The Corpus of Jinglese
A Syntactic Profile of an Idiolectal 'System of Stenography'
in Critical Survey
This is an example of what I will call ‘Jinglese’, the idiolect spoken by Alfred Jingle in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1837). With reference to this extract, Dickens, or at least the narrator of the novel, characterizes Jingle’s idiolect as ‘a lengthened string of similar broken sentences.’ This paper is concerned with the nature of that brokenness, its distribution and discernible categories.
