Suspended Quotations

By joining manual analysis and corpus linguistics methods, this paper compares and contrasts the use of suspended quotations in Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. An analysis of two authors whose styles, aims and literary contexts are so different is functional to creating a list of functions typically performed by suspended quotation generally. The study shows that some roles of the suspended quotation reported for Dickens’ novels in previous literature are indeed specific to this writer and his idea of narrative, while others can be considered ‘author-independent’. Furthermore, the current analysis has revealed that suspended quotations lend themselves to a much wider range of functions than those reported and described in the literature thus far.