Abstract
The contribution discusses the semantic aspects of the negotiation of personal/social identity as they appear in the language used by the protagonists of three British novels. In my use of the term, identity is a process that is manifested within an ongoing communicative event.
Herein, I argue that denotational correctness and interactional success are two discrete phenomena whose co-occurrence in any language sample is realised through the dynamism of differing degrees of accuracy and effectiveness. I outline a semiotically mediated model of identity negotiation using a quantitative and qualitative analytical approach focusing on (a) two types of dialogue (internal and external), (b) depth of context-embeddedness and (c) the degree of implicitness, as the key linguistic factors correlating with the occurrence of selected social variables.
I propose an application of Jakobson's concept of language functions and compare it to more recent theories. My results serve to demonstrate the impact of alter-identity negotiation as opposed to identity negotiation on syntactic structure and semantic complexity.