Language Varieties: a Comparative Analysis of the Formality Differences Between Literary and Colloquial English Language

This research has been carried out to investigate the differences between literary and colloquial language through a contrastive analysis of the text of ?Pride and Prejudice? by Jane Austen and the script of the movie made on the novel with particular focus on the levels of formality in the two genres. Almost 62 extracts from the novel have been compared with the same number of relevant extracts from the script of the movie. It is found that the presence of lexical & syntactic devices, for example, attributive adjectives, prepositional phrases, parallelism, sentence structure, and lexical diversity are the markers of elaboration & well-formedness; and, consequently of formality in literary language. While the presence of several features, like, phrases, tag questions, contractions, clipping, topic-comment structures and passive constructions and incomplete utterances are the markers of ease and naturalness in colloquial speech and, therefore, make it appear as casual & flexibly or loosely structured. The study has wider scope in that it not only incorporates the features of literature and language, but also deals with spoken & written discourse.