Australian narrative voices and the colloquial element in nineteenth century written registers

This paper analyses the colloquial elements used in the narratives of three Australian writers of the later nineteenth century-Marcus Clarke, AJ Boyd and Henry Lawson-to investigate whether their narrative styles can be traced back to nineteenth century journalism. A set of four reference corpora were created out of the COOEE corpus data (its narrative and newspaper categories) for the last two quartiles of the century, and one for each of the three writers. Six linguistic variables from Biber's multidimensional analysis representing interactive speech were used for four-way comparisons among the reference corpora, showing contrasting shifts in style. The later narratives proved increasingly colloquial in style, and the later news reporting increasingly impersonal. The use of colloquial elements intensifies from Clarke to Boyd to Lawson, and is always more marked than in the reference corpora. Their narrative voices are their own, not simply derived from contemporary narrative or news writing.