Análisis estilístico de los verbos de habla como recurso de caracterización en las novelas de Charles Dickens

Abstract

The purpose of this PhD dissertation is to analyze Charles Dickens' use of speech verbs in his fourteen major novels (c. 3.8 million words). Apart from their basic function as speech-introducing verbs, they can also contribute to characterization. This additional stylistic function is explored here. In order to do so, a corpus stylistic approach has been adopted, which has allowed the retrieval of 17,021 tokens of 130 different types. In the first stage of the analysis, the relevance of this stylistic phenomenon is investigated against the backdrop of a reference corpus (c. 12.9 million words) consisting of seven different Victorian authors: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, William Thackeray and Anthony Trollope. Subsequently, Dickens' use of speech verbs is analyzed from different perspectives: according to gender, according to the narrators that tell the stories and from the point of view of the original serialized publication of the novels. The analysis of speech verbs from these viewpoints will demonstrate the stylistic role of this element in Dickens' novels, thus revealing another relevant feature among his well-known techniques of characterization.