Evidence for a Literary Dialect: Speaker Judgments

Abstract

The existence of a “literary dialect” was postulated on several grounds. Specific syntactic structures were hypothesized to be literary or nonliterary. This hypothesis was tested by obtaining judgments from adults on hypothesized literary and nonliterary structures, each presented at two levels of vocabulary difficulty. Results confirmed that the two structure types could be reliably differentiated statistically, and showed large absolute differences in the percentage of times they were judged as being literary. In addition, vocabulary exhibited a significant main effect, with structures containing infrequent vocabulary being judged as literary more often. Finally, there was a significant structure by vocabulary interaction, where literary structures with infrequent vocabulary were judged to be particularly literary.