Abstract The March sisters, especially Jo March, in Little Women have been the focus of literary criticism, yet the linguistic mechanisms that underpin the construction of womanhood and the sisters’ characterisation remain underexplored. This corpus-based study addresses this gap by examining how the sisters’ bildungsroman towards womanhood is encoded through the use of reporting verbs, particularly in direct speech. As a form of implicit characterisation, reporting verbs function as markers of attitude, emotion, and gendered identity. Drawing on Caldas-Coulthard’s (1987. “Reported Speech in Written Narrative Texts.” In Discussing Discourse , edited by Malcolm Coulthard, 149–67. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.) taxonomy, this corpus-based study maps the distribution and functional variation of reporting verbs across the four sisters, presenting a collective coming-of-age trajectory. The findings reveal that Meg, Beth, and Amy largely conform to the stereotypical femininity of being supportive, fragile, or imploring. Despite sharing certain feminine traits, Jo exhibits a unique personality in her assertive, demanding, and aggressive manner of speaking throughout the book. By integrating narratology, feminism, and cognitive stylistics, the study offers a linguistically informed perspective on complex social identities and the construction of womanhood in the Victorian era, highlighting the interplay between discourse and gender, and social norms within the female bildungsroman tradition. The quantitative finding further reveals the voices within a broader communicative and social context.
Tao et al. (Thu,) studied this question.