Chapter 7. “Worth a moment’s notice”
Jane Austen and conversational parentheticals
This paper explores the competition between round brackets and other punctuation
marks as delimiters of kinesic parentheticals in Austen’s dialogue (e.g.
said Harriet, in a mortified voice). Drawing mainly on an analysis of Emma,
the investigation suggests that, linguistically, round brackets in Austen are
preferred over other punctuation marks in cases where the kinesic parenthetical
is not introduced by a reporting clause and takes the form of an -ing clause
(e.g. laughing affectedly). Stylistically, the data show that kinesic parentheticals
are amenable to an interpretation along Mahlberg’s (2007) distinction between
‘contextualising’ and ‘highlighting’ textual functions; the ‘highlighting’ functions
being more prominent when the kinesic information is introduced by
round brackets. More generally, the paper provides an example of how punctuation
can contribute to textual structuring. Jane Austen is known to have disliked
parenthetical attributions of speech (Toner 2012). In this connection, the paper
tentatively suggests that the use of rounds brackets as kinesic parenthetical
markers in her work may partly be the result of Austen’s stylistic experimentation
with ways of avoiding attribution of speech markers and helping the reader
to identify secondary (female) characters.
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Lugea, Jane
2017.
The year’s work in stylistics 2016.
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 26:4
► pp. 340 ff.
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