Literary and Colloquial English: Formality Differences between the Novel Pride and Prejudice and its Screen Adaptation

Abstract

Focusing on formality in the literary and colloquial registers, the study compares the text of the novel Pride and Prejudice to the script of its film adaptation released in 2005. To find out the formality differences between the novel and its adaptation, 62 extracts from the novel have been compared with the same number of relevant extracts from the movie script. The analysis is informed by the concept of formality expounded by Heylighen and Dewaele, formal links and coherence markers suggested by Cook, elaborate and economy features proposed by Finegan and Biber, and the features of colloquial speech identified by Iqbal. Results show that formality in the novel has been brought by elaboration and well-formedness caused by using lexical and syntactic devices, such as attributive adjectives, prepositional phrases, parallelism, and sentence length and structure maintained through logical connectors and lexical diversity. Contrarily, features such as phrases, contractions, tag questions, clipping, passive constructions, topic-comment structures, and incomplete utterances are the colloquial markers of ease and informality in the script, thus making it appear as casual and flexibly structured speech. The study has implications for stylistics and pragmatics.

Keywords: Formality, Pride and Prejudice, Literary register, Colloquial style, Context