Negative Expressions in Austen's Pride and Prejudice in Comparison with Richardson's Pamela

Jane Austen inherited a rich variety of stylistic legacies from her predecessor Samuel Richardson. Among their characteristic features in common is included the use of "double negation, "the device of which is specifically called "litotes" in rhetorical terminology. The present paper examines Austen's use of negative expressions mainly through her Pride and Prejudice (1813) as our linguistic material. A comparative discussion is made,with the aid of computational analysis, on Richardson's Pamela (1740) as well as on several prose fictions from the late 17th to the early 19th century. Our purpose here is twofold : to show statistically the frequency of occurrence of fifteen negative words found in those prose fictions, and to analyse the chief stylistic effects of double negatives extensively used by Austen and Richardson.