‘I quite detest the man’: Degree adverbs, female language and Jane Austen

Abstract

Burrows’ (1987) stylometric analysis of Austen’s novels associates quite with ‘the speech of the vulgarians, especially the women who predominate among them’. Through a corpus-based analysis, this article takes further Burrows’ (1987) claims by scrutinizing the socio-stylistic mappings between characters and functions of quite in Austen. The results indicate that gender (rather than vulgarity) is the main factor determining the socio-stylistic variation of quite in Austen’s novels. More generally, the study contributes to a better understanding of Jane Austen’s practices of linguistic gendering. Recent literary criticism has commented on Austen’s stylistic manipulations aimed at challenging 18th-century stereotypes of women’s language (Michaelson, 2002: 62–63). The corpus-based study provided in this article can be taken as a concrete example of how such manipulations work at the linguistic level. It suggests that Austen may have drawn on 18th-century stereotypes of ‘female’ language for the stylistic stratification of quite in her novels, although introducing functional and grammatical variations that allow for subtle differentiations across ‘female’ idiolects.

Degree and Related Phenomena in the History of English: Evidence of Usage and Pathways of Change

“…Another influential framework has been historical pragmatics (e.g., Culpeper & Kytö 2010), which allows one to examine sociohistorical and pragmatic aspects of historical texts in their sociocultural communicative contexts, including attention paid to, for instance, conversational principles, speech acts, politeness strategies, face concerns, and speakers’ need to hedge or assert their utterances (e.g., Pahta 2006a, 2006b; González-Díaz 2014; Claridge, Jonsson & Kytö forthcoming). Processes of change that are relevant to the development of intensifiers such as grammaticalization and lexicalization are at the heart of historical pragmatics.…”