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Universidad de Salamanca
Linguistic Approaches to Dialects in English Literature (LADEL)
First International Symposium, Salamanca, 26th-27th October 2017
 
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Plenary speakers

. Joan C. Beal (University of Sheffield): “The Chicken and the Egg: Dialect in Literature as Evidence for Historical Enregisterment”

The diachronic study of post-medieval English regional dialects presents a number of challenges, given that, as Görlach (1991: 10) states ‘after 1450, English texts can no longer be localized’. Görlach is referring here to the dominance of Standard English in printed texts in contrast with the dialectal diversity of manuscript texts from earlier periods. Of course, as the rich material in the Salamanca Corpus demonstrates, evidence for regional diversity is available in the form of dialect literature (texts written mainly in dialect and designed for a local readership) and literary dialect (extracts representing regional dialect in texts otherwise composed in Standard English). However, in using such material as evidence for historical dialectology, we need to bear in mind that it is moderated. The author is not recording the spontaneous utterances of dialect speakers, but presenting a portrayal of such speech to achieve specific literary effects. As such, both literary dialect and dialect literature present evidence, not of what earlier dialects were, but of what contemporary authors thought they were. This is not to say that such evidence is useless: on the one hand, it is all we have, and on the other hand, it provides important sociohistorical information about attitudes to and perceptions of dialects in earlier periods. In this presentation, I use the framework of enregisterment and indexicality (Silverstein 1976, Agha 2003) to examine early representations of northern English. Within this framework, accents and dialects are considered to be ideological constructs whereby a set of linguistic features becomes associated with a social persona. This process of enregisterment involves the production, reception and transmission of messages in which linguistic features are associated with social characteristics, either via metapragmatic discourse (‘northern English is harsh’) or the association of a repertoire of features with a ‘type’ of character. Literary dialect and dialect literature provide ample evidence of such processes. In this presentation, I shall address the following questions: how did these early authors choose which features to include in their repertoires;  what part did these early texts play in the further enregisterment of these dialects; and how can we best use such material as evidence for historical dialectology?

References

Agha, Asif. 2003. ‘The social life of cultural value’. Language and Communication 23, 231-273.

Görlach, Manfred. 1991. An Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Silverstein, Michael. 1976. ‘Shifters, linguistic categories and cultural description’. In Basso, Keith H. And Henry C. Shelby (eds.) Meaning in Anthropology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 11-55.

 

. Marina Dossena (Università degli studi di Bergamo): “Peaceful coexistence? Ideology in the Representation of Languages and Varieties in Late Modern Literature

My title borrows a phrase dating from Cold War times as a starting point for the study of some ideological traits in Late Modern English literary discourse concerning contact with other languages or socially- and geographically-marked varieties.

Unlike in studies of earlier stages of the language, where the analysis of literary texts has normally been part of scholarly investigations, not least on account of the relative paucity of materials at hand or of their popularity and accessibility, when Late Modern English is concerned historical linguists have tended to focus on grammarians, orthoepists and lexicographers as prototypical codifiers (e.g. see Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008). Of course there are notable exceptions, but present-day studies of the language of literary figures have normally taken into consideration non-literary works (e.g. Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2014) or analyses have mostly concerned stylistics. A valuable approach has recently been taken by the project on Dialect in British Fiction 1800-1836 (see www.hrionline.ac.uk/dialectfiction and Hodson and Broadhead 2013). However, its rather limited time span (expected to be expanded in Hodson 2017, still unavailable at the time of writing [Jan. 2017]) only offers preliminary insights into the role played by significant literary figures in the endorsement or stigmatization of linguistic features at a time when even literary critics and book reviewers could have a say in the assessment of language variation (Percy 2010).

Beyond so-called ‘dialect literature’ (Shorrocks 1996), the success of works authored by e.g. James Fenimore Cooper and Robert Louis Stevenson greatly contributed to the definition of how readers perceived the relatively greater or lesser prestige of different languages and language varieties. While these authors were not unique in their treatment of language variation, their attention to language as a special poetic and narrative element is well-documented (e.g., see Warner 1969, Blakemore 1984, Rosenwald 1998, Dossena 2005: 131-133, Shields 2009, Schachterle 2011, and Dossena 2012 and 2013). Moreover, the role of popular culture in the dissemination of specific views on language variation is hardly negligible: use of socially- and geographically-marked features in songs, ballads, dime novels and penny dreadfuls is a valuable object of investigation for the study of how language representation could be more or less ideologically charged.

As I hope to show in this paper, the coexistence of languages and varieties was often represented as both ambiguous and problematic. In addition to stereotypical uses for humorous purposes, in which differences were emphasized to the point of caricature, as in the famous case of Sam Weller’s speech in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, the supposed distance between varieties could be stressed to evoke exotic scenarios, such as in the representation of the so-called ‘Mountain Men’, fur trappers and traders in nineteenth-century North America, where social class distinctiveness was represented and indeed emphasized by the geographical distance of the context (see Hubbard 1968).

On the other hand, a certain fascination with different varieties underpins the compilation of numerous glossaries, such as those collected in the Salamanca Corpus (see www.thesalamancacorpus.com/index.html), in which variation represents diachronic distance. In the Positivistic agenda of the times, language standardization was expected to improve as progress advanced, but this improvement entailed the disappearance of varieties which therefore needed to be preserved like archeological artefacts, bearing witness to a distant (and often idealized) past. Within this framework, political ideologies could also be at work, whether it was to highlight distinctiveness or to emphasize linguistic contiguity as a metaphor of national unity.

In my presentation I intend to focus both on languages and on varieties of the same language, in an attempt to show how their more or less explicit evaluation contributed to the construal of their image among readers on both sides of the Atlantic – an image which may have persisted through time thanks to the popularity of the texts in which it was framed.

References

Blakemore, Steven 1984. Strange Tongues: Cooper’s Fiction of Language in The Last of the Mohicans. Early American Literature 19: 21-41.

Dossena, Marina 2005. Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary. Edinburgh: John Donald (Birlinn).

Dossena, Marina 2012. Vocative and Diminutive Forms in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Fiction: A Corpus-based Study. International Journal of English Studies 12(2): 1-17; special issue on A New Approach to Literature: Corpus Linguistics edited by Ángela Almela Sánchez Lafuente and Irina Keshabyan.

Dossena, Marina 2013. “Stour or dour or clour”:  An Overview of Scots Usage in Stevenson’s Works and Correspondence. In John M. Kirk and Iseabail Macleod (eds) Scots: Studies in its Literature and Language. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 87-101.

Hodson, Jane (ed.) 2017. Dialect and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century. Abingdon: Routledge.

Hodson, Jane and Broadhead, Alex 2013. Developments in Literary Dialect Representation in British Fiction 1800–1836. Language and Literature 22(4): 315-332.

Hubbard, Claude 1968. The Language of Ruxton’s Mountain Men. American Speech 43(3): 216-221.

Percy, Carol 2010. How Eighteenth-century Book Reviewers Became Language Guardians. In Päivi Pahta, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin (eds), Social Roles and Language Practices in Late Modern English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 55-85.

Rosenwald, Lawrence 1998. The Last of the Mohicans and the Languages of America. College English 60(1): 9-30.

Schachterle, Lance 2011. James Fenimore Cooper on the Languages of the Americans: A Note on the Author’s Footnotes. Nineteenth-Century Literature 66(1): 37-68.

Shields, Juliet 2009. Savage and Scott-ish Masculinity in The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie: James Fenimore Cooper and the Diasporic Origins of American Identity. Nineteenth-Century Literature 64(2): 137-162.

Shorrocks, Graham 1996. Non-standard dialect literature and popular culture. In Juhani Klemola, Merja Kytö and Matti Rissanen (eds), Speech Past and Present: Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Ihalainen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 385-411.

Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid (ed.) 2008.  Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar-writing in Eighteenth-century England. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid 2014. In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters: Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Warner, Fred B., Jr. 1969. Stevenson’s First Scottish Story. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24(3): 335-344

 

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