MISTER SHERLOCK HOLMES OR SHERLOCK? (A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF GRAMMATICAL FEATURES OF SH. HOLMES’S SPEECH PARTIES IN A.C. DOYLE’S STORY AND THE TV SHOW)

Abstract

The carried-out investigation is dedicated to the analysis of Sherlock Holmes’ speech portraits as represented in the story by Arthur Conan Doyle and in the British TV show “Sherlock” from BBC (2010). The investigation touches upon the basic grammatical peculiarities of Sherlock’s speech and uncovers the changes that the literary character’s image has undergone on the level of its speech. Thus, the paper results in the conclusion about the peaking frequency of simple sentences in the TV show Sherlock’s speech on the level of sentence structure, accounted for by the necessity to simplify his speech for the viewers to grasp it easier. For the same reason, the new medium calls for shorter lineal length of Sherlock’s utterances. Though declaratives still make up the predominant communicative sentence type in Sherlock’s speech, he is twice as frequent with his interrogatives as Doyle’s old Mister Sherlock Holmes, and uses rhetorical questions even more often than special ones. Sherlock from BBC is more emotional, using exclamatory sentences and imperatives, which are often packed with verbs of motion, like go and get, or ask his interlocutors to “shut up”. Despite using the term “sociopath” about himself, Sherlock initiates communication more often in the TV show than in the book, using direct addresses. The changes in Sherlock Holmes’ speech portraits the authors attribute both to the type of medium the literary character functions in and to the diachronical changes bringing about more informal conversations and new dialogue traditions.