| It should come as no surprise that language and ethics interact to give readers a sense of what characters' ethical constitutions are like in narrative fiction. This study attempted to find out exactly how language conveys morality through a statistical analysis of the diction of the three oldest daughters in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives were categorized into several linguistic features, from modals in the verbal category to Latinate words in the noun category. Of all the features analyzed, however, three rose in prominence. They were emotional, informal, and moral-related words. This study showed that the daughter described as the conscience of the novel yielded the highest frequency of moral-related words and the lowest frequencies of emotional and informal words, and the daughter described as materialistic and self-absorbed yielded the lowest frequency of moral-related words and the highest frequencies of emotional and informal words. |
