Profiling and defocusing phenomena in the discourse of fe/male novelists: a corpus-based approach

Abstract

In this chapter we examine Richardson’s Pamela and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from a purely linguistic perspective to analyse whether a male/female-writing standpoint implies any differences in terms of the process of topicalization in the transitive model. Particularly, we centre on the order of elements in the action chain, that is, the type of entities that are profiled/defocused in discourse, when a restricted set of verbs of emotion are employed, the so-called ‘amuse-type psych-verbs’. The research hypothesis states that a male-writing perspective would be related to the chiefly use of the canonical transitive event in which the Subject is identified with the Agent and the Object coincides with the Patient. On the other hand, a female-writing view would entail a subversion of the prototypical order of discursive elements by means of the extensive use of alternations of the canonical action chain that involve a process of Patient-profiling and Agent-defocusing. This would imply an attempt on behalf of the female author to also subvert the canonical, patriarchal, human-agent-based, and egocentric view on women and their place in society as traditionally portrayed by men in literature. The research hypothesis is tested here by means of corpus analysis. We retrieved the sample of contextualised instances by using the Concordance tool of the Sketch Engine software. Particularly, we filtered the searches by typing the set of selected verbs and then we analysed the argument structure realization in each case. The results show that the research hypothesis is confirmed and that it implies the pursuing of distinct objectives in the authors’ writings. Austen’s intention might be to bring to perspective her characters’ emotions and promote to subjecthood those entities that are affected by the actions denoted by the verbs, rather than profiling the Agentive entities that eventually carry out those actions, as Richardson would do.