1　A Critical Survey of Linguistic Studies on Jane Austen's Major Fiction

Jane Austen's fiction has received common attention from the critics and readers for a long time and her novels are very attractive to students of English who have read them for themselves and to professionals who make critical comments on literature (Woolf, 1975). She is described as being with moral charge to an exquisite discrimination of human values. Virginia Woolf (1975: 177) said that “the wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste. Her fool is a fool, her snob a snob”. She is regarded as sharing qualities with Shakespeare, and called as “Shakespeare in prose”. As early as twelve years old, Austen began to practice writing, and continued with a completion of six novels, letters and juvenilia and fragments until her death. Among her works, Pride and Prejudice belongs to her earlier works, which is of the 18th century style of sarcastic comedy, while Emma is regarded as the most mature one, and Persuasion is her last novel that is approaching modern literature because of the delicate psychological depiction (朱虹, 1985). Her writing is vigorous and her style is witty and elegant, and people find her works invigorating and entertaining.

However, in the 19th century, her fiction was generally neglected by contemporary writers and critics, who held prejudice against her narrowness in subjects, which were related to her “country gentlemen, ladies, snobs, bores and social climbers” (范存忠, 1983: 146). What's more, Austen once called her work “small square two inches of ivory” misled people into judging her works as narrow and shallow (qtd. in范存忠, 1983: 146). Her novels sold not very well compared with those contemporary writers such as Walter Scott. And the critics did not comment much on them. Instead, they just did very general studies on Austen's achievements on language and they tended to ignore her art of language by paying more attention to the entertainment and morality that her novels contained.

Entering the 20th century, her fiction began to arouse great interest from the literary circle. The contemporary readers and writers were quite aware of Jane Austen's mastery of the art of language. An anonymous reviewer in the Edinburgh Magazine found in Jane Austen's novels “more permanent delight in those familiar cabinet pictures, than even in the great historical pieces of our more eminent modern masters” (Watt, 1962: 3). Her language was valued as being able to give vivid pictures of her characters and events. At the same time, some other critics also showed interest in Austen's language, either by praising her writing skills or searching for her style in general. Their focus was presently on Austen's choice of words. Sir Walter Scott, as the most eminent poet and novelist of his time, praised Jane Austen's Emma openly. He wrote in his private journals, “Also read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen's very finely written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with” (Watt, 1962: 3).

Then in 1939, Mary Lascelles initially did a comparatively complete and systematic study of Jane Austen's art by publishing her influential book Jane Austen and Her Art, which was one of the earliest and best study of Austen's writing in depth. In the book, she said, Jane Austen's style exhibited “a curiously chameleon-like faculty” changing with the character and situation. She first approached Jane Austen by way of a brief narrative of her life and an inquiry into the scope, quality and outcome of her reading, and then made an inquiry into her art by means of her use of language especially in relation to the narrator's peculiar problems. She considered that there was certainly something that must be said about the narrative art of Jane Austen and she believed that Austen's style was best illustrated by the definition that proper words in proper places made the true definition of a style. She explored Austen's control of language as tools by way of her vocabulary, consistence of characters with opinions she expressed, variety of dialogues and points of view. On the whole she concentrated on the structural and semantic side of Austen's language.

In the late 20th century, with the enlargement of stylistic horizons to discuss English novels, Jane Austen's language was rewarded with close and warm attention. Gradually the critics began to pay more attention to Austen's language and tried to apply linguistic knowledge to Austen's fiction; yet, their studies put emphasis on the lexical meaning of language, namely the semantics. In 1966, David Lodge edited the book Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel. In this book, there was an article “The Vocabulary of Mansfield Park”, which illustrated carefully the word choices in Austen's early novel Mansfield Park. In 1970, K.C. Phillips, wrote Jane Austen's English so as to illustrate her linguistic features to a greater extent. In 1970, Donald D. Stone published “Sense and Semantics in Jane Austen” on Nineteenth-century Fiction. They were all attempts at a study of Jane Austen's language in fiction but they tend to avoid linguistic terms.

In 1972, as an innovative work on Austen's language, The language of Jane Austen was written by Norman Page, who began to study carefully Austen's language style. He was quite “aware of a disparity between subject-matter and significance” in Austen's fiction (Page, 1972: 7). The apparent shallowness revealed actual profundity in her fiction. Page (1972) also argued that the triumph of her fiction was a triumph of style and they could be explained in terms of certain qualities of language. He made detailed exploration of her language by means of the social context of her vocabulary, dialogues, rhetoric devices, and the epistolary art.

Other researchers also delved into Austen's language in various ways. In 1980, Geoffrey Nash wrote a book to give notes to Austen's earlier work Pride and Prejudice, which was called light, bright and sparkling, and was regarded by some as the most reread novel in English. Nash analyzed the language of the novel and thought that Austen portrayed the characters vividly, such as “Mrs. Bennet's speeches always reflect her mind: they ramble on with no obvious direction except the general theme of her daughter's superiority” (1980: 57). He claimed that Jane Austen's irony “expressed its meaning indirectly, through what only appeared to be polite conversation” and “satire makes use of humor and irony, and in Jane Austen, usually has a social meaning” (1980: 59). In this novel, Jane Austen's mastery of dialogues was well displayed.

In the subsequent years, the series of York Notes on Jane Austen's works were published successively, which discussed both the traditional literary study and the study of her linguistic features. In 1980, York Notes: Jane Austen Persuasion was published with the notes given by Angela Smith. The book gave summaries and commentary on the novel including its language. She discussed Austen's concern with moral discrimination and judgment by applying to Austen's words connected with moral and legal judgment and moral discrimination. She argued that there was always legal strain in the language and she pointed out persuasion and susceptibility to persuasion are two important elements of the moral qualities that were examined in the novel such as the words “sacrifice”, “consciousness of right” and “maturity of mind”. In general, Austen's language constantly required that readers should discriminate, evaluate and judge, and reading this novel was like a journey of self-improvement and self-judgment.

In 1981, York Notes: Jane Austen Emma was published with the notes provided by Barbara Kayley, whose book was different from other two books by exploring the style of Emma in more details and greater depth. In the book, she argued that the narrative was orderly in both content and style, and dialogues were used by Austen as an efficient way to shape the characters and help with the plot development. She pointed out that the “dialogue of Emma was lively and spontaneous, much of it was formal, as was natural for the gentility of the time; it gives a balanced and well-organized impression, falling into antitheses, parallels and sequences” (76). She found that different characters had different styles and paces of conversations. She also mentioned the vividness brought by indirect speech, which drifted now and then into direct speech. This kind of narrative was highly valued as being very helpful with the sustained picture. All in all, most of the studies emphasize the linguistic achievements of Jane Austen from the perspective of literary research.

In the latter half of the 20th century, there seemed a surge in the linguistic study on Austen's art of language with the guidance of stylistics and narratology. In 1981, John Odmard wrote the book An Understanding of Jane Austen's Novels, in which he discussed Austen's language in a more theoretical level of semantic fields and the real point of view. In Part IV entitled Ordering One's Priorities: Semantic Fields and the Real Point of View, he examined the most significant patterns in Austen's word-choices from the perspective of the real point of view. According to him, “words are an important guide for the reader to the moral frame of reference in Jane Austen's fictional world” (123). His research was more important than former critics because he began to talk about the pattern of Austen's word-choices instead of the fragments of diction. Semantic field theory was the theory about the relationship between the senses of words, either syntagmaticly or paradigmaticly. He grouped Austen's language into three fields, namely material values, social values and moral values. In each field, there were related and hierarchical words which helped the reinforcement and clarification of certain value. In this way, Austen provided her readers with key words group to guide them in the judgment and discrimination of the heroines' views.

Janet Todd, as a specialist in Austen's studies, had been doing innovative researches for Austen's writing under the guidance of certain linguistic theories. In 1983, Janet Todd edited the book Jane Austen: New Perspectives, which collected brilliant articles on Austen. In the article “The Language of Supposing: Modal Auxiliaries in Sense and Sensibility” by Zelda Boyd, the author classified the content of the novel into two parts, actual and hypothetical. He thought “the way to begin with Austen's language study was with the hypothetical, with the world of supposition and desire as opposed to the world of hedgerows and apples” (143). He also defined Austen's language as the language of judgment. According him, there was scarcely a page that did not abound with “musts, oughts, shoulds, coulds” in her novel (143). Almost everyone in her novels used modals. Some comic figure such as Mr. Woodhouse in Emma was always remaking the actual to suit his own judgment and assumption, and the selfish and the manipulative were most prone to use modal language to help reshaping the facts to match their desires. They just transformed their subjective desires into objective grounds, which were in their favor. This covert willfulness expressed by modal language was not only the mark of comic characters but also the feature of most self-indulgent wishful thinkers. They just used modal language to objectify their desires. The prime aim of the modal auxiliaries was the expression of inner feeling, supposition and judgment.

Then in 1978, Mary Vaiana Taylor published the article “The Grammar of Conduct: Speech Act Theory and the Education of Emma Woodhouse” on Style, in which she explored Emma Woodhouse from the perspective of pragmatic theory and speech act theory. In 1986, in the book The Jane Austen Companion edited by J. David Grey, Norman Page mentioned in his article “Jane Austen's Language” that although there was not the kind of full-blown rhetoric, “the variety and the contrasts are there, and some of her most telling effects are derived from minor modulations of style, slight departures form the norm that she carefully created” (261). The author also pointed out that in Austen's later novels, especially in Emma and Persuasion, there were more notable stylistic experiments, such as her antithetical structures for ironic or parodic purposes, flexible and open-ended syntax that traced the fluctuations of thought and feeling, punctuation, abrupt phrases, the absence of coordination and her mastery of the long sentence. He argued that Austen examined carefully her moral vocabulary, which recurred consistently in her description and analysis of characters and conduct. More importantly, he pointed out that Austen's mastery of dialogue was of great importance which made the conversation natural and dramatic. In the dialogue, the application of direct speech was only one way of communicating with the reader, another variety of language was the telescoping of a long speech into short sentences or a few telegraphic phrases, which were called free indirect form. In this way, the author had explored a lot of stylistic innovation of Austen's language. His research had begun to approach the discourse analysis field. Yet owing to the age limit, still there was not much done about her language, such as the pragmatic meaning of Austen's language, and there was no detailed analysis of indirect free form. In brief, the author explored various innovative linguistic and stylistic features, and he argued that Jane Austen had a good command of long and short sentences, which was the syntactic level of language.

In 1988, the book Romance, Language and Education in Jane Austen's Novels, was written by Laura G. Mooneyham, which gathered a representative collection of critical essays on Jane Austen's works. The author entitled the third part “Pride and Prejudice: Towards a Common Language” which delved into the language of both the protagonist and the antagonist. The author argued that both the hero Darcy and the heroine Elizabeth had their special language. According to the author, Darcy's language was formal, precise and stolid by “speaking with a detachment born of his intellectual superiority. Such language is not suited to intimacy but to the exercise of authority” (48). While Elizabeth's language was “dominated by a prevailing sense of irony and the wit such an ironic viewpoint generates” and “subversive, that is, she seeks to undermine his authority, both temporal and linguistic, through verbal aggression” (48). The first half of this novel was in some sense not only the conflict between Darcy and Elizabeth but also the misinterpretation of language. The author just gave a rather general impression of the language in the novel, without giving first illustration of the linguistic features of the character's language in the novel.

In 1991, Myra Strokes in her book The Language of Jane Austen studied some aspects of Austen's vocabulary. She held the opinion that “literature of the past requires some re-orientation from the reader, for the meaning attributed to words changes, radically or subtly, from period to period” (1991: 1). Thus she made great efforts in exploring the social context including time, place and manner of Austen's vocabulary, the conceptual context, and the vocabulary referring to head and heart in Austen's fiction. Her diachronic study was the semantic re-orientation of the vocabulary, which concerned the meaning changes of words in Austen's fiction.

In recent years, studies on Jane Austen's art of language have come into a new age of diversity. They range from the stylistic and pragmatic studies to corpus researches. In 2002, the book Romantic Austen was written by Clara Tuite. She discussed the topic “Sensibility, free indirect style and the Romantic technology of discretion”, and she argued that Austen employed some new mechanisms as strategies of realist narrative, namely irony, ambiguity and free indirect discourse, which served as a language of sympathy. Among them she emphasized that “free indirect discourse is a defining feature of Austen's realism, and a technique which Austen finessed”. According to her, free indirect discourse was a form of doubleness of voices as “an internalization of an externalized process”. And her highly self-conscious strategy distinguished Austen as a realist instead of a romanticist. Free indirect discourse was a notable grammatical usage, also called represented speech and thought. It referred to the way that the reports of what a character said and thought shift in pronouns, adverbs, tense and grammatical mode as we moved or hovered between the direct narrated reproductions of these events as they occurred to the character and the indirect representation of such events by the narrator. According to her, the free indirect discourse inscribed feminine authority and refinement of feeling and discretion.

While in the year of 2010, Corpus Linguistics in Jane Austen's Novels was written by Bettina Fischer-Strarcke, in which he argued that literature was a prime example of language use and language was also a network created by various features. His book had offered new methodological, theoretical, interpretative and structural insights into the data collected from the novel. It applied the corpus linguistic approach to Austen's novel Northanger Abbey and demonstrated the impact of various features of text on literary meanings and how corpus tools could extract new critical angels. It symbolized the consistent academic interest and further research into the linguistic essence of Austen's works.

Compared with the lasting and enthusiastic study by critics and scholars abroad of Jane Austen's art of language, the academic research on Austen's language in China was rather insufficient in both depth and breadth. First introduced in the 1920s, Jane Austen had aroused extensive attention from Chinese critics, and the diverse studies on her fiction did not thrive until the 1980s when more translated versions of Austen's fiction emerged. But most of the articles emphasized the traditional reflections on ethical, ideological, social, political, feminist perspectives. Scholars and critics began to explore her artistic features and themes (黃梅, 2011). For instance, Wang Bin studied the romanticism in Austen's fiction in 1983, and Fang Hanquan generally explored Emma's theme in 1985.

In the year of 1985, Zhu Hong published the book Studies of Jane Austen, which was not creative study on Austen, but a collection of translated version of western critical articles. It is a very important book on Jane Austen by introducing the western commentary and providing detailed materials for scholars at home for a better understanding of Austen's novels and the western researches. It covered the major articles written in the 19th century till those in 20th century. Since then, the studies of Austen had been increasing.

The articles and books on Austen's language have appeared since 1990s. However, the researches are rather few and narrow, most of which refer to the narration and rhetoric devices. In 1991, Zhang Jieming in his article “On the Narration of Pride and Prejudice” discussed Austen's narrative skills in detail. In 1998, Lin Wencheng did researches into Austen's irony by means of the head and heart in her fiction. In 2001, Chen Jun in his article “On the Form of Pride and Prejudice”, explored the plot and narration related to Austen's aesthetics.

In 2003, Li Weiping in his book A History of the Artistic Development of the English Novel made an inspiring study into Austen's art. Li pointed out Austen's works were full of newness and innovation. Her shorter titles and content represented the tendency of 19th century English novels and dialogues played a significant role in shaping the characters and themes. He believed Austen was good at applying omniscient narrative to compose her novels, which made them believable and attractive.

There has been only one Ph.D. book till now, namely “An Intertextual Reading of Jane Austen's Novels” by Xu Libing in 2003, who mainly gave a further study of Jane Austen's inheritance from Fielding and Richardson, and the development she had made. She pointed out that Austen made good use of the classical means of a third person narrative, which was the form of her novels derived from the epistolary style. Compared with Henry Fielding, Jane Austen was far more delicate, elegant in dealing with similar structures and devices. Her usage of irony and the theater, characterization were better integrated in her characters and stories. However, considering Austen's reputation and influence in the West, the intellectual interest in her fiction is far from being sufficient. On the whole, most of the studies lack creativity in dealing with Jane Austen's language style in general, not to mention the studies of interpersonal relationship from the linguistic perspective.

In general, there was still a long way for critics and scholars at home to keep pace with the world-class study of Austen. The researches of her art of language and style were still inadequate. The overall picture of linguistic studies of Jane Austen's art of language has just been outlined, yet this book is mainly concerned with a detailed interpretation and analysis of Austen's linguistic features in her major fiction. Since there is still insufficient study of the application of linguistics to the interpersonal relationship, this book aims to explore Jane Austen's art of language from the perspective of linguistics in the realization of different interpersonal relationships of her major fiction.