Stevenson’s Adventure in Treasure Island: How Nonstandard Forms Appear in a Nineteenth-Century Pirate Book for Children.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) is a classic novel from the nineteenth century, notable for the protagonist Jim’s adventures and the vivid portrayal of sea villains. During this era, normative grammar rules heavily influenced language usage, but this is not always the case with the pirate book. This paper examines how Stevenson employs prescribed and proscribed language variants in his characters’ speech and the narrative from sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and stylistic perspectives. Since the novel is often categorized as pirate fiction, Stevenson’s stylistic approach to illustrating pirates is compared with other works in the period. The nonstandard usages investigated in the study include subject-verb number concord (e.g. you was, I says); irregular verbforms in the past tense (e.g. knowed for knew); case problems with personal pronouns (e.g. it is me for it is I); nonstandard relative pronouns (e.g. he who you seek for he whom you seek); negative constructions, such as multiple negation, third-person singular don’t, ain’t, and warn’t; nonstandard use of past and perfect participle verbs (e.g. I seen for I saw, I’m mistook for I’m mistaken); nonstandard use of the relative pronoun as for who/that (e.g. the boys as works hard ); placement of prepositions after relative pronouns (e.g. the person whom I just talked about for the person about whom I just talked); the reflexive pronoun form his self for himself; and contractions. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyze these features, uncovering their role in characterization and storytelling. The study reveals that Stevenson uses nonstandard forms, particularly in the pirates’ speech, to illustrate the social and cultural milieu of rough and uneducated characters. However, these features are not limited to uneducated characters. He sometimes applies nonstandard forms, such as he don’t and I says, to the speech of educated characters to focus on their psychological state or emotional stress. A clear distinction emerges between the narrative and dialogue: while standard grammar is generally observed in the narrative, the speech occasionally includes nonstandard forms. For instance, in narrative, prepositions are typically placed before the relative pronouns they govern and who is avoided in the objective case, whereas pronouns are often omitted altogether in speech. Instances of nonstandard forms in the narrative, such as it is me, betray linguistic evolution, reflecting a transition from the older it is I to the more modern it is me. The findings highlight that, at a time of strict prescriptivism, Stevenson’s deliberate use of nonstandard grammar as a tool for characterization is remarkable for both children’s literature and pirate fiction. His approach serves as an invaluable historical and linguistic resource, offering unique insights into nineteenth-century English usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]