36 Rhetoric December 2005

SPEECH REPRESENTATION IN LITERATURE AS A MIMETIC PROCESS
 

Milton M. Azevedo
University of California, Berkeley, USA

Portuguese

Although standard writing imposes limitations to the literary representation of speech, particularly its nonstandard varieties, the techniques of the literary dialect allow the creation of aesthetically legitimate representations of regional or social dialects, as well as of hybrid speeches or foreign accents. Full comprehension of such representation modes, as well as of their cognitive or social implications, requires notions of linguistics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics.