Jennifer E. Shakespear and Dr. Cynthia L. Hallen, Linguistics

In her novel Wuthering Heights, Emily Brönte uses the dialogue of her characters to disclose their inner-most workings. Like real humans, characters in novels share a part of themselves every time they speak. Their personalities, moods, demeanor, affections, dispositions, and affinities are revealed through language. By conducting a detailed linguistic analysis of the dialogue of both Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, I hoped to discover language patterns reflecting their temperament, emotions, and relationships with other characters. I believe my study was very successful in achieving this goal.

Originally, I planned on completing a full-scale exegesis of the characters= dialogue identifying linguistic and stylistic features, including: unusual lexical categories or functional shifts, elliptical constructions, word order variations, merged structures, lexical and structural ambiguities, metaphors and other kinds of figurative language, idiomatic expressions, and rhetorical figures. My first step was to parse1 the dialogue and analyze its syntactic structures by employing the concept of T-Units. While my T-Unit analysis was supposed to only be a preparatory study to the other linguistic and stylistic analyses, I soon discovered that it held much more interesting and relevant data than I had originally thought and that it would bring me closer to my goal of finding linguistic patterns that reveal character than all the other analyses put together. I therefore narrowed my research and focused all my efforts on the T-Unit analysis.

A T-Unit is basically a main clause plus all subordinate clauses before and after it. (I included sentence fragments as individual T-Units in my analysis as well, even though they don=t contain a main clause.) The concept of T-Units was devised by Kellogg Hunt in 1965 as a tool to analyze the syntactic maturity of schoolchildren=s writing and is today widely used in studying first and second language acquisition2. The basic idea is that the length of a T-Unit (determined by the number of words in it) reveals its syntactic complexity and thereby the speaker/writer=s linguistic maturity. Because people speak differently when they are in different emotional/mental states, the syntactic complexity can also indicate a person’s moods and emotions. Much research has been done involving T-Unit analyses, but as far as I know, mine is the first study to apply the concept of T-Units to studying literary technique and character development.

Through my research, I have found that Brönte does a very good job altering her characters’ language according to their moods, emotions, and relationships. Following are some of the major results of my study:

• There is a large jump between Catherine=s T-Unit complexity as a child and as an adult, showing realistic linguistic maturation.
• Catherine speaks to Heathcliff nearly twice as much as she speaks to Edgar, and her T-Units show a reverse pattern of complexity when speaking with the two of them. Also, the distribution of T-Units per mood is much more evenly balanced with Heathcliff than with any other character, suggesting that her relationship with him is much better than with any other character, including Edgar, her husband..
• Catherine is very unhappy most of the time, and her different moods are reflected in her sentence complexity.
• Heathcliff shows wild swings in his T-Unit complexity over the course of the novel. The lowest complexity is always associated somehow with Catherine; the highest is usually produced when he is plotting or in the course of taking revenge on his enemies.
• The complexity of Heathcliff’s speech is reflected in his moods and even more strongly in his relationships with other characters.

At this time, I have completed all of my analyzation efforts as well as the rough draft of my honors
thesis, which presents my findings in detail. Though unutilized til now, I believe T-Unit analyses can be a very effective means of gaining insight into characters and also into the methods and techniques talented authors use to create realistic characters and lifelike dialogue. Overall, Brontë does a wonderful job making Catherine and Heathcliff into very realistic and memorable characters based on the way she modifies their dialogue complexity to fit their individual moods and relationships with other characters.