Literary dialect as social deixis

Abstract

The representation of non-standard and regional accent and dialect in literary fiction has been framed mainly sociolinguistically and treated as an index of authenticity, within an account of characterisation. The reader’s attitude to such speakers in literary fiction is manipulated narratorially and authorially. Since readerly effects, impressions and evaluations are the key issues involved, it seems plausible that a cognitive poetic approach to the reading of dialect in literature would also be productive. In the current deictic theory, the dimension of social deixis captures a broad range of stylistic features including register and dialectal representations. Cognitive deictic theory draws on an explicitly spatial metaphor in which characters are positioned in conceptual space. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the effect of readerly positioning and dispositioning. This article revisits social deixis and its points of transition and textural variation from a theoretical perspective. It develops a new angle on the representation and significance of accented and dialectal forms in literary fiction, with some illustrative examples drawn from 19th and 20th century British novels.

Literary dynamics inThe.PowerBookby Jeanette Winterson andOryx and Crakeby Margaret Atwood

“…In silent reading, the immediacy of direct speech, viewed as performance, triggers more perceptual processes and greater neural activity than does indirect speech, viewed as observer description (Yao, 2021; Yao and Scheepers, 2011, 2018); direct speech is perceived as more ‘vivid’ (Clark and Gerrig, 1990: 794; Yao, 2021: 1). Direct speech in novels is crafted and deployed (Stockwell, 2020: 3) for discursive, rhetorical and aesthetic purposes. The direct speech that opens the moment, ‘ This is the one fish chosen for you tonight’ , is stylistically formal and has a sacramental tone.…”

“…Microcognitive processes are therefore conceptually differentiated from consciously experienced cognition such as finalised word recognition, its interpretation or associated affect. As there are multiple microcognitive, macrocognitive and intermediate scales of cognition (Nani et al, 2019: 2), such ‘category divisions are convenient and contingent, rather than absolute and natural’ (Stockwell, 2020: 361). Whether a process is considered to be micro or macrocognitive depends on analytical method (Nani et al, 2019: 1).…”