Dickens’s Use of Non-Fluency Features in Spoken Discourse

Abstract

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.