Voicing imperial subjects in British literature : a corpus analysis of literary dialect, 1768-1929
This study investigates nonstandard dialect as it used in fictional dialogue. The works included in it were produced by British authors between 1768 and 1929 â a period marking the expansion and height of the British Empire. One of the projectâs aims is to examine the connections among dialect representation and the imperial project, to investigate how ventriloquizing African diasporic, Chinese, and Indian characters works with related forms of characterization to encode ideologies and relations of power. A related aim is to explore the emergence and evolution of these literary dialects over time and to compare their structures as they are used to impersonate different communities of speakers. In order to track such patterns of representation, a corpus was constructed from the dialogue of 126 novels, plays, and short stories. That dialogue was then annotated for more than 200 lexical, morphological, orthographic, and phonological features. That data enable statistical analyses that model variation in the voicing of speakers and how those voicings change over time. This modeling demonstrates, for example, an increase in the frequency of phonological features for African diasporic dialogue and a countervailing
Brown, David
Voicing imperial subjects in British literature : a corpus analysis of literary dialect, 1768-1929. This study investigates nonstandard dialect as it used in fictional dialogue. The works included in it were produced by British authors between 1768 and 1929 â a period marking the expansion and height of the British Empire. One of the projectâs aims is to examine the connections among dialect representation and the imperial project, to investigate how ventriloquizing African diasporic, Chinese, and Indian characters works with related forms of characterization to encode ideologies and relations of power. A related aim is to explore the emergence and evolution of these literary dialects over time and to compare their structures as they are used to impersonate different communities of speakers. In order to track such patterns of representation, a corpus was constructed from the dialogue of 126 novels, plays, and short stories. That dialogue was then annotated for more than 200 lexical, morphological, orthographic, and phonological features. That data enable statistical analyses that model variation in the voicing of speakers and how those voicings change over time. This modeling demonstrates, for example, an increase in the frequency of phonological features for African diasporic dialogue and a countervailing
voicing imperial subject british literature corpus_analysis literary dialect study_investigate dialect use fictional_dialogue work include produced british author period_mark expansion height british_empire project_aim examine_connection among dialect representation imperial project_investigate african diasporic chinese indian character work related form characterization encode ideology relation power related aim_explore emergence evolution literary dialect time compare structure use different community speaker order track pattern representation corpus_construct dialogue novel play short_story dialogue annotate lexical morphological orthographic phonological_feature data enable statistical_analysis model variation voice speaker voicing change_time model demonstrates example increase frequency phonological_feature african diasporic dialogue