Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus
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...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
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SAGE Publications
2012
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| Online Access: | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/3155/ |
| _version_ | 1848790964969144320 |
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| author | Mahlberg, Michaela Smith, Catherine |
| author_facet | Mahlberg, Michaela Smith, Catherine |
| author_sort | Mahlberg, Michaela |
| building | Nottingham Research Data Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-14T18:20:59Z |
| format | Article |
| id | nottingham-3155 |
| institution | University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus |
| institution_category | Local University |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-14T18:20:59Z |
| publishDate | 2012 |
| publisher | SAGE Publications |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | nottingham-31552020-05-04T16:32:58Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/3155/ Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus Mahlberg, Michaela Smith, Catherine 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. SAGE Publications 2012-04-09 Article PeerReviewed Mahlberg, Michaela and Smith, Catherine (2012) Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus. Language and Literature, 21 (1). pp. 51-65. ISSN 0963-9470 Character discourse; corpus stylistics; Dickens; suspended quotation http://lal.sagepub.com/content/21/1/51.refs doi:10.1177/0963947011432058 doi:10.1177/0963947011432058 |
| spellingShingle | Character discourse; corpus stylistics; Dickens; suspended quotation Mahlberg, Michaela Smith, Catherine Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus |
| title | Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus |
| title_full | Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus |
| title_fullStr | Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus |
| title_full_unstemmed | Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus |
| title_short | Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus |
| title_sort | dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus |
| topic | Character discourse; corpus stylistics; Dickens; suspended quotation |
| url | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/3155/ https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/3155/ https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/3155/ |