Abstract
<em>This study investigates the linguistic code choices of Francis Stott Fitzgerald for one of his masterpieces: The Great Gatsby. It hypothesizes that as a linguistic virtuoso, Fitzgerald exploits marked linguistic choices to convey his intentional meaning throughout the novel. “Marked” linguistic choices are defined as departures from the expected or the norm to negotiate a change during a discourse. This study assumes that the writer who is a linguistic virtuoso will “mark” the crucial passages (i.e., the passages which carry the author’s most important messages) by using marked syntactic structures and certain grammatical categories to set them off from the rest of the work. The study aims to find whether Fitzgerald marks the crucial narrative passages in The Great Gatsby by using particular syntactic structures which are demonstratively different from the typical narrative passages in the novel as a whole. To do so, it analyzes five passages which are crucial in carrying the “authorial message”, and these passages differ syntactically from five matched passages which largely function only to carry the story line forward. The stylistic analysis rests on a frequency count of the major components of the phrase structure and the most important grammatical categories in the paired paragraphs. Based on the analytical results, this study reaches the conclusion that the syntactic markedness stands out as a stylistic feature in The Great Gatsby, and such a stylistic feature can only become salient beyond surface-level considerations of phrase structure and grammatical categories in any stylistic analysis of literary works.</em>
Highlights
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, an American novelist and short-story writer, is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century
Our research question became: What syntactic features account for the different profiles of the trees? Categories for further analysis were generated mainly by scrutinizing the trees, and by considering the categories which Longacre had identified as characterizing discourse peaks and which Biber had found useful. Frequencies of these four main categories were studied in each of the marked and unmarked sample passages: (1) INFL Phrases (IPs); (2) Complement Phrases (CPs); (3) Prepositional Phrases (PPs); and (4) types of verbs
There are many more CPs in the marked passages than the unmarked ones, 31 to 15 Under CP were included subordinate clauses, such as adverbial complements when I came back from the East last autumn and sentence complements I felt CP; and embedded clauses, such as which is dignified under the name of the creative temperament in the marked passage
Summary
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, an American novelist and short-story writer, is considered one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. This study assumes that the writer who is a linguistic virtuoso will “mark” the crucial passages (i.e., the passages which carry the author’s most important messages) by using marked syntactic structures and certain grammatical categories to set them off from the rest of the work.
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