In this project it has been my aim to study characterization and identity construction through the analysis of dialog in Lady Audley’s Secret. When I was planning the project, I had to decide what was central to my argument and what could be left out due to time constraints. Promising areas of further analysis of speech and characterization in Lady Audley’s Secret are thus briefly discussed here but this list is obviously open-ended.

A point worth exploring is the comparison of the speech of different characters. In this project, I have focused on each character individually, without drawing comparisons with the frequency figures related to other characters. This is therefore a further issue to explore. The frequency figures of each most-frequently-used word are thus included in the table below.

However, it is important to bear in mind that frequency figures obtained through the analysis of different corpora must always be normalized in order to be compared, especially if the corpora are very different in size. The following table clearly shows that the five corpora I have compiled and analyzed are not directly comparable.

Moreover, the speech of secondary characters, such as Phoebe Marks, Luke Marks, Clara Talboys, Harcourt Talboys etc. definitely deserves to be analyzed as well.

I hope that this research project will inspire some of its recipients to develop research questions on this existing correlation between speech and identity construction in 19^th-century novels.