended quotations in Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. An analysis of two authors whose styles, aims and literary contexts are so different is functional to creating a list of functions typically performed by suspended quotation generally. The study shows that some roles of the suspended quotation reported for Dickens’ novels in previous literature are indeed specific to this writer and his idea of narrative, while others can be considered ‘author-independent’. Furthermore, the current analysis has revealed that suspended quotations lend themselves to a much wider range of functions than those reported and described in the literature thus far. DOI : 10.17456/SIMPLE-157 Keywords Dickens, Austen, CLiC database, POS tagging, semantic tagging. Bibliography Babb, Howard S. 1962.  Jane Austen’s Novels. The Fabric of Dialogue . Columbus (OH): Ohio State University Press. Culpeper, Jonathan & Jane Demmen. 2015. Keywords. Douglas Biber & Randi Reppen eds.  The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics . Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press. Gabrielatos, Costas & Anna Marchi. Keyness: Matching metrics to definitions.  Corpus Linguistics in the South: Theoretical-methodological challenges in corpus approaches to discourse studies – and some ways of addressing them . University of Portsmouth, 5 November 2011, http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/51449/ (consulted on 5/05/2017). Lambert, Mark. 1981.  Dickens and the Suspended Quotation . New Haven (CT)-London: Yale University Press. Mahlberg, Michaela. 2012. The Corpus Stylistic Analysis of Fiction or the Fiction of Corpus Stylistics? Joybrato Mukherjee & Magnus Huber eds. Corpus Linguistics and Variation in English: Theory and Description . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 77-96. Mahlberg, Michaela. 2013. Corpus Analysis of Literary Texts. Carol A. Chapelle ed.  The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1479-1485. Mahlberg, Michaela & Catherine Smith. 2012. Dickens, the Suspended Quotation and the Corpus.  Language and Literature , 21, 1: 51-65. Mahlberg, Michaela, Catherine Smith & Simon Preston. 2013. Phrases in Literary Contexts. Patterns and Distributions of Suspensions in Dickens’s Novels.  International Journal of Corpus Linguistics , 18, 1: 35-56. Mahlberg, Michaela, Peter Stockwell, Johan de Joode, Catherine Smith & Matthew Brook O’Donnell. 2016. CLiC Dickens: Novel Uses of Concordances for the Integration of Corpus Stylistics and Cognitive Poetics.  Corpora , 11, 3: 433-463. Morini, Massimiliano. 2009.  Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques. A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis . Farnham (UK): Ashgate Publishing. Newsom, Robert. 2000. Style of Dickens. Paul Schlicke ed.  The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 553-557. Rayson, Paul. 2003.  Matrix: A statistical method and software tool for linguistic analysis through corpus comparison . PhD thesis, Lancaster University.