The thesis examines the main characteristics of the English of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s
fictional detective. The main research objective is to ascertain and present Poirot’s way of speaking
through the lens of syntax, and to a lesser degree style. Three notions are integral to the theoretical
part and the relations between them frame all further analysis; these are grammaticality,
acceptability and markedness. Grammaticality deals with syntactic issues and rules, acceptability
with mostly semantics and stylistics, and markedness is the overarching characteristic, value or
label applied through a combination of any number of factors. However, the most important single
factor for this thesis is the emphatic placement of the nuclear tone or focus. Consequently, the thesis
is interested primarily in ungrammatical structures, and structures that exhibit special or unusual
focus placement as a result of a decision to increase the emphatic, emotional value of an utterance;
these are the structures labelled by this thesis as marked and hence suitable for analysis. On the
syntactic level, markedness is observed most frequently in ungrammatical structures, such as an
incorrect use of the definite article and poorly constructed idiomatic expressions, and by devices
that manipulate the normal word order, such as inversion, cleft constructions and the formation of
declarative questions. On the semantic and stylistic level, markedness is exemplified through the
use of French elements, Poirot’s 3rd person reference to himself and miscellaneous items. Additional
categories, sharing characteristics of both levels, reveal the scope of devices such as contraction and
the emphatic realisation of reflexive pronouns. A chronological examination of such marked
structures reveals the fact that Poirot’s speech is quite uniform throughout his literary existence,
with only a few categories exhibiting evolution or progression.
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