Pseudo-oral discourse in literary texts: Interdisciplinary studies at the interface of quantitative-linguistic and literary approaches with a focus on James Joyce's Ulysses

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Volker Gast; Professor Dr. Dirk Vanderbeke
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 380283145

This project is situated at the interface of linguistics and literary studies and investigates the representation of 'spoken language' in literary English texts in comparison with authentic spoken language. We will primarily focus on James Joyce's Ulysses and other modern authors who reputedly feature close approximations to authentic dialogues, but also draw on premodern and postmodern texts to supplement and validate our results. Tools and methods from computational linguistics will be employed for multilevel annotations of the literary works, including lexical-semantic, syntactic, text-linguistic and discourse pragmatic factors. The annotations will be generated with the help of relevant software and manually corrected and validated. By creating and analysing rich annotations in a comprehensive corpus of literary texts we intend to make a contribution to the methodological toolbox of quantitative linguistics as well as to empirical literature studies. The texts will be analysed both from a linguistic point of view, employing modern quantitative methods of analysis, and from a literary perspective with special attention to specifically literary strategies and techniques. This interdisciplinary approach will allow us to explore a) systematic and functional differences between authentic orality and its literary representation within the framework of linguistic register analysis, b) the poetic functions of the respective textual features in literary dialogues and c) the linguistic and literary/narrative strategies employed by the authors in the creation of pseudo orality. These topics will be investigated on the basis of a multidimensional approach: Intratextually, we will analyse and compare dialogical and non-dialogical passages, the speech acts of different characters, and, in the case of Ulysses, also the representation of orality in different chapters. Intertextually, we will explore various representations of orality -- some more authentic, others more stylized - in the works of different authors and literary epochs from the 18th to the 20th centuries, in contrast with relevant data from non-literary corpora. The empirical approach based on relatively large amounts of data will allow us to supplement, validate, and, if necessary, revise previously established concepts or theories of pseudo-orality in literary studies. In addition, our research will contribute to register studies by investigating an under-researched register (pseudo-oral discourse) which systematically combines properties of oral and written discourse. At a more general level, we regard our project as a contribution to attempts at bridging the gap between linguistics and literary studies in contemporary philology.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants