Sociolinguistic Concepts and Literary Analysis

HIS PAPER HAS TWO PRIMARY AIMS: to illustrate how sociolinguistic concepts apply to the analysis of literature and to provide pedagogical suggestions as to how to present sociolinguistic theory in the context of literary analysis in advanced-level university courses. It discusses a number of current sociolinguistic concepts that have proven fruitful in the analysis of literary texts, illustrating how the concepts SPEECH COMMUNITY and SOCIAL NETWORK might be called upon to analyze the basis of the comic element in John Kennedy Toole's novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. By integrating such terms with a general discourse analysis of the text that concentrates on the Gricean principles of conversational cooperation, we will show how an author can manipulate the characters of his work to sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious, comic effect. Our analysis will demonstrate that Toole exploits his subconscious knowledge of the restrictions that membership in a particular speech community places on linguistic behavior, in order to characterize the chief protagonist as an outsider who flouts the regular conventions of discourse and sets himself up in a speech community of one, despite the demands of the social network in which he is forced to operate. There is also a third, broader purpose of this article, however: to promote the general applicability of sociolinguistic theory to literary analysis. Hopper (1988) has recently suggested that, while linguistics was at one time considered an tool for literary analysis, it is now unable to provide any tools that are substantially different from those that a literary analyst uses, since the two fields are merging in their approaches to text. In our paper, we maintain that Hopper's remarks about the limitations of linguistics can apply only to a narrow definition of the field, one which targets sentence-level grammar and largely ignores the social characteristics of language. Hopper suggests that the work of linguists on conversational analysis (e.g., Tannen 1980, 1989) is about the only current worthwhile, relevant linguistic work. We certainly agree about the importance of conversational analysis (and Tannen's work in particular) to the analysis of literature. However, we suggest that Hopper is being still too narrow here: sociolinguistics in general, not just conversational analysis, has much to offer to literary studies in the way of theories-if by enabling we mean tools that allow us to give a solid procedural basis for our analysis of

Linguistics · Sociology · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · History · Philosophy

• Spoken and written language

  Deborah Tannen•Spoken and written language•1982

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