Fur Coat, No Knickers: Semantic Potentiality in Alternative Identity Negotiation

My contribution discusses the negotiation of personal/social identity as it appears in the interactions of the protagonists of three British novels. In my use of the term, identity is a process that is manifested within an ongoing communicative event. As I analyse the language of fiction it should be asserted that fiction and reality do not stand in opposition in this framework. Equally, the question of stylisation in authentic and fictional language should be seen as a matter of degree, not of principle absence or presence (cf. Coupland 2003). I argue that denotational correctness and interactional success are two discrete phenomena whose co-occurrence in any language sample is realised through the dynamism of differing degrees of accuracy and effectiveness that are in the relation of indirect proportion. This concept also draws on the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective (Firbas 1992). I outline a semiotically mediated model of identity negotiation using a quantitative (Cook 1979; Limburg 1986) and qualitative (Allerton 2002; Cruse 2004) analytical approach focusing on two types of dialogue (i.e. internal and external), depth of context-embeddedness and degree of implicitness as the key linguistic factors correlating with the occurrence of selected social variables.