Subordinate adnominal relative clauses as used by Charlotte Brontë

Linguistic Research about Jane Eyre:

Syntactic Functions
of the Relativizers Used in the Nineteenth-Century Prose Fiction
Eva Leláková
Department of English Language and Literatur, Faculty of Humanities, University of Zilina, Zilina, Slovakia

Applied Linguistic Research Journal. 2021; 5(10): 58-67 | DOI: 10.14744/alrj.2021.69077

The main aim of the present work is to analyse the subordinate adnominal relative clauses used by a famous representative of the 19th century Victorian literature, Charlotte Brontë, in her novel Jane Eyre and parallelly examine the rate of the author’s adherence to the rules of grammar existing in the Late Modern English. The research findings transparently reflect a detailed syntactic study predominantly focused on five basic relativizers, their syntactic functions in the complex sentences and use with both restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses. The research hypotheses deal with the gender contrast of the antecedents of the relative clauses and the frequency and the subject/object syntactic functions of individual relative pronouns used in the research text. The work presents new findings related to the language of Charlotte Brontë (including discussion on the use of different punctuation marks when separating dependent clauses from the main ones) and therefore it can contribute to more complex understanding of the writing style of the author as well as other writers of the Victorian era. Moreover, it underlines the integration of language and literature studies which can remarkably develop foreign language skills of the language learners and their capacity for literary understanding and appreciation.