Operationalizing the colloquial style: Repetition in 19th-century American fiction

Historians of the English language and students of literary style alike have long agreed that a key change took place in American prose style at the end of the late 19th century, when a more informal, ‘democratic' register came to dominate fictional prose. However, despite its historical and critical importance, neither the features nor the precise historical development of this shift has been the subject of systematic analysis. In this essay, we undertake an in-depth analysis of one key feature of what became known as the colloquial style: patterns of linguistic repetition. With the aid of quantitative analysis, we demonstrate that the use of repetition is in itself a reliable metric for automatically detecting the presence of colloquial discourse. We find that colloquial repetition does indeed increase in American fiction over the course of the 19th and early 20th century, but, via comparative analysis, that this phenomenon may not be limited to American prose. Finally, we explore the semantics of these patterns of repetition, demonstrating first that repetition is broadly characteristic of represented speech in writing, and secondly that changes over time in the semantic contents of repetitions demonstrate a clear increase in colloquial, informal language.

[1]  Douglas Biber,et al.  Register, Genre, and Style , 2019 .

[2]  H. James.  “The Awkward Age” , 2017, The Constant Listener.

[3]  M. Algee-Hewitt,et al.  Between canon and corpus: six perspectives on 20th-century novels , 2015 .

[4]  Jordan Sellers,et al.  The Emergence of Literary Diction , 2012 .

[5]  R. Heuser,et al.  A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels : The Semantic Cohort Method , 2012 .

[6]  S. Lemke.  The Vernacular Matters of American Literature , 2009 .

[7]  Tanya E. Clement.  'A thing not beginning and not ending': using digital tools to distant-read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans , 2008, Lit. Linguistic Comput..

[8]  D. Hoover.  Corpus Stylistics, Stylometry, and the Styles of Henry James , 2007 .

[9]  Michael Borshuk.  Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature , 2005 .

[10]  Lisa Cohen Minnick.  Dialect and Dichotomy: Literary Representations of African American Speech , 2004 .

[11]  Gavin W. Jones.  Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America , 1999 .

[12]  D. Biber,et al.  Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English , 1999 .

[13]  C. Davis,et al.  Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather , 1998 .

[14]  Robert J. Connors,et al.  Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy , 1997 .

[15]  Elsa Nettels.  Language and gender in American fiction , 1997 .

[16]  S. Gilbert,et al.  The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature , 1994 .

[17]  外山 昇.  霧のイニシエーション--Adventures of Huckleberry Finnとシャーマニズム , 1993 .

[18]  K. Cmiel,et al.  Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America , 1990 .

[19]  D. Biber,et al.  Drift and the Evolution of English Style: A History of Three Genres , 1989 .

[20]  D. Tannen.  Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse , 1989 .

[21]  S. Cameron.  Thinking in Henry James , 1989 .

[22]  H. Gates,,et al.  The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism , 1988 .

[23]  Roland Barthes,et al.  The rustle of language , 1986 .

[24]  A. Rampersad,et al.  The Literary Blues Tradition@@@Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. , 1985 .

[25]  H. Baker,et al.  Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature , 1984 .

[26]  R. Yeazell.  Language and knowledge in the late novels of Henry James , 1977 .

[27]  John Lydenberg,et al.  The Colloquial Style in America , 1966 .

[28]  L. Trilling.  The Liberal Imagination , 1950 .

[29]  Mark Twain,et al.  The Portable Mark Twain , 1946 .

[30]  W. Howells.  A Hazard of New Fortunes , 1889 .

[31]  Donald J. Pierce,et al.  Democracy in America , 2018, Princeton Readings in Political Thought.