Styling the characters, setting the scene
Résumé
While not a pro drop language, English allows subject drop in specific registers such as abbreviated writing and colloquial speech. This paper studies subject drop in the representation of speech in British crime fiction. The core material consists of three stories by Agatha Christie, who uses subject drop to style characters and to create the conversational scene. Quantitative corpus data show that subject drop is a function of at least the following factors: education/social class, gender, familiarity, and (in)formality of speech setting. Nevertheless, due to the relatively small size of the samples we have studied, it is difficult to pin down the exact interactions between these four variables.
Domaines
| Origine | Publication financée par une institution |
|---|---|
| Licence |