Enregisterment and dialect in literature

I've been reading a special issue of the journal 'American Speech' that Joan Beal kindly lent to me, and I am getting very interested in the notion of 'enregisterment' and how it might relate to dialect in literature. Of course, we will be having the opportunity to hear from Joan herself at the Triangle colloquium on Saturday 26th September, when she will be speaking on "The idea of a dialect: dialect literature and the enregisterment of urban dialect in 19th-century England". However, here are some of my own thoughts on the subject.

It seems to me that enregisterment might be very useful in providing a synthesised account of dialect in literature. In the past (and with some honourable exceptions) there have been two different ways to study dialect in literature. John Kirk summarises them:

There appear to be two approaches to the study of nonstandard language in literary texts: one is the dialectological, which uses literary texts as evidence of the spoken language and considers the significance provided by the use of the dialect and nonstandard within the literary work as evidence for the dialect, often historical. [...]The second approach is stylistic, which considers how effective or realistic of speech the language in a particular text is and considers the role and effectiveness of the dialect and nonstandard within the literary work as a whole. (45, 1999)

It has always seemed to me that this either / or approach is a bit unsatisfactory. So why might enregisterment provide an opportunity for synthesis?

Kathryn Remlinger, in the special edition of referred to above, summarises enregisterment as follows:

Enregisterment is the recognition of the relationship between specific linguistic features and certain cultural values (Agha 2003). These values are tied to people through notions that link language use to beliefs about "authentic" local identity and the uniqueness of the dialect; speaker's local authenticity is, in part, based on the use of enregistered features. As we will see, speakers rely on enregistered features to perform this identity for locals as well as outsiders. (119, 2009)

In other words, enregisterment is a way of thinking very specifically about the cultural values that get attached to certain linguistic features and how, why and when they get attached. Given that the representation of dialect in literature necessarily involves the use of just a small number of salient linguistic features, it seems to me that there must be ways in which the concept of enregisterment can be used to think about dialect in literature. Indeed, if we accept enregisterment as a basic process in the creation of dialects (or the idea of those dialects), then in many cases the representation of dialect in literature must be a key element in the enregisterment of a particular dialect.

I'm going to think about this a bit more, and then post a fuller explanation of enregisterment (which I struggle to get my head round at times). I'm really looking forward to hearing Joan's paper.