The purpose of this study was two-fold: (1) To establish William Faulkner's informal theory by comparing interview statements which he made on the subject of dialect with Sumner Ives's formal theory and (2) To uncover broad patterns in Faulkner's use of dialect markers from the beginning to the end of his literary career by making a rigorous statistical analysis of his use of dialect markers in eight Yoknapatawpba County novels written between the beginning and the end of his career.Chapter 1 is an introduction to the study. Chapter 2 contains a review of literature in the field of dialect study in recent years and examines the main relationships between those studies and this one. Chapter 3 discusses the basic principles of Sumner Ives's formal dialect theory, particularly as they may be- applied to William Faulkner's use of dialect. Chapter 4 compares Faulkner's informal dialect theory, as it was expressed in various interview statements which he made on the subject of dialect, with Ives's formal theory. Chapter 5 describes the data gathering procedures for the statistical analysis of Faulkner's use of dialect markers, and Chapter 6 gives the results of the analysis. Chapter 7 presents the conclusions for the entire study.The comparison of William.Faulkner's informal dialect theory and Sumner Ives's formal one reveals that they were, in their broad outlines, essentially the same.For the purpose of analyzing Faulkner's use of dialect markers, his works were divided into three periods-early, middle, and late--with the following novels selected for analysis in these periods: early, Sartoris (1929) and The Sound and the Fury (1929); middle, Light in August (1932), The Unvanquished (1938), and The Hamlet (1940) ; and late, Intruder in the Dust (1948), The Town (1957), and The Reivers (1962). In all 3,7144 dialogue passages were analyzed in the eight novels; these dialogue passages contained 83,619 words.Also for purposes of analysis, a dialect marker was defined as either a phonological spelling or a nonstandard grammatical construction. The statistical analysis of Faulkner's use of dialect markers was an analysis of variance involving seven independent variables and six dependent variables. The independent' variables were the numerical order in which the novels analyzed were published and the numerical order of the literary period in which they were grouped with other novels in the study and the age, sex, class, race, and location of the characters who spoke the dialogue analyzed. The dependent variables were the percentages of words used as dialect markers per utterance under the categories 'total', 'verbs or auxiliaries', 'nouns', 'adjectives or adverbs', 'pronouns or demonstratives', and 'others'.The analysis of Faulkner's use of dialect markers revealed that he made significant change in that use from the beginning to the middle, but not from the middle to the end of his career. It showed that the greatest part of that change was a decrease in marker use by lower class characters rather than middle or upper class characters and by black characters rather than white characters. It also showed significant change on a sex basis with a larger decrease for male than female characters and a significant difference on an age basis with children and old adults using higherpercentages of their words as dialect markers than young middle aged adults. On a parts of speech basis, the analysis indicated that Faulkner's most frequently used and most consistently used dialect marker was the verb.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/178934 |
| Date | January 1975 |
| Creators | Murphree, John Wilson |
| Contributors | Houck, Charles L. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | ix, 219 leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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