as far as explaining the speaking style in True Grit. Of course, when I came out of the movie with my family, I had to pretend to know something about language, since the way the characters spoke bothered my sister, and I am the resident linguist. My guess was that the lack of contractions was probably a rather accurate portrayal of an earlier American dialect, but that was a guess based on very little actual knowledge. I also assumed the author wanted to mark the language as being from another time and place (since we know there were many differences in the way of talking between today and days of old), but I really, honestly had no idea. I just felt a need to defend the language choices of the author and directors because I really liked the movie.
I think we're better off referring to an actual active linguist blogger for insight into this one, who seems to conclude that the real reason behind the language choice may be no more than an artistic choice of the author in this case (and he reaches this conclusion by applying linguistics!)
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