(PhD) Análisis estilístico de los verbos de habla como recurso de caracterización en las novelas de Charles Dickens

The purpose of this PhD dissertation is to analyze Charles Dickens’ use of speech verbs in his fourteen major novels (c. 3.8 million words). Apart from their basic function as speech-introducing verbs, they can also contribute to characterization. This additional stylistic function is explored here. In order to do so, a corpus stylistic approach has been adopted, which has allowed the retrieval of 17,021 tokens of 130 different types. In the first stage of the analysis, the relevance of this stylistic phenomenon is investigated against the backdrop of a reference corpus (c. 12.9 million words) consisting of seven different Victorian authors: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, William Thackeray and Anthony Trollope. Subsequently, Dickens’ use of speech verbs is analyzed from different perspectives. Firstly, a general analysis looks into aspects such as the distribution of verbs in the corpus, those most frequently used in each novel, those associated with a single character in one novel or even those associated with only one character in the fourteen novels, among others. Secondly, Dickens’ use of speech verbs is analyzed according to gender. Indeed, there are verbs which introduce either men’s or women’s words exclusively. As will be seen, this set of gender-specific verbs reveals a striking contrast when reporting male and female discourse, which contributes to portraying men and women in completely different ways. Also, speech verbs are examined according to the narrators that tell the stories, for there exist significant differences between the voices used by Dickens to narrate the novels. The catalogue of speech verbs used by the narrators that take part in the stories is different from the one used by the narrators who do not play a part in it —both choices affecting the way in which characters are depicted. Finally, Dickens’ use of speech verbs is analyzed from the point of view of the original serialized publication of the novels. Indeed, publishing in installments influenced Dickens’ style, which, in terms of speech verbs, resulted in specific choices used to gloss characters’ words when, for example, they reappear after some installments —weeks or even moths— out of the story. The use of specific speech verbs helps readers to recall characters after these time gaps. In sum, the analysis of speech verbs from these viewpoints will demonstrate the stylistic role of this element in Dickens’ novels, thus revealing another relevant feature among his well-known techniques of characterization.