Character Speech Individualization in Charles Dickens’s Novels

Abstract

The relevance of this investigation is explained by several reasons: first, the individual character of speech is one of the evidences of Charles Dickens’s geniality and it is of importance for any person writing to analyze some techniques of the genius doing it; second, the analysis of these “speeches” can help understand peculiarities of various styles and genres separately and in interaction; third, everything related to Ch. Dickens is still popular among the readers, so these examples can be of use for teaching and learning English. There are three primary aims of the present paper: to extend coverage of linguistic studies to areas of literary peculiarities; to highlight gaps in the existing literature and promising directions for future research of Charles Dickens’s language; to establish a theory-driven approach to investigating literature language by introducing a new model as a framework for this paper. Authors applied such general research methods as data collection, study of the works in allied fields on the problem of the research, analysis and synthesis of the ideas studied. The theoretical basis of the investigation integrated the main principles of linguistics, stylistics and literature studies. Ch. Dickens is incomparable in linguistic individualization, in creating a personage idiolect, a private language. According to calculations all these characters are minor, about 3 quarters of the are female and about 60% are negatively marked. The main linguistic levels involved in this process are in descending order phonological (graphemic in written form), lexical, syntactic and stylistic.