Phrases in literary contexts

Patterns and distributions of suspensions in Dickens’s novels

Michaela Mahlberg | University of Nottingham

Catherine Smith | University of Birmingham

Simon Preston | University of Nottingham

This paper addresses relations between lexico-grammatical patterns and texts. Our focus is on a specific linguistic unit, the ‘suspended quotation’ (or ‘suspension’), which has received particular attention in Dickens studies. The suspended quotation refers to an interruption of a fictional character’s speech by the narrator with a sequence of at least five words. We show how corpus linguistic methods can help to systematically study suspensions in a corpus of Dickens’s novels: we investigate relationships between patterns of body language presentation and suspensions; we consider the distribution of suspensions across novels; and we illustrate how patterns in suspensions relate to meanings of reporting verbs. Overall, we argue that suspensions are discernible units that contribute to meaningful patterns in narrative prose.

Keywords: suspended quotation, reporting verbs, body language presentation, suspension annotation, Dickens

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 3.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 13 May 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.18.1.05mah

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Phrases in literary contexts

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