Dickens’s Use of Non-Fluency Features in Spoken Discourse
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/philologia.2016.14.13_14.3Keywords:
normal non-fluency features, authorial intent, Dickens's main concernAbstract
This article examines Charles Dickens’s use of ‘normal non-fluency features’ in his characters’ discourse, and probes the speakers’ and the author’s intent behind the use of them. ‘Normal non-fluency features’ means features of non-fluency in conversation such as hesitation, interruption, gap-fillers and the like. They are, as Hughes (1996: 39) points out, a sign of positive participation by conversational participants. In addition, they have another function when they appear in a written text, because, in the case of a drama, ‘the dramatist must have included them on purpose’ (Short 1996: 177). By looking at a number of Dickens’s works, it is possible to infer that he is particularly interested in family relations.
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