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Voicing Imperial Subjects in British Literature: a Corpus Analysis of Literary Dialect, 1768-1929

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Voicing Imperial Subjects in British Literature: a Corpus Analysis of Literary Dialect, 1768-1929 Voicing Imperial Subjects in British Literature: A Corpus Analysis of Literary Dialect, 1768-1929 David West Brown Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University 2016 i Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Paul Baker. This thesis has not only been shaped by his attentive feedback, but it stands upon a foundation of work that he and others in the department at Lancaster have built. Without that, this thesis would not have even been possible. I would also like to thank my former colleagues at the Centre for English Language Education and the University Town Writing Programme at the National University of Singapore. Although I have moved on since this project began, Paul Nerney and others were the first to encourage me to pursue it. Finally, my family – and particularly my partner Jasmine – has been my unwavering support throughout a process complicated by jobs and travels and life’s predictably unpredictable disruptions. I love you all. ii Declaration I declare that this thesis represents my own work, except where due acknowledgement is made, and that it has not been previously included in a thesis, dissertation or report submitted to this University or to any other institution for a degree, diploma or other qualification. iii Abstract 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 – a period marking the expansion and height of the British Empire. One of the project’s 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 decrease in the frequency and complexity of coded features generally for Indian dialogue. Trends like these that are surfaced though quantitative methods are further contextualized using qualitative, archival data. The analysis ultimately rests on connecting patterns of representation to changes in the imperial political economy, evolving language ideologies that circulate in the Anglophone world, and shifts in sociocultural anxieties that crosscut race and empire. The combined quantitative and qualitative analyses, therefore, expose representational systems – the apparatuses that propagate structures and the social attitudes that accrue to those structures. It further demonstrates that in such propagation, structures and attitudes are complementary. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ i Abstract ........................................................................................................................ iii List of Figures ............................................................................................................. vii List of Tables ............................................................................................................... xi List of Appendices ...................................................................................................... xii 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................1 1.1 Introduction ...............................................................................................1 1.2 Literary dialect and race in the eighteenth century ...................................2 1.3 Research questions ....................................................................................5 1.4 Corpora and culture ...................................................................................6 1.5 Reading the “imperial archive” .................................................................9 1.6 Patterns, their propagation, and their meaning .......................................14 1.7 The organization of the thesis .................................................................15 2. Literature Review ................................................................................................17 2.1 Introduction .............................................................................................17 2.2 Literary dialect ........................................................................................18 2.2.1 A question of accuracy ................................................................18 2.2.2 Literary dialect as a representational resource ............................20 2.2.3 A combined approach .................................................................23 2.3 Literary dialect as a representational system ..........................................27 2.3.1 Orientalism and colonial discourse studies .................................27 2.3.2 Enregisterment and staged linguistic performance .....................29 2.4 The articulation between theory and method ..........................................32 2.5 Conclusion ..............................................................................................35 3. Research Design and Methods ............................................................................37 3.1 Introduction .............................................................................................37 3.2 Data collection ........................................................................................39 3.2.1 Corpus internal data .......................................................................39 3.2.2 Corpus external data ......................................................................42 3.3 Data preparation ......................................................................................43 3.4 The Voicing Imperial Subjects in British Literature (VISiBL) corpus ......................................................................................47 3.5 Data coding .............................................................................................50 v 3.5.1 Lexical versus morphosyntactic features ....................................52 3.5.2 Orthographic versus phonological features ................................54 3.6 Conclusion ..............................................................................................56 4. Statistical Overview .............................................................................................58 4.1 Introduction .............................................................................................58 4.2 A few comments about the statistical analysis .......................................59 4.2.1 Dispersion ...................................................................................60 4.2.2 Diversity ......................................................................................62 4.2.3 Significance .................................................................................63 4.3 Feature variation .....................................................................................64 4.3.1 Lexical features ...........................................................................66 4.3.2 Morphosyntactic features ............................................................68 4.3.3 Orthographic features ..................................................................71 4.3.4 Phonological features ..................................................................72 4.4 Speaker variation ....................................................................................77 4.4.1 Analysis of variance ....................................................................77 4.4.2 Composite frequencies ................................................................80 4.4.3 Diversity indices .........................................................................83 4.4.4 Cluster analysis ...........................................................................90 4.5 Conclusion ..............................................................................................96 5. Imagining African Diasporic Voices ..................................................................98 5.1 Introduction .............................................................................................98 5.2 Constituents of African diasporic dialogue ...........................................109 5.3 Diachronic trends in African diasporic dialogue ..................................112 5.4 Resemblances in African diasporic dialogue ........................................121 5.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................130 6. Imagining Indian Voices ...................................................................................134
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