‘I quite detest the man’: Degree adverbs,female language and Jane Austen

Abstract

Burrows’ (1987) stylometric analysis of Austen’s novels associates quite with ‘the speech of the vulgarians, especially the women who predominate among them’. Through a corpus-based analysis, this article takes further Burrows’ (1987) claims by scrutinizing the socio-stylistic mappings between characters and functions of quite in Austen. The results indicate that gender (rather than vulgarity) is the main factor determining the socio-stylistic variation of quite in Austen’s novels. More generally, the study contributes to a better understanding of Jane Austen’s practices of linguistic gendering. Recent literary criticism has commented on Austen’s stylistic manipulations aimed at challenging 18th-century stereotypes of women’s language (Michaelson, 2002: 62–63). The corpus-based study provided in this article can be taken as a concrete example of how such manipulations work at the linguistic level. It suggests that Austen may have drawn on 18th-century stereotypes of ‘female’ language for the stylistic stratification of quite in her novels, although introducing functional and grammatical variations that allow for subtle differentiations across ‘female’ idiolects.