The language of self-talk in Shakespeare's plays

Murphy, Sean Edward and Culpeper, Jonathan (2014) The language of self-talk in Shakespeare's plays. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

Abstract

This thesis reports an original approach to the language of self-talk in Shakespeare’s plays. Having established that self-talk is a form of discourse worthy of study, and potentially distinguishable from dialogue in terms of language, I ask two questions: 1. What is the nature of self-talk? 2. What language forms are characteristic of self-talk? The second question is really a subsidiary of the first in that it focuses specifically on the linguistic nature of self-talk. In Chapter 2, I begin to answer these questions by drawing on theories in stylistics, (im)politeness, literary criticism and methods employed in corpus linguistics. In doing so, I show how this research breaks new ground by approaching the language of self-talk from innovative angles, for example, by building and studying a corpus of self-talk. Chapter 3 describes the construction of this corpus, together with a dialogue corpus against which to compare the former. Chapters 4 and 5 address the first question. In Chapter 4, qualitative analysis of the self-talk corpus provides insights into the nature of self-talk as discourse, showing, for example, how speakers may linguistically split themselves in two. The focus in Chapter 5 shifts to theories of (im)politeness, and the ways in which self-talkers use linguistic strategies to justify their own social value, or even attack it by being impolite to themselves. Chapter 6 addresses the second question by using automatic analysis of the self-talk corpus, in conjunction with the dialogue corpus, to reveal characteristic language forms. Among others, these include DREAM, EYES, NATURE, and COMES. Chapter 7 uncovers characteristic combinations such as AND YET, I AM and I WILL. Self-talk in comedy, history and tragedy is typified by words such as LOVE, KING and GODS respectively.