A Variationist Approach to Text: What Role-Players Can Teach Us about Form and Meaning

Abstract

The purpose of my essay is twofold: (1) I demonstrate how analytical techniques from the variationist research paradigm in sociolinguistics provide the scholar with additional tools to understand the relationship between form and meaning, and (2) through this kind of analysis, I present an example of how real-world notions of gendered speech are extended to the dialogue in texts that emerge from virtual interactions. I use the term form in the linguistic sense to represent a meaningful unit of language. In this sense, go and going are two distinct linguistic forms. By contrast, literary form, as it is typically construed, represents the assembly of linguistic forms into a literary composition. For example, poets utilize the syllabic structure of particular linguistic forms in the creation of systematically metered verses. In this case, aspects of the linguistic form (i.e., syllable structure) are integral to the development of the literary (i.e., poetic) form. For authors who leverage dialogue as a means of characterization (e.g., William Faulkner), vernacular linguistic forms are used to create a sense of authenticity, which contributes to the plausibility of their fiction. While distinct, the meanings associated with linguistic forms help to shape the meaning that readers associate with particular literary forms. Through quantitative analysis, I describe how social meaning—those ideologically grounded notions that emerge from the social experiences and understandings of a particular group—becomes associated with particular linguistic forms and how these meanings serve to characterize a particular text. I examine collaboratively authored texts that emerge from interactions in an online role-playing game to demonstrate that authors’ use of nonstandard spellings helps create stereotypically male characters who are linguistically positioned in opposition to non-male characters in their dialogue. In order to understand why a variationist approach can be useful to literary scholars, I will begin by exploring why previous quantitative approaches have had little success in contributing to literary theorization and will then describe how the variationist approach differs.