The Language of Dialogue in Fiction

As far as the description of variation in discourse is concerned, it can be observed that descriptive linguistics has focused on the description of various syntactic structures as they occur in rather formal written or—to a lesser extent—spoken language Little attention has been given to investigating how the choice for a particular has been structure relates to the communicative purpose it serves. Research in the field of discourse analysis and pragmatics into the nature of spoken and written language has brought to light that these forms of language differ from each other not merely as far as the medium is concerned, but also the degree to which the discourse is planned Along what may be considered to be a continuous scale, with planned and unplanned discourse on the respective extreme ends, we also find dialogue in (written) fiction as the writer's attempt to portray everyday natural language conversation It is, however, to a much greater extent than spoken language planned, revised, edited, etc The present paper reports on some preliminary results of a study into the nature of the language of dialogue in fiction, which is being carried out on the basis of the material contained in the TOSCA Corpus The material, which has received a detailed synactic analysis, gives access to both numerical and linguistic information, and allows for comparisons to be made between various genres and modes of writing Our research so far has yielded some interesting results as far as the nature of dialogue in fiction is concerned, for example in that features that in the literature are put forward as being typical of spoken language in such dialogue hardly occur at all, while others must be related to the personal style of the author