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

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.

The Quantitative Analysis of Texts

The relationship between quantitative linguistics and the study of literature has been tenuous since computers were first enlisted to aid literary critics in the 1960s. One of the earliest scholars of computers in the humanities, Louis T. Milic, commented in 1967 that there were "a number of related activities that border on literature but which are really tangential or preliminary to literary study. Among these I include . . . most kinds of linguistic study" (24, emphasis added). Since then, many scholars have attempted to use quantitative linguistic techniques to answer questions in the humanities, particularly in the study of literature. Many of these studies fall into the purview of stylometrics, the study of style through measurement (Holmes). Stylometrics is typically concerned with quantifying an author's style and then making comparisons either among elements in the author's body of work (e.g., Laan) or between works in similar genres by different authors (e.g., Ledger and Merriam). By quantifying an author's style, stylometricians discover, for example, suggestive patterns that occur between the styles of two authors that may not be intuitive to a scholar unaided by quantitative tools. This is the primary advantage that quantitative approaches bring to the study of texts.

While stylometrics is refreshingly interdisciplinary, leveraging specializations in fields such as statistics, computer science, and mathematics toward the study of literature, its application has been limited in scope. Where scholars have applied quantitative analyses to understanding a particular literary work's meaning (McKenna and Antonia), their research is typically reported in a language of complex statistical reasoning without consideration for the background of the intended audience of literary scholars. Potter sums up this sentiment:

The synthesis between literary criticism and literary computing has been prevented by both (1) the utter lack of training in, or appreciation of scientific methods among mainstream literary critics, and (2) the almost universal tendency of computer analysts to get lost in the jargons of programming and statistics.

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With this said, the stylistic goal of this essay is to present relatively complex statistical procedures and analyses without focusing on their...