narrator's representation of speech act

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Acknowledgement, speech representation as a narrative technique in sir gawain and the green knight.

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Sara M Pons-Sanz, Speech Representation as a Narrative Technique in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , The Review of English Studies , Volume 70, Issue 294, April 2019, Pages 209–230, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgy094

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Speech plays a central role in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , a trait that it shares with other Arthurian romances. Accordingly, its dialogues have been scrutinized for their lexical choices and their significance for a number of key elements in the story. However, the stylistic and pragmatic effects of speech representation have not received similar attention. By presenting a typology of modes of speech representation that takes into account the distinctive features of medieval texts and focusing on their role in (mis)guiding the audience’s reaction towards the events they are presented with, this paper identifies the representation of speech as a key narrative technique in the poem, an element of the poet’s craft comparable to others that have been studied more frequently, such as his lexical choices or the text’s structural patterns. In this respect, the paper is of interest to literary critics of medieval narrative and historical stylisticians.

Scholars’ recognition of the centrality of speech in the poem has led to the careful study of its dialogues, with particular emphasis on the ambiguity of some of the terms they include (e.g. the significance of ME gāme , strōke and buffet in Fitt I for the correct understanding of the Green Knight’s challenge); 4 their link to well-known topoi and genres, such as the association of the bedroom scenes with medieval debates; 5 and the significance of the dialogues for a number of key elements in the story: (1) characterization and identity definition; 6 (2) morality and religion; 7 and (3) heterosexual and homosexual desires, and homosocial links. 8

The present article aims to show that this relatively new stylistic approach to Middle English literature can lead to very fruitful results and, accordingly, seeks to set the way for further studies along similar lines. By presenting a new approach to the text and relying on a framework of speech representation especially adapted for the study of medieval texts, this paper significantly contributes to our understanding of the poet’s art, in particular how the text (mis)guides the audience’s reaction towards the events and verbal exchanges they are presented with in order to keep them in the dark about the nature of Gawain’s challenge, before letting them make up their minds about its moral significance. This approach makes clear that, despite lack of scholarly attention, speech representation is a key narrative technique in the poem, an element of the poet’s craft comparable to others that have been discussed more frequently, such as his lexical choices, 15 or the text’s structural patterns. 16

Medieval rhetorical works show awareness of the importance of direct speech for the sake of characterization (cp. sermocinatio ) and, in keeping with this, the need to attribute a character words that are suitable to his age, social status, and other characteristics. 17 However, they do not pay similar attention to the various modes of speech representation. Since we cannot rely on those works for a theoretical framework, this paper takes instead Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short’s typology as its starting point. 18 It has been widely used for the study of (near-)contemporary texts, although it has also been occasionally applied in historical stylistics. 19 Yet, this typology was developed for the study of modern texts; accordingly, it needs to be adapted to the distinctive features of medieval texts (in ways suggested below).

Direct speech that could represent what a particular character might have said in a particular situation (e.g. ll. 313–4, quoted above);

Collective direct speech: this category refers to direct speech that is unlikely to have been uttered by anyone in particular, but rather represents the opinions shared by a group (e.g. ll. 672–83, quoted below); 22

Internal direct speech: Leech and Short explain that, in modern narratives, the norm for thought representation is indirect thought because it is recognized that we do not have access to people’s thoughts and because not all thoughts can be said to be clearly verbalized. Thus, in modern narratives, direct thought highlights, somewhat artificially, the strength of thought and is particularly appropriate to reproduce ‘conscious “thinking to yourself” thought’. 23 Medieval texts treat the representation of consciousness differently. On the one hand, its report is very often introduced by verbs referring to speech rather than thought (e.g. ‘he sayde in hymself’, l. 1198; ‘he said to himself’). On the other, the use of direct discourse in these contexts is actually the norm, not the exception, and, accordingly, we cannot attribute to it the same stylistic effect here as in modern texts. In keeping with these features, Monika Fludernik argues in favour of associating verbalized internal discourse in medieval compositions with speech instead of thought representation, and her suggestion is followed in this study. 24

While modern and medieval texts differ with regard to the norms of thought representation, they are aligned when it comes to speech representation: in both modern and medieval texts direct speech can be identified as the norm because it is reasonable to assume that a reporter might have had access to the original utterance, should there have been one. 28 In fact, in medieval narratives, often composed to be listened to rather than read, 29 the narrative function of direct speech plays a particularly important role, as J. M. Pizarro points out: ‘the oral narrator tries to become transparent, to vanish from the scene or from the listeners’ awareness; by appealing primarily to their dramatic imagination, he invites them to follow an action that does not include him as a judge, critic or interpreter’. 30 On the basis of various references to the oral transmission of our story (e.g. ll. 30–1 and 1996–7), J. J. Anderson suggests that ‘the narrator presents himself as part of the oral culture of storytelling, a minstrel who tells stories and hears stories from others’. 31 Even though we cannot take such comments at face value in a text that consciously portrays its links to literacy as well, 32 direct speech is indeed the main mode of speech presentation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (see further below).

In Leech and Short’s taxonomy, free direct speech is the category with least narratorial intervention, as it differs from direct speech in the absence of the inquit clause and/or quotation marks. However, in more recent interpretations of the taxonomy, it has been suggested that it might be better to consider free direct speech as a variant within the larger category of direct speech because, in spite of their formal difference, there is not much functional difference in terms of faithfulness in their representation of the original speech. 33 While the criterion of faithfulness has already been discussed as problematic, the distinction between these two categories becomes even more unnecessary in medieval texts, where the formal difference between them is reduced by the fact that there was no standard way to mark direct speech: manuscripts employed different punctuation marks such as the punctus , punctus elevatus , punctus interrogativus or virgula , and very often no mark at all. 34 Thus, whenever necessary, I simply refer to direct speech without an inquit clause.

Free indirect speech is described as a mixture of direct and indirect speech by Leech and Short, and Louviot. 35 While, as expected, these scholars disagree in connection with Leech and Short’s claim that free indirect speech has ‘odd status in terms of truth claims and faithfulness’, 36 they agree that this mode is characterized by bringing together linguistic markers (such as deictic and expressive elements) that could be appropriate to the character and the narrator. The analysis of this category has led to much scholarly debate because there is still no full agreement on the linguistic features that can be said to allow a reader to identify a character’s voice through narratorial expression. Moreover, the presence of free indirect speech in medieval texts remains disputed, its development being often associated with the birth of the novel. 37 Its identification in medieval texts is made particularly complex by the difficulties in classifying expressions as being clearly colloquial (and hence more suited to oral speech), as well as the general absence of some of the linguistic markers prototypically associated with this category, such as the use of proximal deictic markers in clauses with shifted reference (e.g. ‘tomorrow’ instead of ‘the day after’ in ‘He would see her tomorrow, he said’) or reliance on linguistic variation for the sake of characterization. 38 In spite of these difficulties, Fludernik has argued that there are a number of medieval cases that could be classified as free indirect speech. 39 In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , one of the best examples might be ‘And he nikked hym “Naye!”—he nolde bi no ways’ (l. 2471; ‘And he told him “No!”—he would not on any account’), where what looks like direct speech, in the form of the interjection ME nai ‘no’ (cp. ll. 256, 1222, 1813, 2250 and 2407), is immediately followed by an independent clause with shifted reference. Lines 706–7 present a similar case:

And al nykked hym wyth ‘Nay!’—Þat neuer in her lyue þay se e neuer no segge Þat watz of suche hwez Of grene. [‘And all said “No!” to him—that never in their lives did they ever see a man of such green hues.’]

Yet, here a conjunction introduces the clause that follows the apparent direct speech, thus rendering it a subordinate clause (more typical of indirect speech). Moreover, while the significant emphasis on negation gives it a level of expressivity that one might find in direct speech (cp. ll. 399–400), such emphasis is not necessarily out of place in the narrator’s voice (cp. ll. 203–5).

Given the difficulties in identifying free indirect speech in medieval texts and the fact that this category tends to be associated in the main with modern attempts to subvert the distinction between direct and indirect speech for particular stylistic purposes (e.g. a distancing effect leading to irony), 40 I use mixed speech instead. Fully embracing Leech and Short’s vision of a continuous cline, this term attempts to capture those cases where the boundaries between direct and indirect speech are blurred, either because it is difficult to know whether the utterance is reproduced as direct or indirect speech (e.g. l. 67; see note 47 below), or because it is not possible to distinguish systematically between proto-free indirect speech and indirect speech with some expressive elements.

Leech and Short initially classified as narrative reports of speech acts those contexts where we are given an indication that a speech act or a number of speech acts have occurred, without necessarily having a sense of what was said. 41 However, in later revisions of the typology we find a distinction between narrator’s representation of speech acts, where we are told the illocutionary force of the utterance and, possibly, its topic; and narrator’s representation of voice, where the mere fact that speech has occurred is represented: 42 e.g. ‘[he] neuenes hit his aune nome’ (l. 10; ‘[he] names it with his own name’, Romulus’s naming being a performative speech act that results in the fact that new city he has built has a name) and ‘with mournyng he melez to his eme’ (l. 543; ‘he talks to his uncle with sorrow’), respectively. While this is a useful distinction, it is not always necessary in the discussion presented below; thus, narrated speech is used as an umbrella term for these two categories. Narrated speech, in either form, tends to be used for summarizing relatively unimportant parts of a conversation, although this backgrounding effect should not be associated with the complete lack of narrative significance of the information that we are being presented. After all, the decision about what to send to the background and what to bring to the foreground of the narrative can give us a clue about whose point of view is being represented and for what purpose. 43

In order to conduct this study, the reported verbal interactions between the characters in the story have been tagged according to the adapted taxonomy presented above, with one additional caveat. In keeping with the tagging process in other studies, 44 the distinction between indirect speech and the narrator’s representation of speech act with a topic has been established on the basis of the syntactic structure of the reported speech: indirect speech consists of an inquit clause and a subordinate reported clause (which can be finite or non-finite), while the narrator’s representation of speech act consists of a single clause. Consider, for instance, ‘he hit quyk askez / To be her seruaunt sothly, if hemself lyked’ (ll. 975–6; ‘he swiftly asks to be their servant truly if it pleased them’) as opposed to ‘[he a]skez erly hys armez’ (l. 567; ‘[he] asks early for his arms’). In its 2,531 lines, the text includes approximately 800 lines of direct speech and 250 of non-direct speech. This makes the analysis of all speech events neither possible nor desirable; the discussion below focuses instead on those cases which are particularly salient for the focus on speech representation as a useful narrative technique.

Moore argues that the lack of clear formal markers for the distinction between direct and indirect speech meant that medieval speakers did not distinguish between these categories as easily as modern authors and audiences do. 45 While this might indeed have been the case (as suggested by the examples of mixed speech), the lines below show that the Gawain -poet chose very carefully between various forms of speech representation at his disposal in order to control the emphasis that he placed on different types of information and, in that way, shape the audience’s responses and expectations. One way in which he did this was by presenting the extradiegetic audience (i.e. the audience outside the fictional universe of the text) with the views, thoughts and reactions of the intradiegetic audience (the minor, unidentified characters that populate the text’s universe). This is a narrative strategy that Brandsma has identified in other Arthurian romances, whose authors seem to have perceived the views of these ‘mirror characters’ as more effective for guiding the extradiegetic audience’s reactions than expressing such views through the narrator. 46 In the examples that Brandsma discusses, the extradiegetic audience is expected to feel the same admiration, contempt or fear as the characters in the story. The Gawain -poet, similarly, elaborates on the sense of wonder and fear that the Green Knight causes in Camelot’s inhabitants (ll. 233–49); like and through them, we are asked to experience these feelings when hearing about the ‘aghlich mayster’ (l. 136; ‘fearsome lord’) that has just burst into Arthur’s court. At this point the knights are simply left speechless, but we get to hear their views on this encounter as Gawain departs in search of the Green Chapel:

And sayde soÞly al same segges til oÞer, Carande for Þat comly: ‘Bi Kryst, hit is scaÞe þat Þou, leude, schal be lost, Þat art of lyf noble! To fynde hys fere vpon folde, in fayth, is not eÞe. Warloker to haf wro t had more wyt bene And haf dy t onder dere a duk to haue worÞed. A lowande leder of ledez in londe hym wel semez, And so had better haf ben Þen britned to no t, Hadet wyth an aluisch mon, for angardez pryde. Who knew euer any kyng such counsel to take As kny tez in cauelaciounz on Crystmasse gomnez?’  (ll. 673–83) [‘People with one accord said softly to each other, sorrowing for that noble one: “By Christ, it is a pity that you, sir, should be lost, you who are so noble of life! It is, truly, not easy to find his equal on earth. It would have made more sense to have acted more cautiously, and have ordained yonder noble one to have become a duke. It becomes him to be a brilliant leader of men in the land and it would have been better so than for him to be utterly destroyed, beheaded by an other-worldly man, for arrogant pride. Whoever knew any king to take such advice as that of knights in trivial arguments about Christmas games?”’]

Yet, nothing is fully straightforward with this poet. Just as it is difficult not to read as ironic his statement that Arthur’s knights remained quiet not out of fear but out of respect towards Arthur, whom the Green Knight has singled out as his preferred interlocutor (ll. 224–5 and 246–9), these words might be taken as a further indication that these knights are not much more than ‘berdlez chylder’ (l. 280; ‘beardless children’), as the Green Knight calls them. 54 Indeed, John Burrow reminds us that medieval authors did not always take mass opinion very seriously: ‘their tone in such passages ranges from amused superiority (as in the Squire’s Tale ) to downright indignation (as in the Clerk’s Tale )’. 55 Furthermore, after all, it was the courtiers who advised Arthur to pass the challenge on to Gawain (ll. 362–5) and, therefore, they are also to blame for his being sent on what looks like a deadly quest.

Thus, in the same way that Camelot’s send-off does not offer Gawain any particular consolation, with his life being honoured and yet presented as a sure loss, we do not find it very enlightening either. Although it seems to support our misapprehensions about Arthur’s qualities (and those of his young court), it is not fully helpful in our attempts to understand the nature of the challenge that Gawain accepted the year before and is getting ready to finish. However, one might argue that the two readings presented above, taken together, could be interpreted as the narrator’s covert indication that Gawain’s adventure is about his chance to discover what being a knight is truly about, how to bring together ideals (reputation, pride) and practicalities (fear and courtly expectations). Later in the text we are presented with a similar contrast between the idealized views on knightly behaviour that the Lady attempts to force Gawain to adhere to and the more down-to-earth performance of manly accomplishments and chivalry in the hunting scenes. 56

The intradiegetic vox populi also (mis)guides our opinions and expectations during Gawain’s stay at Castle Hautdesert. As in Camelot, the courtiers are only allowed collective direct speech, and only on very few occasions, particularly to voice their perception of their guest. When they find out who he is, their immediate reaction is to think, not about his martial prowess, but about his fame as a knight of impeccable manners (and a courtly lover): 57

Vch segge ful softly sayde to his fere: ‘Now schal we semlych se sle tez of Þewez And Þe teccheles termes of talkyng noble. […] I hope Þat may hym here Schal lerne of luf-talkyng’ (ll. 915–27). [‘Each man said very softly to his companion: “Now shall we see becomingly skilled demonstrations of courteous manners and the faultless expressions of noble conversation. […] I believe that anyone who has the opportunity of listening to him will learn something of the art of conversing about love”.’]

The focus on Gawain’s reputation for good manners and ‘luf-talkyng’, a term that could refer to polite courtly conversation generally as well as a conversation specifically about love, 58 gives us a clue about one of the main topics dominating Gawain’s stay in Hautdesert, i.e. the problematization of identity yet again: just as being brave does not mean chopping someone’s head off, being a courtly lover does not necessarily involve sleeping with a married woman. 59 Through this focus, the poet is able to develop one of the best examples of dramatic irony in Middle English literature: while Gawain is in the dark about the fact that the Lady’s attempts to seduce him are not truly sincere, we are let into her plot (‘ay Þe lady let lyk as hym loued mych’, l. 1281; ‘all the time the lady behaved as if she loved him a great deal’), although the wider ramifications of her behaviour are not made equally clear (cp. ll. 1549–50). At times Gawain seems to find it difficult not to succumb to the reputation that the Lady keeps reminding him of (cp. ll. 941–65, 1768–9; see also below), but, because we are slightly wiser about what is going on, we are in a better position to enjoy the scenes as a ‘gomen’ which Gawain can win, despite the Lady’s persistent attempts to corner him. 60 Speech representation is fundamental in raising our hopes for Gawain’s success. Through collective direct speech the poet has already reassured us that Gawain is capable of handling situations where his courtliness and communicative skills will be put to the test; narrated speech equally emphasizes Gawain’s ability to cope with the situation, while, at the same time, it helps to keep sexual tension under control, thus increasing his chances of success:

þus Þay meled of muchquat til mydmorn paste, And ay Þe lady let lyk as hym loued mych. þe freke ferde with defence, and feted ful fayre (ll. 1280–2) [‘Thus they spoke of many things until midmorning passed, and all the time the lady behaved as if she loved him a great deal. The man acted guardedly and behaved most politely’] þus hym frayned Þat fre and fondet hym ofte, For to haf wonnen hym to wo e, whatso scho Þo t ellez; Bot he defended hym so fayr Þat no faut semed, Ne non euel on nawÞer halue, nawÞer Þay wysten Bot blysse. (ll. 1549–53; see also ll. 1259–62 and 1506–7) [‘In this way the gracious lady put him to the test and tempted him often, in order to bring him to wrong, whatever else she intended; but he defended himself so fitly that no offence was apparent, nor any impropriety on either side, nor were they aware of anything but pleasure.’]

Internal direct speech similarly contributes to boosting our confidence in Gawain’s success. In the temptation scenes we encounter one (possibly two) examples of such direct verbalization of thought, and this is not a practice that the poet commonly engages in. In the first case, Gawain is, rather comically, pretending to be asleep while deciding how best to deal with the Lady, who has just entered his chamber for the first time. We are not allowed any insights into his thinking process regarding the various reasons that might have led the Lady to visit him in such unusual circumstances; we are just given a glimpse of his belief in his own ability for ‘luf-talkyng’:

þe lede lay lurked a ful longe quyle, Compast in his concience to quat Þat cace my t Meue oÞer amount. To meruayle hym Þo t; Bot et he sayde in himself: ‘More semly hit were To aspye wyth my spelle in space quat ho wolde.’ (ll. 1195–9) [‘The man lay snuggled down a very long time, pondered in his mind what the circumstance could portend or signify. It seemed amazing to him; but yet he said to himself: “It would be more seemly, by talking to her, to discover in due course what she wants”.’]

The second example, also part of the first temptation scene, is much less clear because it hinges around our reading of l. 1283:

And ay Þe lady let lyk as hym loued mych; þe freke ferde with defence, and feted ful fayre— ‘þa I were burde bry test’, Þe burde in mynde hade. þe lasse luf in his lode for lur Þat he so t Boute hone, þe dunte Þat schulde hym deue, And nedez hit most be done. (ll. 1281–7) [‘And always the lady behaved as if she loved him a great deal. The man acted guardedly and behaved most politely—“Though I may have been the loveliest lady …”, the lady thought. He had brought with him much less love because of the penalty he was going to meet forthwith. The blow that should strike him down and cannot be avoided.’]

This passage has caused much trouble to editors because of the implications that the Lady’s revelation has for the story. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron prefer to replace ‘I’ with ‘ho’ and ‘burde’ with ‘burne’ in l. 1283, attributing the words to Gawain. 61 This move makes these lines less conspicuous in terms of the poet’s attempt not to give the game away completely (as far as we know, the Lady has no way of knowing the exact nature of the appointment that he has at the Green Chapel). It is also in keeping with the text because it is Gawain, not the Lady, who has just been mentioned. The attribution of the words to Gawain has most recently been supported by Lawrence Warner, and Ad Putter and Myra Stokes, 62 but this is not the only option. The lines as quoted above follow J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon’s edition and retain the manuscript readings. 63 With this punctuation, the Lady considers (with an elliptical sentence) her chances of success, in keeping with the fact that her lack of sincerity has recently been mentioned (l. 1281), but at the same time she does not fully let the cat out of the bag for the audience. This interpretation is supported by W. A. Davenport’s reading, where her speech extends until ‘done’. 64

‘And Þerfore I pray yow displese yow no t And lettez be your bisinesse, for I bayÞe hit yow neuer To graunte. I am derely to yow biholde Bicause of your sembelaunt, And euer in hot and colde To be your trwe seruaunt.’ (ll. 1839–45) [‘“And therefore, I pray you, do not be displeased, and stop your importunity, for I shall never agree to grant it to you. I am deeply beholden to you because of your kindness, and [obliged] always to be your servant in all circumstances”.’]

Although his fear of death is blamed time and again for Gawain’s breach of treuth by not giving the girdle as well as the kisses to Bertilak (by Gawain himself in ll. 2379–80, by the narrator in ll. 2040–2 and by the Green Knight in ll. 2366–8), the prominence that direct speech gives to Gawain’s attempt to keep his good manners with the Lady (ll. 1839–45) leads us to focus on this feeling of obligation towards her as an important element in his behaviour and final acceptance of her gift. That is, the acceptance of the girdle is, after all, also an act of courtesy, regardless of whether we believe that in the end Gawain is fully infatuated with the Lady, 67 or we see his actions towards her just as another manifestation of his generosity of spirit. 68 Direct speech brings his attachment to the Lady to the foreground and, hence, it is consistent with the fact that the girdle is referred to as a ‘luf-lace’ (ll. 1874, 2438) and never as a * līf-lās . Thus, these lines exemplify what Gerald Richman calls ‘artful slipping’ between different modes of speech representation. 69 They signal not an author who cannot fully control speech representation but an author who is finely attuned to its significance for establishing emphasis and the ‘aboutness’ of the narrative.

Besides helping Gawain manoeuvre around the various courtly expectations, the poet also needs to handle his audience, who, for the narrative to have full effect, cannot be allowed to recognize the significance of Gawain’s stay in Hautdesert for the overall adventure. He manages to prevent (at least partially) any recognition that this episode might be something other than an interlude to the main action by reducing the moral significance of Gawain’s acceptance of the girdle and by projecting Hautdesert as a Christian household where Gawain can enjoy generous hospitality before facing his ‘true’ challenge. He uses the various effects of speech representation in his attempts to achieve both aims.

Similarly, his confession to the priest is relegated to six lines of non-direct speech, with the representation of Gawain’s words moving from indirect speech for the description of his reasons for seeking confession to the narrator’s representation of various speech acts for the actual confession:

Preuély aproched to a prest and prayed hym Þere þat he wolde lyste his lyf and lern hym better How his sawle schulde be saued when he schuld seye heÞen. þere he schrof hym schyrly and schewed his mysdedez, Of Þe more and Þe mynne, and merci besechez, And of absolucioun he on Þe segge calles (ll. 1877–82) [‘[He] approached a priest in private and asked him there if he would hear his confession and teach him how his soul should be saved when he should pass away. He made a clean confession there and revealed his sins, the greater and lesser, and begs for forgiveness and asks the man for absolution’].

Because of the minimal information that we are given about the confession, we don’t know what Gawain might have said to the priest, whether he ever mentioned the girdle. Instead, the poet is able to shift our attention from it to Gawain’s concern with certain death, which is the main reason for attending confession and, therefore, for requesting absolution. Given that we have been told that Gawain ‘cryed for his mysdede’ (l. 760; ‘wept for his sin’) when he was looking for somewhere to attend mass to celebrate Christmas, we are not necessarily asked to identify his sins with his recent behaviour. Accordingly, the girdle only resurfaces in the narrative when Gawain is getting ready to depart from Hautdesert (ll. 2030–1).

Putter does not refer to the collective speech of Hautdesert’s courtiers regarding Gawain’s happiness as one of the strategies used by the poet to make us put the girdle to the back of our minds:

Vche mon hade daynté Þare Of hym, and sayde: ‘Iwysse, þus myry he watz neuer are, Syn he com hider, er Þis.’ (ll. 1889–92) [‘Everyone there took delight in him, and said: “Indeed, he was never yet so merry, since he came here, before this”.’]

Yet we should interpret this speech in a similar light. We have just witnessed Gawain defeat the Lady in, supposedly, his biggest challenge in Hautdesert (i.e. his ability to engage in ‘luf-talkyng’); emerge from such a challenge all the better off because he has remained courteous towards her (and, by doing that, he has been given an object that will help him protect his life); and piously attend confession. Thus, this comment by Hautdesert’s courtiers seems to invite us to identify ourselves with Gawain, give a big sigh of relief and share, at least momentarily, his happiness with the prospect of survival.

It is only in Fitt IV that we learn about the significance of Gawain’s actions at Hautdesert. As noted above, our temporary lack of awareness is to a great extent the result of the focus in the previous lines on Gawain’s talking rather than fighting prowess, which leads us to see his stay in Bertilak’s castle on the whole as an episode subordinated to the original, apparently more physical, challenge. Yet, the tricks that the poet plays in his presentation of Hautdesert as a court deserving of God’s approval are also very important for the text’s attempts to cover up any association of its inhabitants with the pagan-looking challenger. 74 Following the common topos in medieval (English) romances of divine intervention, 75 the castle is seemingly portrayed as the direct response to Gawain’s prayer to find a place where he can attend mass as part of his celebration of Christmas and in preparation for facing his enemy:

And Þerfore sykyng he sayde: ‘I beseche þe, Lorde, And Mary, Þat is myldest moder so dere, Of sum herber Þer he ly I my t here masse Ande þy matynez tomorne, mekely I ask, And Þerto prestly I pray my Pater and Aue And Crede.’ He rode in his prayere, And cryed for his mysdede. He sayned hym in syÞes sere And sayde: ‘Cros Kryst me spede!’ (ll. 753–62) [‘And, therefore, sighing, he said: “I beseech You, Lord and Mary, who is the mildest mother so dear, for some lodging where I might solemnly hear mass and Your matins tomorrow, I meekly ask, and accordingly promptly I pray my Lord’s Prayer, Ave Maria, and Creed”. He rode in prayer and wept for his sin. He crossed himself several times and said: “Christ’s cross speed me”.’]

The previous reference to a prayer to Mary (whether it is the same prayer or a different one), with no mention of Gawain’s religious intentions and presented only in indirect speech (ll. 737–9), does not receive any obvious answer. In the quoted lines, direct speech helps to make Gawain’s prayer more vivid and thus strengthens the suggestion of his coming across the castle as God’s direct response to his plea.

Til Þat hit watz tyme þe lord comaundet ly t (ll. 991–2) [‘until it was time the lord ordered lights’] Gestes Þat go wolde hor gromez Þay calden (l. 1127) [‘Guests who wanted to go called their servants’].

These references to speech, like other cases of narrated speech associated with the courtiers’ conversations in Camelot and Hautdesert (e.g. ll. 107–8, 974–6, 1010–5), are not unimportant. As Jane Emberson indicates, they ‘demonstrate the workings of an ordered and polite society, in which the relative positions of persons are generally fixed and known’. 77 Against this background, the words of the porter (and, of course, those of the servant guiding Gawain) are all the more significant.

Like Gawain’s welcome to Hautdesert, his departure equally invites us to retain a positive image of this other court. The lack of an inquit clause introducing (internal?) direct speech is important in this respect:

His haÞel on hors watz Þenne, þat bere his spere and launce. ‘þis kastel to Kryst I kenne,’ He gef hit ay god chaunce (ll. 2065–8) [‘His man [i.e. Gawain], who bore his spear and lance, was then mounted. “I commend this castle to Christ”—he wished it good fortune forever’].

Studies of speech representation in medieval texts have emphasized the key role of the inquit clause in marking direct speech as well as identifying who the speaker of a particular utterance might be, to the extent that Brandsma has shown that both poetic and prose romances seem to prefer to avoid ambiguity and mark out direct discourse and its speaker either by positioning the inquit clause before the speech (rather than in between a starter element and the rest of the quote), 78 or by making it follow immediately from non-direct speech. 79 In the lines quoted above we do not have either, for narrated speech follows rather than precedes direct speech, and this helps to create some initial uncertainty about whose voice we are hearing: Gawain’s or the narrator’s. The latter’s emotional involvement in Gawain’s circumstances has been signalled through various uses of the ethical dative, 80 as well as through interjections in the narrative appropriating Gawain’s thoughts (cp. ll. 964–5). The facts that Gawain is granted eight lines of (internal?) direct speech to spell out further his feelings towards Hautdesert’s inhabitants (ll. 2052–9) while Camelot did not receive a similar treatment, and that the porter is allowed to speak again (albeit not in direct speech this time), wishing him good-bye as politely as when he welcomed Gawain a few days before (ll. 2071–3), reinforce the feelings of mutual respect and admiration.

The long exchange between Gawain and his guide (ll. 2091–151) turns our attention away from the hospitality that Gawain has received and back to the initial challenge. It is only with the benefit of knowing what happens in the Green Chapel that we realize the significance of Gawain’s actions at Hautdesert and make full sense of all the clues that we have been given, such as the similarities between the Green Knight and the Lord of the castle in their appearance and idiolects, 81 the fact that the girdle is green and gold, like the Green Knight’s attire, or the fact that ‘alle Þe haÞeles’ in Hautdesert might have covertly warned Gawain about the possibility that his actions there are directly connected with his encounter in the Green Chapel the first time we hear them speak:

þe freke calde hit a fest ful frely and ofte Ful hendely, quen alle Þe haÞeles rehayted hym at onez As hende: ‘þis penaunce now e take And eft hit schal amende.’ (ll. 894–8) [‘The knight very courteously and graciously called it a feast, when all together the men, equally courteously, exhorted him “Take this penance now and next time it will improve”.’]

Although ME penaunce has here a dietary meaning (‘meagre meal’), its main meaning has clear religious and moral connotations (cp. l. 2392). 82

Once Gawain leaves the Green Chapel, the poem comes quickly to an end. Gawain first tells the court about his experiences; like Bertilak’s account of his hunts (see above), they are presented through non-direct speech (ll. 2494–500) because we have already heard about them in full. Notably, though, his explanation about the meaning that he has chosen to give to the girdle-turned-baldric, as ‘Þe token of vntrawÞe’ (l. 2509; ‘the token of infidelity’), is presented in direct speech (ll. 2505–12), even though he has already made his decision clear, again through direct speech, in ll. 2429–38. Thus, it is this deeply personal interpretation of his new chivalric token that the text highlights at the end, rather than passing explicit judgement on which of the three interpretations of Gawain’s actions we should adopt: the Green Knight’s suggestion that he ‘lakked a lyttel’ (l. 2366), Gawain’s harsher self-judgement on his failure to adhere to chivalric ideals, or the court’s celebration of the adventure as a success boosting their renown (l. 2519). 83 While the moral implications of the story remain unclear and we are not much wiser about how best to bring together chivalric ideals and practicalities, speech representation seems to lend support to Mark Amodio’s argument that ‘ Sir Gawain is ultimately more interested in exploring the hermeneutics of the self than questions of the soul’. 84 The contrast between Gawain’s somewhat repetitive direct speech, and the narrator’s representation of speech act and indirect speech to refer to Arthur’s and Camelot’s reactions, respectively (ll. 2513 and 2514–8), foregrounds ‘this newly emerged self […] based on unique, recently formed and internal precepts’ against the background of ‘the collective, traditional, external ones still operating for Arthur and the rest of the court’. 85

By presenting a typology of modes of speech representation that reflects the distinctive features of medieval texts, and carefully scrutinizing their use as a narrative technique, this paper has gone beyond the common scholarly focus on the world-building functions of speech in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to explore instead its stylistic and pragmatic effects. Our medieval ancestors might have lacked the clear and consistent typographical markers of direct speech that we now use in written texts and this might have blurred the boundaries between direct and indirect speech (consider the examples that have been identified above as mixed speech). However, we should not conclude that authors were not aware of their different effects. On the contrary, this paper has shown that the Gawain -poet skilfully played with different modes of speech representation in order to manage his audience’s interpretation of the verbal exchanges and events being presented in front of them, to a great extent to give his audience a false sense of security and relief before the actual nature of Gawain’s quest is revealed and its implications for self-development hinted at. Moreover, this approach and the careful study of speech representation in connection with particular lexical choices have also brought to light various nuances in this well-known poem.

The careful distinction between strategies of speech representation pioneered by modern stylistics has been shown to further our understanding of the text’s success in presenting its story and could be applied to other medieval compositions. At the same time, this paper has also given further proof of the general robustness of Leech and Short’s widely used framework, as well as a note of caution regarding its direct applicability to medieval texts. It is hoped that the typology suggested here and its application will benefit medieval literary critics and historical stylisticians alike by setting the way for further discussions about the forms and uses of discourse representation in pre-modern texts.

I am very thankful to Richard Dance, Michael Handford, Lesley Jeffreys, Megan Leitch, Violeta Sotirova and Thorlac Turville-Petre for their comments on previous versions of this paper. I am also very grateful to the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for its financial support; this paper is part of a wider study on the representation of speech in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , which has been conducted under the auspices of the AHRC-funded Gersum Project (AH/M011054/1).

Except for ll. 1281–7 (see below), quotations and translations follow The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, 5 th edn (Exeter, 2007).

See Conor McCarthy, ‘ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Sign of TrawÞe ’, Neophilologus , 85 (2001), 297–308, for an analysis of the meanings of the word in the poem. The forms of the lemmata presented here follow Hans Kurath et al. (eds), Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, MI, 1952–2001), hereafter MED .

Frank Brandsma, ‘Knight’s Talk: Direct Discourse in Arthurian Romance’, Neophilologus , 82 (1998), 513–25, at 513.

See, for instance, Victoria Weiss, ‘Gawain’s First Failure: The Beheading Scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, The Chaucer Review , 10 (1976), 361–6; and Sheri Ann Strite, ‘ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : To Behead or Not to Behead—That is a Question’, Philological Quarterly , 70 (1991), 1–12.

See Myra Stokes, ‘ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : Fit III as Debate’, Nottingham Medieval Studies , 25 (1981), 35–51; and Thomas L. Reed Jr., ‘“BoÞe blisse and blunder”: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Debate Tradition’, The Chaucer Review , 23 (1988), 140–61.

See Cecily Clark, ‘ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : Characterisation by Syntax’, Essays in Criticism , 16 (1966), 361–74.

See A. Francis Soucy, ‘Gawain’s Fault: “angardez pryde”’, The Chaucer Review , 13 (1978), 166–76; and Olga Bukarov, ‘False Speech: Sins of the Tongue, Selfhood and Middle English Romances’, PhD dissertation, New York University, 2008, 86–123.

See Carolyn Dinshaw, ‘A Kiss is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, Diacritics , 24 (1994), 205–26; and Jayme M. Yeo, ‘“Dere dame, to-day demay yow neuer”: Gendering Fear in the Emotional Community of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, Exemplaria , 28 (2016), 248–63.

See Elise Louviot, Direct Speech in Beowulf and Other Old English Narrative Poems (Woodbridge, 2016), with references.

See Jane Emberson, ‘Reported Speech in Medieval German Narratives’, Parergon , 4 (1986), 103–16; and Frank Brandsma, ‘The Presentation of Direct Discourse in Arthurian Romance: Changing Modes of Performance and Reception’, in Douglas Kelly (ed.), The Medieval Opus: Imitation, Rewriting, and Transmission in the French Tradition (Amsterdam, 1996), 245–60; and Brandsma, ‘Knight’s Talk’.

See Michael Peverett, ‘“Quod” and “seide” in Piers Plowman ’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen , 87 (1986), 117–27; Colette Moore, Quoting Speech in Early English (Cambridge, 2011); and Thomas D. Hill, ‘God’s “Inquits” and Exegetical Speech Theory in the Middle English Patience ’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology , 116 (2017), 182–94.

See, for instance, Sophie Marnette, ‘Réflexions sur le discours indirect libre en français médiéval’, Romania , 114 (1996), 1–49, with references, for work on speech representation in French medieval texts, particularly the presence and effects of free indirect speech.

Moore, Quoting Speech in Early English .

See the various chapters devoted to vocabulary in Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (eds), A Companion to the Gawain Poet (Cambridge, 1997).

See Donald R. Howard, ‘Structure and Symmetry in Sir Gawain ’, Speculum , 39 (1964), 425–33; and Larry D. Benson, Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (New Brunswick, 1965), 158–66.

See, for instance, Iv.43 in Rhetorica ad Herennium , trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 367–9; this was one of the best-known rhetorical works in the Middle Ages.

Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose , 2 nd edn (Harlow, 2007), 255–81. First edition from 1981.

See Dan McIntyre and Brian Walker, ‘Discourse Presentation in Early Modern English Writing’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics , 16 (2011), 101–30; and Katrina M. Wilkins, ‘Characterization in Ælfric’s Esther : A Cognitive Stylistic Investigation’, PhD dissertation, University of Nottingham, 2018, 87–120.

Leech and Short, Style in Fiction , 255.

See Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction: The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness (London, 1993), 391–426, with references. See Moore, Quoting Speech in Early English , 80–98, for an argument, based on the study of slander depositions, that medieval speakers did not necessarily identify direct speech with verbatim quotation either.

See Monika Fludernik, ‘1050–1500 Through a Glass Darkly: Or, the Emergence of Mind in Medieval Narrative’, in David Herman (ed.), The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (Lincoln, NE, 2011), 90–92.

Leech and Short, Style in Fiction , 275–7. See also Mick Short et al., ‘Using a Corpus for Stylistics Research: Speech and Thought Presentation’, in Jenny Thomas and Mick Short (eds), Using Corpora for Language Research: Studies in Honour of Geoffrey Leech (London, 1996), 116; and Elena Semino and Mick Short, Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing (London, 2004), 13–15.

Fludernik, ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, 77–9 and 94.

Louviot, Direct Speech in Beowulf, 11.

Louviot, Direct Speech in Beowulf, 13.

Herbert Clark and Richard J. Gerrig, ‘Quotations as Demonstrations’, Language , 66 (1990), 764–805, at 794.

On the relevance of this claim for modern texts, see Short et al., ‘Using a Corpus for Stylistics Research’, 110–31; and Semino and Short, Corpus Stylistics . On Old English texts, see Louviot, Direct Speech in Beowulf; and on Middle English texts, see Matylda Włodarczyk, ‘Is Reanimation of Voices Possible? Pragmatics of Reported Speech in Selected Middle English Texts’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia , 41 (2005), 99–113.

See Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge, 1996), 1–2.

J. M. Pizarro, A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the Early Middle Ages (Toronto, 1989), 55–6.

J. J. Anderson, Language and Imagination in the Gawain- Poems (Manchester, 2005), 163.

See Mark C. Amodio, ‘Tradition, Modernity, and the Emergence of the Self in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts , 8 (1995), 47–68, especially 49–55.

See Short et al., ‘Using a Corpus for Stylistics Research’, 127; and Semino and Short, Corpus Stylistics , 16.

Moore, Quoting Speech in Early English , 18–79. See also below, note 47.

Leech and Short, Style in Fiction , 260–1; and Louviot, Direct Speech in Beowulf, 12, n. 41.

Leech and Short, Style in Fiction , 261.

See, for instance, Moore, Quoting Speech in Early English , 4. Leech and Short, Style in Fiction , 266, trace its use as far back as the seventeenth century, but see above, note 12.

See Fludernik, Fictions of Language , for an overview of the linguistic features that characterize free indirect speech.

Fludernik, Fictions of Language , 93–5 and 194–5; and ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, 87–9.

Much has been written on the stylistic effects of modern uses of free indirect speech, so it would be impossible to give a comprehensive overview. For an introductory summary, see Leech and Short, Style in Fiction , 260–70.

Leech and Short, Style in Fiction , 259–60.

See Short et al., ‘Using a Corpus for Stylistics Research’, 124; and Semino and Short, Corpus Stylistics , 67–104.

See Leech and Short, Style in Fiction , 260; Semino and Short, Corpus Stylistics , 43–5.

See Semino and Short, Corpus Stylistics , 11; and McIntyre and Walker, ‘Discourse Presentation’, 112–3.

Frank Brandsma, ‘Mirror Characters’, in Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz (eds), Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness (Cambridge, 2006), 275–82.

On foregrounding as a stylistic effect and its connection with deviation, see Christiana Gregoriou, ‘The Linguistic Levels of Foregrounding in Stylistics’, in Michael Burke (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics  (London, 2014), 87–100.

Olga Griswold, ‘Center Stage: Direct and Indirect Reported Speech in Conversational Storytelling’, Issues in Applied Linguistics , 20 (2016), 73–90, at 73.

The fact that the courtiers’ words regarding their views on the main characters in the story are presented in direct speech is also in keeping with the analysis of the non-narrative functions of reported speech presented by Diane Vincent and Laurent Perrin, ‘On the Narrative vs Non-Narrative Functions of Reported Speech: A Socio-Pragmatic Study’, Journal of Sociolinguistics , 3 (1999), 291–313, at 305–6. In their corpus of 132 interviews with French speakers, in most cases where reported speech has an appreciative function (i.e. it ‘reproduces a witness’s judgement or opinion of a recounted event or object rather than reproducing a speech act as an event’; p. 296), it is given as direct rather than indirect speech.

Greg Walker, ‘The Green Knight’s Challenge: Heroism and Courtliness in Fitt I of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, The Chaucer Review , 32 (1997), 111–28, at 124–5.

John Plummer, ‘Signifying the Self: Language and Identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, in Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller and Julian N. Wasserman (eds), Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives on the Pearl- Poet (Troy, 1991), 195–212, at 200.

See, for instance, Soucy, ‘Gawain’s Fault’. For an argument that Gawain’s virtues are presented as something external to him, see Anderson, Language and Imagination , 181–4.

J. A. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London, 1965), 61, sees their words as indicative of the courtiers’ lack of understanding of the obligations that knightly excellence entails; however, this view seems to suggest that Arthur and Gawain did not have much choice, firstly, in accepting the challenge and, secondly, in how they engaged with it. For a very different view, see Weiss, ‘Gawain’s First Failure’; and Strite, ‘ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’.

Burrow, Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 61.

See W. A. Davenport, The Art of the Gawain-Poet (London, 1978), 167.

On Gawain’s reputation as a courtly lover, see Bartlett Jere Whiting, ‘Gawain, his Reputation, his Courtesy and his Appearance in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale ’, Medieval Studies , 9 (1947), 189–234.

See Conor McCarthy, ‘ Luf-talking in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, Neophilologus , 92 (2008), 155–62.

See Plummer, ‘Signifying the Self’.

See Anderson, Language and Imagination , 194.

Andrew and Waldron, Poems of the Pearl Manuscript , 255.

Lawrence Warner, ‘The Lady, The Goddess and the Text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, The Chaucer Review , 48 (2014), 334–51; and Putter and Stokes, Works of the Gawain Poet , 340, l. 1283.

Tolkien and Gordon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , 36; see also 110.

Davenport, Art of the Gawain-Poet , 166. See also Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (London, 1996), 81–2; and Moore, Quoting Speech in Early English , 138–40.

Demonstration and description refer to the differences between the aims of direct and indirect speech established by Clark and Gerrig, ‘Quotations as Demonstrations’. On the transition from indirect to direct speech in this context, see also Moore, Quoting Speech in Early English , 137.

See Thomas D. Hill, ‘Gawain’s Jesting Lie: Towards an Interpretation of the Confessional Scene in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, Studia Neophilologica , 52 (1980), 279–86; and Bukarov, ‘False Speech’, 120.

See Gerald Morgan, ‘Medieval Misogyny and Gawain’s Outburst against Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, Modern Language Review , 97 (2002), 265–78, at 272; and McCarthy, ‘ Luf-talking ’, 159.

Gerald Richman, ‘Artful Slipping in Old English’, Neophilologus , 70 (1986), 279–90.

Putter, Introduction to the Gawain Poet , 90–6.

See Sara M. Pons-Sanz, ‘Terms for speech in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, forthcoming in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology .

See Rüdiger Zimmermann, ‘Verbal Syntax and Style in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, English Studies , 54 (1973), 533–43, at 542.

On the role of oaths in medieval swearing expressions, see Melissa Mohr, Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (Oxford, 2013), 88–128. Gawain’s reference to Christ’s cross here is all the more important because it is precisely to the cross that he commends himself just before arriving to Hautdesert (see below).

For an overview of the different pagan entities that the Green Knight has been associated with, see Derek Brewer, ‘The Colour Green’, in Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (eds), A Companion to the Gawain Poet (Cambridge, 1997), 181–90, with references.

See Corinne J. Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romances (Cambridge, 2010), 207–33.

See Ronald Tamplin, ‘The Saints in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’, Speculum , 44 (1969), 403–20, at 403–4.

Emberson, ‘Reported Speech’, 109.

Cp. ll. 1031–6, 1372–80 and 1836–45.

E.g. l. 1932, as Gawain is about to break his agreement with Bertilak; and l. 2014, as he is getting ready to leave Hautdesert.

See Clark, ‘ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ’; and Pons-Sanz, ‘Terms for speech ’.

See MED , s.v. penaunce , sense 6.

On these interpretations and the possible prevalence of Gawain’s judgement, see John Burrow, ‘The Conclusion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight : Three Knightly Verdicts’, Essays in Criticism , 67 (2017), 103–15. For an argument against the religious suitability of Gawain’s interpretation, see, however, Ross G. Arthur, Medieval Sign Theory and Sir Gawain the Green Knight (Toronto, 1987), 106–58.

Amodio, ‘Tradition, Modernity, and the Emergence of the Self’, 58.

Amodio, ‘Tradition, Modernity, and the Emergence of the Self’, 61.

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Speech Representation

Verbal narrative, it has long been assumed, is especially qualified to represent speech events because in this case, unlike any other, the object and the medium of representation are identical―language. The speech of characters can be represented directly, through quotation: “She said, ‘No, no, I can’t just now, but tomorrow I will.’” Or it can be paraphrased by a narrator and represented indirectly: “She said that she couldn’t just then, but that the next day she would.” There is also the option to narrate speech acts in an intermediate mode, called free indirect discourse: “No, no, she couldn’t just now, but tomorrow she would.” Consciousness, at least that part of it that resembles unspoken interior speech, can be represented using the same three forms: directly, as quoted interior monologue; indirectly, as thought report, also called psycho-narration (cf. Cohn 1978 ); or using free indirect discourse. It has been clear for some time, however, that the three discrete forms fall far short of exhausting the range of speech representation in narrative, much less the representation of consciousness, so that analysts have become increasingly willing to consider more diffuse and generalized effects of voice (e.g., Baxtin [1934/35] 1981 ) and fictional mind (e.g. Palmer 2004 ).

Explication

Speech representation in verbal narrative can be conceived in terms of a relationship between two utterances, a framing utterance and an inset (framed) utterance (Sternberg 1982 ), or alternatively in terms of interference or interaction between two texts, the narrator’s text and the character’s text. (For further details on the Textinterferenz approach advocated by Schmid and others, see section 3.3 below.) In direct discourse (DD), whether it represents a speech event or an unspoken thought, the transition from frame to inset is clearly visible, typically signaled typographically and/or by an introductory verb of speech or thought: “She said,” “She thought.” DD is conventionally understood to replicate exactly what the quoted character is supposed to have said or thought, preserving (for instance) expressive elements of the original utterance: “No, no.” Of course, the “originality” of direct quotation in fiction is entirely illusory (Fludernik 1993 : 409–14); moreover, so is the independence of the quoted inset, which is always controlled by the framing context. DD shorn of its introductory clause, which some call free direct discourse (FDD), is the basis of interior monologues, and a staple of modernist novels.

In indirect discourse (ID), the narrator is much more evidently in control. Here the inset is grammatically subordinated to the framing utterance, with person, tense, and deixis adjusted to conform to those of the frame. According to some authorities (e.g. Banfield 1982 ), expressive and dialectal or idiolectal features are excluded from ID, but in fact such features are well-attested in actual narrative texts (Vološinov [1929] 1973 : 131–2; McHale 1978 , 1983 ). Types and degrees of paraphrase and summary vary widely in ID, from instances that appear quite faithful to the original utterance (though of course, no such “original” exists), through instances that preserve only its content or gist to those that minimally acknowledge that a speech event took place (Vološinov [1929] 1973 : 129–33; Leech & Short 1981 : 318–51). In representing consciousness, ID shades off into psycho-narration (Cohn 1978 : 21–57) where the narrator analyzes the content of the character’s mind, potentially including its habitual and/or subliminal (unconscious) aspects.

Free indirect discourse (FID) is the most problematic and, no doubt for that very reason, still the most widely discussed form for representing speech, thought, and perception. (For further details on the free indirect representation of perception, see section 3.4 below.) Here frame and inset become much harder to distinguish. FID handles person and tense as ID would (though in French it is identifiable by a distinctive past-tense form, the imparfait , in narrative contexts where the passé simple would be expected). On the other hand, it treats deixis as DD would, reflecting the character’s rather than the narrator’s position: “she couldn’t just now , but tomorrow she would.” FID also tolerates many of the expressive elements characteristic of direct quotation―how many, and which ones, remains controversial. In terms of the Textinterferenz model, person and tense evoke the narrator's text, while deictic, expressive and other features evoke the character’s text. To further complicate matters, many instances of FID entirely lack the form’s defining features so that, taken out of context, they appear indistinguishable from non-quoting narrative sentences. Manifestly, it is contextual cues more than formal features that determine, in many cases, whether or not a sentence will be interpreted as a free indirect representation of speech, thought or perception (McHale 1978 ; Ehrlich 1990 ).

In view of the range and diversity of each of these forms, especially ID and FID, and the evidence of intermediate or ambiguous instances, some analysts have concluded that a scale of possibilities would be more adequate than the three-category model (McHale 1978 ; Leech & Short 1981 ). Such scalar approaches, however, are hardly an improvement on the three-category model when it comes to capturing those diffuse and transient effects of “voice” that are such a regular experience of reading novels. Especially pointed is the dissatisfaction of some analysts with the mapping of categories deriving from speech representation onto the phenomena of represented consciousness. Consciousness in fiction, it has been compellingly argued (e.g. Palmer 2004 ), is much more ubiquitous and variegated than speech and is not adequately captured by speech-based models of interior discourse. (For further discussion, see section 3.4 below.)

History of the Concept and its Study

The foundation for the categorical approach to speech representation, and the source for many of the conceptual difficulties that continue to beset it, can be traced back to the ancient world. Plato in Republic III distinguishes between situations in which the poet speaks in his own voice (Plato calls this “pure narration,” haple diegesis ) and those in which the poet mimics a character’s voice. Classical rhetoric recognized two categories of speech representation proper, oratio recta and oratio obliqua , direct and indirect discourse; however, FID, though already present in ancient Greek and Latin literature and in biblical narrative, would not be identified until the last decades of the 19th century. Pervasive in the 19th-century novel, from Austen to Flaubert, Zola, James and beyond (Pascal 1977 ), FID did not attain the threshold of visibility until, arguably, the 1857 trial of Madame Bovary, which hinged on whether certain free indirect expressions of indecent and anti-social sentiments were attributable to the author (LaCapra 1982 ; Toolan 2006 ). In any case, French and German Romance philologists identified this “new” form around the turn of the nineteenth century, calling it erlebte Rede , verschleierte Rede , or style indirect libre (Tobler 1887 ; Kalepky 1899 , 1913 ; Bally 1912 ; Lorck 1914 ; Lerch 1914 ; Lips 1926 ). In English, FID has also been called “narrated monologue” (Cohn) and “represented speech and thought” (Banfield); Israeli scholars call it “combined discourse.” A prescient critique of grammar-based descriptions of FID was mounted as early as 1929 by Vološinov, Baxtin’s collaborator and/or alter ego . However, Vološinov’s contribution dropped out of sight until the “rediscovery” of the Baxtin circle in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in the meantime the forms of speech representation continued to be treated less as narratological than as grammatical phenomena, whether according to traditional models of grammar (e.g. Ullmann 1957 ) or in terms of the transformational- generative paradigm (Banfield 1982 ).

Over the course of the 20th century, scholars of FID gradually expanded the range of what had initially been perceived as a rather local and specialized phenomenon limited to third-person (heterodiegetic) literary narratives. It was identified in first-person, second-person, and present-tense contexts as well as in non-literary prose and oral narrative (Todemann 1930 ; Cohn 1969 ; Fludernik 1993 : 82–104), and its historical roots were pushed back to the Middle Ages and earlier. Apart from the Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, it has been attested in Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese, and Chinese, among others (Steinberg 1971 ; Coulmas ed. 1986 ; Hagenaar 1992 ; Tammi & Tommola eds. 2006 ). Above all, it has come to be recognized not only as a tool for regulating distance from a character―from empathetic identification at one extreme to ironic repudiation at the other―but also as one of the primary vehicles of what modernist poetics taught us to call the stream of consciousness .

Stream of consciousness is best thought of not as a form but as a particular content of consciousness, characterized by free association, the illusion of spontaneity, and constant micro-shifts among perception, introspection, anticipation, speculation, and memory (Humphrey 1954 ; Friedman 1955 ; Bickerton 1967 ). It can be realized formally by first-person “autonomous” interior monologue (as in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses , or the first three sections of Faulkner’s T he Sound and the Fury ), or by FID (as in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs.Dalloway and To the Lighthouse ), or indeed by a combination of means. Modernist innovations in stream of consciousness technique seemed to monopolize the agenda of scholarly investigation of the representation of consciousness for much of the 20th century, at least until Cohn ( 1978 ) reasserted the importance and ubiquity of less “glamorous” techniques, such as psycho-narration. Since then, cognitive narratologists in particular have taken up the challenge of investigating the presence of consciousness in fiction outside the well-worn channels of the stream of consciousness (e.g. Fludernik 1993 , 1996 ; Palmer 2004 ; Zunshine 2006 ).

Progress in understanding speech and consciousness representation has been hampered by fundamental confusion about the concept of mimesis . Two senses of mimesis are regularly conflated: on the one hand, mimesis in the sense, derived ultimately from Plato, of the author’s speaking in a character’s voice rather than his own; on the other hand, mimesis in the sense of faithful reproduction of what we take to be reality. An unexamined assumption throughout much of the discussion of speech representation has been that mimesis in the sense of speaking for the character should correlate with mimesis in the sense of faithfulness of reproduction―that the more direct the representation was, the more realistic or life-like it would be (Sternberg 1982 ). Thus, DD should be the most faithful to reality, and ID the least, with FID somewhere in between. Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact, speech representation is a classic illustration of what Sternberg ( 1982 ) decries as the fallacy of “package deals” in poetics whereby forms and functions are bundled together in one-to-one relationships. Actually, the forms of speech representation stand in a many-to-many relationship to their reproductive functions: some instances of DD are highly imitative of “real” speech, while others are deliberately stylized and un-mimetic; some instances of ID or FID are more imitative of “real” speech than DD often is, while other instances are less so; etc. (Fludernik 1993 : 312–15). Attempts to elaborate the three-category repertoire of speech representation into a continuous scale from maximally to minimally mimetic, in the faithfulness-of-reproduction sense (e.g. McHale 1978 ; cf. Genette [1972] 1980 ), stumble at just this point. They invariably place DD (or FDD) at the most-mimetic pole and ID at the opposite pole. But no matter how many gradations such scales admit in between, they obscure the fact that degree of faithfulness does not correspond to formal categories: one scale cuts across the other.

Moreover, the very notion of “faithfulness to reality” here is highly suspect. Another of the unexamined assumptions of speech representation scholarship is that verbal narrative is better able to represent speech than anything else because narratives share one and the same medium, namely language (e.g. Genette [1972] 1980 : 169–74). But this, too, is fallacious, as a glance at a transcription of spontaneous conversation would immediately confirm. At one level of analysis, conversation in novels may indeed reflect the “rules” of spontaneous real-world conversation (e.g. Toolan 1987 ; Thomas 2002 ; Herman 2002 : 171–93). But at a finer-grained level, speech in the novel appears utterly unlike real-world speech. Novelistic speech is always highly schematized and stylized, depending for its effects of verisimilitude on very limited selections of speech-features, many of them derived not from actual speakers’ behavior but from literary conventions, linguistic stereotypes, and folk-linguistic attitudes. This is especially evident in representations of foreign accents, regional dialects, and specialized professional registers (Page 1973 ). Perhaps the most powerful factor in producing effects of “realistic” speech is textual context, which induces the reader to accept thin sprinklings of conventional or possibly arbitrary features as faithful representations of real-world speech behavior (McHale 1994 ). In short, the mimesis of speech in fiction is a “linguistic hallucination” (Fludernik 1993 : 453); it depends on our willingness to play a “mimetic language-game” (Ron 1981 ).

If speech in fiction is not a faithful imitation but an effect produced by a combination of convention, selection, and contextualization, then this must also be the case for consciousness in fiction, only more so, for consciousness is at best only partly linguistic. Nevertheless, the operating assumption of much recent cognitivist work on consciousness in narrative is that fictional minds are modeled on real-world mental processes (e.g. Palmer 2004 : 11). But what if consciousness in fiction is just as conventional, schematic, selective, and context-dependent as speech in fiction―just as much an effect, just as much a hallucination or language-game? Surely this is a hypothesis that ought to be entertained (Mäkelä 2006 ).

If speech representation always involves a quoting frame and quoted inset, this means that it involves two agents or instances of speech―two voices. The two voices are readily distinguished in DD and in content- paraphrase types of ID, but only with difficulty in FID. In FID, the effects of voice all seem to derive from the quoted character, with the narrator’s contribution reduced to the bare grammatical minimum of tense and person. Indeed, an early controversy in the scholarship on FID hinged on the question of the narrator’s putative self-effacement and empathetic identification with the character. However, FID is just as likely to serve as a vehicle of irony, and it is in these instances that the so-called dual-voice hypothesis (Vološinov [1929] 1973 ; Baxtin [1929] 1984 ; Pascal 1977 ) seems most compelling. According to the dual-voice hypothesis, in sentences of FID (and some instances of ID) the voice of the narrator is combined with that of the character (hence “combined discourse”) or superimposed on it. “It partook, she felt, helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity”: in this famous sentence from To the Lighthouse , the parenthetical clause (“she felt, helping Mr. Bankes,” etc.) introduces a plane of narratorial comment that ironizes Mrs. Ramsay’s experience of eternity. (Or does it? This is actually an interpretative crux in the novel.) Irony of this kind seems best accounted for in terms of the dual-voice hypothesis (Uspenskij 1973 : 102–5).

With the rediscovery of the Baxtin circle, the dual-voice analysis of FID, already anticipated by Vološinov ( [1929] 1973 ), came to be viewed in the light of wider phenomena of dialogue in the novel. According to Baxtin and his school, the text of the novel is shot through with more or less veiled dialogues between voices that “speak for” social roles, ideologies, attitudes, etc. The forms of dialogue range from outright parody and stylization to implicit rejoinders and veiled polemics (Baxtin [1929] 1984 ). FID is folded in among these categories, reflecting as it does (according to the dual-voice hypothesis) the internal dialogization of the sentence of speech representation itself.

Related to the Baxtinian approach, but less ideologically driven, and capable of much finer-grained analyses, is Schmid’s model of Textinterferenz ( [1973] 1986 , 2010 : 137–74; see also Doležel 1973 ; de Haard 2006 ). The Textinterferenz approach treats speech representation as a matter of interference or interaction between two texts, the narrator’s text and the character’s text. Textual segments display varying kinds and degrees of interaction between these two texts, depending upon how various features are distributed between the narrator’s and the character’s voices. These features include thematic and ideological (or evaluative) markers; grammatical person, tense and deixis; types of speech acts ( Sprachfunktion ); and features of lexical, syntactical and graphological style. In DD, all the markers point to the character’s voice. In ID, person, tense and syntax can be assigned to the narrator’s text, while thematic and ideological markers, deixis, and lexical style point to the character’s voice; the speech-act level points both directions. Finally, in FID, person and tense evoke the narrator’s text, while all the other features can be assigned to the character’s text.

In the light of dialogism and Textinterferenz , speech representation comes to be reconceived as only more or less discrete instances of the pervasive heteroglossia (Tjupa → Heteroglossia ) of the novel, its multiplicity of voices (Baxtin [1934/35] 1981 ). According to the Baxtinian account, samples of socially-inflected discourse―styles, registers, regional and social dialects, etc. with their associated attitudes and ideologies―are dispersed throughout the novel, appearing even where there is no frame/inset structure of quotation to “legitimize” or naturalize them. The language of a novel diversifies into various zones , including zones associated with specific characters, even in the absence of syntactical indications of quotation or paraphrase. This analysis of novelistic discourse was paralleled in the Anglophone world, albeit in a casual and pre-theoretical way, by Kenner’s ( 1978 ) jocular proposal of the “Uncle Charles Principle,” named after a typical sentence from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist : “Uncle Charles repaired to the outhouse.” The sentence is attributable to the heterodiegetic narrator, but it is “colored” by Uncle Charles’ characteristic periphrasis, “repaired.” The Uncle Charles Principle, also called stylistic “contagion” or “infection” (Spitzer [1922] 1961 ; Vološinov ( [1929] 1973 : 133–36; Stanzel [1979] 1984 ; Fludernik 1993 : 332–38), involves the dispersal of a character’s idiom into the narrative prose in the proximity of that character (Koževnikova 1971 ).

At the opposite extreme from the dual-voice hypothesis and its extensions is the controversial no-narrator hypothesis advanced by Banfield ( 1982 ). According to Banfield, free indirect sentences of thought representation (though not of speech) in third-person hetereodiegetic contexts entirely lack a narrator, and so could hardly be dual-voiced. In effect, Banfield has revived the empathetic reading of FID endorsed by early commentators, but in a way calculated to scandalize anyone committed to a communications-model approach to narrative. Indeed, it might be argued that in certain FID representations of thought, those representing what Banfield calls non-reflective consciousness, there is no discernible voice at all: “It was raining, she saw” (Banfield 1982 : 183–223; Fludernik 1993 : 376–79). Whereas sentences of reflective consciousness express what the character is aware of as passing through her mind―what she “thought to herself”―sentences of nonreflective consciousness express what the character perceives or apprehends without being aware of perceiving or apprehending. At this point, issues of voice shade off into even more diffuse issues of fictional minds.

Pervasive voice in the novel is mirrored by a parallel pervasiveness of consciousness. Investigating the presence of fictional consciousness, cognitive narratologists have become impatient with the so-called “speech-category approach,” which in effect limits consciousness in fiction to varieties of inner speech. Not all consciousness in fiction is inner speech, they argue―perhaps relatively little of it. As we have already seen, however, even approaches to the representation of consciousness using speech categories eventually run up against phenomena that exceed those categories in various ways. Speech categories “bleed” at their edges, trailing off into less category-bound forms of fictional mind. At one edge, for instance, ID bleeds into psycho-narration, whereby the narrator takes charge of analyzing the character’s mind, including subconscious levels that might not be accessible to the character herself, or habitual dispositions that might not manifest themselves in inner speech. At the other edge, FID bleeds into nonreflective consciousness. Indeed, almost from the earliest days of scholarship on FID, it was recognized that the speech category of FID was intimately related to a form of so-called “substitutionary perception” (Fehr 1938 ; see also Bühler 1937 ), sometimes called “represented perception” (Brinton 1980 ) or even “free indirect perception” (Palmer 2004 ): “She opened the door and looked out. It was raining harder. The cat would be around to the right. Perhaps she could go along under the eaves.” The third and fourth of these sentences are unmistakably FID (as indicated by the past-tense modals would and could , and the adverbial of doubt, perhaps ), but the second is substitutionary perception.

Reorienting the study of represented consciousness away from speech categories opens up new areas of inquiry. For instance, characters can be shown to read each other’s minds―not in any science-fiction sense, but in the sense that they develop working hypotheses about what others are thinking, inferring interior states from speech and external behavior, just as one does in everyday life; they do “Theory of Mind,” in other words (Zunshine 2006 ). Indeed, all actions of characters in a narrative fiction must be animated by mental states or acts; otherwise, we might not be disposed to call them “actions” at all. So thought ought not to be viewed as separable from action, but rather as forming together with action a “thought-action continuum” whereby actions are animated by consciousness throughout (Palmer 2004 : 212–14).

The most radical statement of this reorientation of analysis away from the speech-category approach and toward “mind in action” must surely be Fludernik’s redefinition of narrativity itself as experientiality (Fludernik 1996 : 20–43; compare Antin 1995 ). According to Fludernik’s account, narrativity is not adequately defined in terms of sequences of events or even in terms of causal connections among events, but only in terms of the experiencing of events by a human (or anthropomorphic) subject. In other words, it is ultimately the presence of consciousness that determines narrative, and not anything else.

This is a far cry from the carving up of blocks of prose into discrete units labeled DD, ID, FID. Nevertheless, it is not as unprecedented a development as some cognitive narratologists have claimed. For instance, the analysis of informational gaps and gap-filling, as practiced by exponents of the Tel Aviv school (Perry & Sternberg [1968] 1986 ; Perry 1979 ), is every bit as finely attuned to characters’ ventures in mind-reading and the thought-action continuum as anything to be found in the new cognitivist narratology (Palmer 2004 : 182; Herman → Cognitive Narratology ). But if cognitive narratology sometimes overestimates its own novelty and underrates its precursors, this does not prevent it from standing at the cutting edge of research into the representation of fictional mind at the present time.

Topics for Further Investigation

(a) One is tempted to recommend (albeit facetiously) a moratorium on further research into FID proper until other, more diffuse and pervasive effects of mind and voice in fiction are better understood. Among other advantages, this might give us the opportunity to evaluate critically some of the bold claims of the cognitive narratologists with respect to fictional minds, and of the Baxtin school with respect to “dialogue” (Shepherd → Dialogism ). Baxtin, in particular, has become a victim of his own (posthumous) success; serial (mis)appropriations of his approach by a diverse range of literary and cultural theories, coupled with uncritical endorsement of his ideological positions, has made critical evaluation of his account of dialogue virtually impossible. (b) Too little is still known about the role of models (schemata, stereotypes, folk-linguistic knowledge, etc.) in the production and recognition of representations of language varieties (styles, dialects, registers, etc.) in fiction. (c) Similarly, there is still much that remains to be clarified about the operation of textual context and its interaction with models of speech and thought in producing the effect or illusion of mimesis (though with respect to context see Ehrlich 1990 ). (d) “Currently, there is a hole in literary theory between the analysis of consciousness, characterization, and focalization […] a good deal of fictional discourse is situated precisely within this analytical gap” (Palmer 2004 : 186). Palmer perhaps underestimates the quantity and value of the work that has already gone into knitting together consciousness, characterization and focalization. Nevertheless, he is basically right: this is one of the holes that remain in narrative theory, and closing it should be a high priority of future research.

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Further Reading

• Ginsburg, Michal Peled (1982). “Free Indirect Discourse: A Reconsideration.” Language and Style 15, 133–49.
• Hernadi, Paul (1972). “Appendix: Free Indirect Discourse and Related Techniques.” P. Hernadi. Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 187–205.
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• Neumann, Anne Waldron (1986). “Characterization and Comment in Pride and Prejudice: Free Indirect Discourse and ‘Double-Voiced’ Verbs of Speaking, Thinking, and Feeling.” Style 20, 364–94.
• Patron, Sylvie (2009). Le narrateur. Introducion à la théorie narrative . Paris: Armand Colin.
• Rivara, René (2000). La langue du récit: Introduction à la narratologie énonciative . Paris: L’Harmattan.

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“Speaking base approbious words”

Speech representation in early modern english witness depositions.

This paper explores the representation of speech in Early Modern English witness depositions. We demonstrate that Semino and Short’s (2004) framework of description, which has for the most part been used in explorations of present-day texts, is generally applicable to our historical data. Our study shows that factors such as the importance of the evidence cited and the clarity of the deposition narrative were crucial considerations in representing speech in different contexts.

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Material
• 3.1 Narrator’s representation of voice (NV)
• 3.2 Narrator’s representation of speech acts (NRSA)
• 3.3 Indirect speech (IS)
• 3.4 Free indirect speech (FIS)
• 3.5 Direct speech (DS) and free direct speech (FDS)
• 3.6 Hypothetical speech (h)
• 3.7 Quotations (q)
• 3.8 Portmanteau and other
• 3.9 Speech embedding
• 4. Quantitative results
• 5.1 Narrator’s representation of voice (NV)
• 5.2 Narrator’s representation of speech act (NRSA)
• 5.3 Indirect speech/direct speech (IS/DS)
• 5.4 Indirect speech (IS) and direct speech (DS)
• 6. Summary and conclusion

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Narrative Representation of Speech Acts as an Indicator of Style: A Comparative Corpus- based Pragma-stylistic Analysis of Speech Acts in Self and Other Translators

This study explores the style of self and other-translators through a pragmatic analysis of speech acts employed in narrative representation of speech acts (NRSA). As stylistic analysis is limited to the structures of language and does not take int o account contextual meaning (Ramtirthe, 2017); therefore, much is lost in terms of what the author intends actually. For example, the stylistic analysis of the use of NRSA in a text rev eals that the author chooses to present the even entirely from his own perspective (Leech & Short, 1 98 ), but how the author intends to portray the event or characters through NRSA can only be de t rmined through a pragmatic analysis. The present study; therefore, analyses NRSA through a p ragma-stylistic analysis in order to thoroughly understand the style of self and other-translators. It analyses three categories of texts i.e. self-translators, other-translators and Pakistani writers category. Lists of NRSA are generated for each speech act type based...

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Over the last few years, substantial work has been seen in " Corpus Stylistics' and computational techniques to study the literary style. Previous studies conducted in corpus stylistics have not considered the full set of core linguistic features. Previous studies conducted on the style of Pakistani Fiction in English show their inability in presenting any framework which can be used for the comparison of styles taking into account the extensive range of linguistic features. These studies face validity concerns due to unrepresentative data, reliance on individual linguistic features and lack of internal and external comparisons. The present study is pioneering in nature and explores the discourse style variation among the leading novelists of Pakistani Fiction in English across Biber's (1988) textual dimensions. Based on representative corpus of leading novelists of Pakistani Fiction in English, the significant statistical linguistic differences have been investigated and the discourse style variation among the leading novelists has been explored. Findings reveal the fact that the style of Tariq Ali has been found to be most deviant among all the novelists of Pakistani English-language fiction. Tariq Ali has been found using less involved, highly narrative, explicit, overt expression of persuasion/argumentation and abstract discourse style in nature.

kadhim hussein

The meaning of any text is best realized when linguistic competence and pragmatic theory of language are taken into consideration. Novels are best understood in terms of Speech Act Theory since they represent a macro-text act (to use Hatim and Mason&#39;s {1990} term). Novels are reflections of the real world with real speech. The real reader is part of the context ,thus, part of the interpretations of the utterance. This is due to the fat that a real reader receives the intention of the real author who wants to achieve a certain perlocutionary effect on a certain socio-cultural context. Consequently, tackling any literary text without pragmatic theory constitutes a real problem. As a result, the present research attempts to answer the following question: Can Speech Act Theory be successfully applied to literature, and can fictional and conversational Speech Act be analysed and established similarly? 1-1 An Introduction Pratt (1977: 86) provides another way of which SAT (speech act ...

Abstract The present research uses multidimensional analysis to explore new discourse styles in Pakistani Fiction in English. ‘Corpus Stylistics’ approach with the help of corpora and computational techniques has helped in exploring the new discourse styles in Pakistani Fiction in English. Previous quantitative studies conducted on Pakistani Fiction in English in general have rarely studied the full set of core linguistic features. The present study is pioneering in nature and has compiled a large special purpose corpus of Pakistani Fiction in English corpus based on substantial collection of novels and short stories. Statistical factor analysis has been applied taking into account the full set of core lexico-grammatical features used in Pakistani Fictionalized writing. Drawing on the data from the large special purpose corpora of Pakistani Fiction in English, the present research identifies new discourse styles and labelled them as: ‘Expression of Thought vs. descriptive discourse production’, ‘Context-oriented Discourse’ ‘,Concrete Action discourse vs. Abstract Exposition’, ‘Narrative vs. Dialogic Discourse’.

Khadija Kubra

Ilha do Desterro

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard

One of the most pervasive features of &#39;narrative texts&#39; is the reporting of what was said. In this article, I propose to examine the representation of speech and its function in factual and fictional texts in order to consider the principles of organisation and selection that underlie any representation of speech and their stylistic effects. I will consider the various possibilities available to writers to represent what people said (or were perceived or imagined to have said), since the different options may influence the way the represented utterances are received and interpreted by readers. One of the most pervasive features of &#39;narrative texts&#39; is the reporting of what was said. In this article, I propose to examine the representation of speech and its function in factual and fictional texts in order to consider the principles of organisation and selection that underlie any representation of speech and their stylistic effects. I will consider the various possibil...

Nozliya Normurodova

International Journal of Multicultural and Multireligious Understanding

Visola Tashpulatova

The article presents the main theoretical prerequisites for studying the pragmatics of the literary text. Determining the functions of the text as a means of communication in all a variety of its manifestations refers to the fundamental problems of linguistics.The general problems of the theory of the text, the questions of the pragmatics of the literary text and the observables of its impact and perception are considered. The pragmatics of the text as a global category, which is a mandatory property of each text and reflects the attitude of the addressee to the object of communication, to the communicative act itself and through it to the address.

Dr. Musarrat Azher (Fulbrighter)

The present study aims at the comparative stylistic analysis of gender presentation in terms of status and attitude in Pakistani and British English Fiction. The data are based on the instances of 'he is' and 'she is' in relation to the complements following them. The methodology adopted for the research is corpus based and deals with the data both qualitatively and quantitatively, however, with a major inclination towards qualitative analysis. The instances of 'He is' and 'She is' along with the concordance words are derived from PEF and BEF corpora consisted of one million words for each through Antconc 3.2.2. The data are further manually analyzed in MS Excel and then categorized in relation to Status and attitude linked with 'he' and 'she' in both PEF and BEF. It is found that the gender representation is quite typical of the culture it relates to. The presentation of 'he is' and 'she is' in BEF is of positive and balanced nature where as that of in PEF is based on the superiority and inferiority of men and women respectively. The research is a contribution in the better understanding and interpretation of Pakistani English fiction and British English fiction. 1. Introduction The purpose of the present research is to make a comparative stylistic analysis of the representation of he and she in relation of complements following he is and she is in BEF and PEF. The major interpretations are related to the status and attitude of 'he' and 'she' in terms of positive and negative presentation of men and women in Pakistani English Fiction and British English Fiction. Both qualitative and quantitative methodology has been adapted to deal with the instances of 'He is' and 'She is'. However major inclination remains towards the qualitative analysis of the data. Stylistics is the study of linguistic analysis of the written and oral text. It aims at the interpretation and understanding of the text through linguistic choices at different levels. In other words, it refers to the technique of textual interpretation through language by reflecting the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language. Widdowson (1975:3) defines stylistics as the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation. He further adds that stylistics is a link between literary criticism and linguistics by describing it as an area of meditation between two disciplines as its morphological construction suggests: the 'style' is related it to the form or shape and the 'istics' to the method of writing. He therefore perceives stylistics as a medium of better understanding and appreciation of literature. Style has different meanings for different people. According to Leech and Short (1981:13) Stylistics is the (linguistic) study of style, is rarely undertaken for its own sake, simply as an exercise in describing what use is made of language. They also said that the major aim of studying stylistics is to explore the meanings and understand the linguistic features of the text. Short and Candlin (1989:183) said that stylistics is a linguistic approach to the study of the literary texts. It thus embodies one essential part of the general course-philosophy; that of combining language and literary study. Widdowson (1975: 3) defines stylistics: as the study of literary discourse from a linguistic orientation. It is a linking technique. He also suggests that stylistics is in between linguistics and literary criticism and its function is to link between two. So, generally, it deals with both the literary and linguistic factors.. Another definition given by Verdonk and Jacques Weber (2002) in Twentieth Century Fiction: " Stylistics is the study of spoken and written text. By style is meant a consistent occurrence in the text of certain items and structures, or types of items and structures, among those offered by the language as a whole. " Style, interpreted widely in linguistic literature, can be viewed as variations of language use against the background of some context (Simpson, 2004). Verdonk refers to style in language as distinctive linguistic expression used for some purpose and to some effect. There are mainly two approaches towards stylistic analysis of a text: one is the traditional way doing stylistic analysis at different levels of choices and the other is corpus based analysis through computer. Computer has

Frank H. Polak

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The Presentation of Speech and Thought in Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice" and in Joe Wright’s Film Adaptation

Bachelor thesis, 2007, 51 pages, grade: 1,7, reni ernst (author), i. introduction.

II. The Presentation of Speech and Thought in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and in Joe Wright’s Film Adaptation

1. Speech and thought presentation in the novel 1.1 Categorization of speech presentation 1.1.1 Direct Speech 1.1.2 Indirect Speech 1.1.3 Free Indirect Speech 1.1.4 Summary of speech presentation in a graphic model 1.2 Categorization of thought presentation 1.2.1 Direct Thought 1.2.2 Free Indirect Thought 1.2.3 Comparison of speech and thought presentation in a graphic model

2. Analysis of speech and thought presentation in the novel Pride and Prejudice 2.1 Speech presentation 2.1.1 Direct Speech 2.1.1.1 Characterisation through dialogue 2.1.2 Indirect Speech 2.1.3. Free Indirect Speech 2.2 Thought presentation 2.2.1 Direct Thought 2.2.2 Free Indirect Thought 2.2.3 Letters

3. Speech and thought presented in Joe Wright’s film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (2005) 3.1 Speech presentation 3.2 Thought presentation

III. Conclusion

IV. Appendix

V. Bibliography

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has been a widely read and studied novel and has been known to serve as a suitable model for the research of different topics. A special emphasis has been placed on the way Austen portrays her characters’ speech and thoughts. To her, dialogue is described as the most appropriate means in order to achieve a preferably close approach to reality.

Due to the fact that Austen strived after combining a realistic depiction of her characters and their surroundings with psychological depth, she had to find gradations of the ordinary dialogue between the characters. Utterances could be regarded as important or less important, a character could appear more strongly than another in the course of the story or whole scenes could excel others in their prominence.

In order to be able to illustrate the different emphasis and to present these contrasts comprehensibly to the reader, the dialogue in Pride and Prejudice is expanded with direct and indirect versions of speech. The same applies to the portrayal of characters’ thoughts, which accounts for a dominant part of the novel. By alternating between the various possibilities to depict speech and thought, thus putting emphasis on certain situations, it was possible for Austen to insert her own views on specific circumstances and characters.

Nevertheless, direct speech is the prevailing method to display the characters’ utterances since it is the nearest and most dramatic manner. The vivacity of the characters’ persona, their feelings and different tempers are perceptible through their dialogues and provide a narration that is as realistic as possible.

In the following, the different versions of speech and thought presented will be analysed in terms of their occurrence in the novel, their importance and their meaning to the narrator and the reader, as well as exemplified on the basis of selected passages. This can be achieved after giving a detailed description of the terms.

Furthermore, the analysis will proceed to a brief, but close investigation of how speech and thought are dealt with in the most recent film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice . The novel was first transcribed onto screen in 1940, followed by diverse adaptations for British television. Joe Wright filmed the novel once more in 2005 and aimed at a faithful visual realization of the original by putting the emphasis on the most realistic transcription. “I told the actors to improvise as much as possible […] to give a kind of reality and freshness.” (DVD Stolz & Vorurteil , Bonus "Director’s commentary") The way Joe Wright adopted the presentation of speech and thought from the written medium into the visual one and which methods he used for the 'translation' onto screen will be looked at closely. In addition, the two different sorts of media will be compared by means of their similarities and discrepancies concerning the presentation of speech and thought and which difficulties appear when transcribing a novel into a film.

1. Speech and thought presentation in the novel

1.1. categorization of speech presentation.

Before it is possible to give an account of how speech is represented in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice , it is at first necessary to have a closer look at the definitions of the various speech presentations in general. There are several choices available to the author to demonstrate a character speech as well as thought. These choices enable the author to endue the narration with different viewpoints and meanings. “[…] Variation in speech presentation […] allows the authors to indicate how important a piece of speech is. In general terms, Indirect Speech appears to be a backgrounding, and Direct Speech a foregrounding device.” (Short 1996, 292-293)

However, there are more options one can choose to present speech acts than solely direct and indirect speech. In order to give a complete review of the different possibilities of speech presentation, the researcher will begin with the least direct and most minimalist form, the Narrator’s Representation of Speech (NRS), using Short’s term. (compare: Short 1996, 293 ff.) The narrator here informs the reader that a speech act has taken place without giving any further details about the topic or the tone. 'He was talking with her for a while' is an example of NRS which reveals the narrator’s complete control over the speech act, but with a perspective so distanced from the original words of the conversation that the reader only comes to know that a speech act occurred but is unaware about the topic and the tone of the speakers.

In comparison to NRS, the Narrator’s Representation of Speech Acts (NRSA) provides the reader with slightly more information about what is said. Though still completely under the narrator’s control, a particular act of speech is now being presented and in some cases even the subject matter that is talked about. “'Speech Act' is the term used to designate ACTS performed by saying something e.g. complaining, instructing, questioning, pleading, arguing.” (Short 2005, 1) In the example 'He told her about his upcoming holidays' the reader gets an indication of the speech act the speaker uses as well as the topic he talks about. Yet the reader is still left uninformed about what the person said precisely and “as a consequence, [this phrase] can be seen as a summary of a longer piece of discourse […]”. (Short 1996, 293) The two forms of speech presentation mentioned so far, NRS and NRSA, indeed are possibilities to inform the reader that a speech act has taken place but are nevertheless not expressive enough to be analysed in Pride and Prejudice . These forms are merely mentioned for the sake of completeness.

In the following research, the analysis will be limited to direct, indirect and free indirect speech in the novel as well as the presentation of thoughts as an indirect version of speech acts. As the following forms of speech and thought presentation will be analysed further down in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice , the example-quotes will be extracted from this very novel.

1.1.1 Direct Speech

As opposed to the minimalist presentation of speech in NRS and NRSA, the form which expresses characters’ words directly without being filtered through the manipulation of a narrator is Direct Speech (DS). “DS contains the actual words and grammatical structures which the character used in the original utterance, not those of the narrator.” (Short 2005, 1) One has to bear in mind that, unlike in a real-life conversation, the author of the novel quotes utterances which he made up and are not based on a prior speech situation. “When we read, we pretend to ourselves that a character whose speech is being reported said the words at some previous point in the fictional world of the novel.” (Short 1996, 290) Although the words a person uttered are expressed truthfully in DS without any changes in style or grammar, one could argue that the narrator still has a minimal influence on what is said by indicating the utterance with a reporting clause, such as 'he said', 'he shouted', or 'he asked' before or after the reported clause.

The two clauses belong to two different discourse situations - the reporting clause relates to the situation where the narrator is talking to the reader, and the reported clause relates to a previous discourse situation where a character said something to another character. (Short 2005, 1)

DS 'translates' an utterance by repeating all the linguistic features used by the original speaker marked off within inverted commas and by defining the reported clause with the reporting clause, which identifies the speaker, selectively the addressee and additionally informs the reader about the tone of the utterance by choosing an appropriate verb. An example sentence for DS could be: ‘“Do not you want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.’ (Austen 5) Here the original utterance is quoted directly within quotation marks and concluded with a question mark which indicates the enquiring nature of the sentence. Furthermore, the reader learns in the reporting clause who said the sentence and in which tone it was phrased. In the most free form of DS even the inverted commas and/or the reporting clause can be omitted whereby the narrator’s influence is reduced to zero.

"What is his name?" "Bingley."

"Is he married or single?"

"Oh! single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!"

"How so? how can it affect them?" (Austen 5-6)

Free Direct Speech (FDS) is mostly used to accentuate the reported clause by delivering it from the presence of the narrator without withdrawing the contextual information the reader needs to consider the text coherent and without

causing confusion or reader difficulty […]. Once this possibility has been noticed, more experimental authors can then use these freer forms of DS to create special effects, bordering on bewilderment for the reader in some cases, but also allowing the delicate perceptual membranes which separate what is done , what is said and what is thought to be explored in interesting new ways. (Short 1996, 304)

Generally speaking, DS is used to offer the reader the most unchanged form of the actual spoken words of a person including colloquial expressions, grammatical mistakes and ejaculations to portray the entire vividness of the utterance and to depict the character of the person speaking.

1.1.2 Indirect Speech

“In addition to the [original] speech act[s] the character uses we are also given the propositional content of his/her utterance but in the narrator’s words.” (Short 2005, 1) In other words, in DS the narrator quotes the utterance verbatim without any intervention, whereas in Indirect Speech (IS) the narrator reports the subject matter of what was said, using his own words. “In the novel, the words of Direct Speech are clearly those of the character concerned. The words of Indirect Speech, on the other hand, usually belong to the narrator.” (Short 1996, 289) The difference can be best seen when translating the example in Direct Speech given above into Indirect Speech:

DS: "Do not you want to know who has taken it?" cried his wife impatiently.

IS: She asked her husband in a heatedly tone if he didn’t want to hear who had taken

When converting the DS sentence into IS, the following changes take place:

(i) The inverted commas around the reported clause as well as the question mark are removed. (ii) The reported clause is introduced with the conjunction 'if' which transforms the independent reported clause in DS into a subordinated position in IS. (iii) The tense of the verbs in the reported clause undergoes backshift. (iv) The second person pronoun changes to a third person pronoun. (v) The verb 'know' in DS is replaced by the verb 'hear' in IS. (vi) In DS it is common to place the reporting clause after the reported clause, whereas the order usually changes in IS.

It is striking that the grammatical difference (ii) leads to a difference in the expressive tone of the reported words. Due to the subordinated position the reported clause in IS receives, the reported words are assessed a minor status. The vividness the words express in DS is lacking here since expressive signs such as the question mark and the rather colloquial style are omitted. Furthermore, the indirect version shows no optical difference to the normal third person narration of the novel. As a result, IS is not apt for conveying liveliness of a person’s utterance, neither for letting the reader experience the character of a person by means of the way this person says something. In general, IS is used to sum up passages of talk that are not considered as important by the narrator to explain a person’s character with appropriate adjectives and to offer the reader a fluent reading.

1.1.3 Free Indirect Speech

Any mixture of DS and IS features can be entitled Free Indirect Speech (FIS). Typically FIS has the grammatical characteristics of IS. The tenses and pronouns of the reported clause usually stay related to the narrator, but at the same time some of the original production features are of DS.

Its most typical manifestation is one where, unlike IS, the reporting clause is omitted […] [which] allows the reported clause, which is always subordinate in indirect versions, to take on some of the syntactic possibilities of the main clause, and in this respect share some of the features typically associated with DS. (Leech, Short 325)

It is often ambiguous to ascribe with certainty whether the character’s or the narrator’s words are being presented. In any case, FIS always bears the signature of the narrator; “its characteristic features in the novel are almost always the presence of third-person pronouns and past tense, which correspond with the form of narrative report and indicate indirectness, along with a number of features […] indicating freeness.” (Leech, Short 325) An example-sentence taken from the novel Pride and Prejudice demonstrates the blend of character and narrator. “How differently did every thing now appear in which he was concerned!” (Austen 201) Although at first sight this sentence might look like a very free form of DS for inverted commas - in the original text - and a reporting clause are not present, the narrator controls the utterance by using the backshift of the tense. In DS the sentence might look as follows: 'How differently does every thing now appear in which he is concerned!' Obviously the grammatical form of IS is mingled with the “vivacity of direct speech, evoking the personal tone, the gesture, and […] the idiom of the speaker […] reported.” (Pascal 137) Hence, the narrator’s and the character’s voice are being fused through vocabulary, sentence structure and intonation, which eventually could be understood as a 'dual voice'. “The [reader] thinks in the third person but understands him in the character’s own terms, his own ejaculations and intonation.” (Pascal 23) This duality of character and narrator, of mixing original language with distancing effects, may be heard as a tone of irony.

The irony arises because FIS is normally viewed as a form where the [narrator’s] voice is interposed between the reader and what the character says, so that the reader is distanced from the character’s words. This is explicable if it is assumed that DS is a norm or baseline for the portrayal of speech. (Leech, Short 334) (see 1.1.4)

Consequently, it is the distance to the character’s original words that allows FIS to be used as a means for imposing irony. Here the narrator has the possibility to let his own opinion slip into the character’s words without changing them into IS, where he could use his own words, but rather giving them a sense of directness which produces a vivid, thus real and believable tone for the reader. “This ability to give the flavour of the character’s words but also to keep the narrator in an intervening position between character and reader makes FIS an extremely useful vehicle for casting ironic light on what the character says.” (Leech, Short 326-327) This also shows how FIS can be used to contrast the role and attitude of characters according to how the narrator intends to picture them, putting them into a back grounding position or highlighting them. “This variation can also be used for more large-scale strategic purposes; for example, to channel our sympathies towards one character or set of characters and away from another.” (Leech, Short 335)

To sum up, FIS is often used to convey irony because the slight distance from the norm of DS allows this form to include two different points of views, the one of the character and the one of the narrator. Nevertheless, FIS does not automatically always contain irony, but can likewise serve as a means of depicting more thoroughly a person’s character than DS or IS can.

As a means of reproducing someone else’s argument it is a pleasant variant from direct quotation, which is often too long or awkward to fit in, and from simple reported speech, which can easily grow clumsy and wearisome. It allows one to give the actual words and tone of the writer, and to fit them smoothly into one’s exposition. (Pascal 136)

Accordingly, Free Indirect Speech can operate at a relatively minor level in the interpretation of a dialogue and sometimes at a higher level in producing tactical effects. In any case, it has to be mentioned, that textual studies require to be based on the original text, and particularly in the case of free indirect speech, since the character of a statement may be decisively established by idiomatic usages of different kinds, a particular tense, certain particles, slight stylistic nuances, that sometimes cannot be rendered in another language or require different means. (Pascal 36)

1.1.4 Summary of speech presentation in a graphic model

All the different speech presentations mentioned so far can be placed on a continuum which illustrates the degree of the blending of character and narrator at different points on the scale:

illustration not visible in this excerpt

As indicated above, DS is considered the norm of speech presentation since it represents the character’s words as original as possible, merely including a reporting clause and inverted commas. In contrast, IS yet conveys the speech acts used and the content of the utterance but not the original words of the character. NRSA and NRS solely mention that speech has occurred but offer too little or no information about the topic and the original words. Therefore, these forms put even more distance between the reader and what the character says than IS does. FIS is put between IS and DS on the scale as it is a mixture of indirect and direct elements of narrator and character. With the most extreme form of direct speech, FDS, the reader gets the impression that he is witnessing what the character says without any interference from the narrator. In other words, any movement to the right of DS on the above scale will produce an effect of freeness, as if the [narrator] has vacated the stage and left it to his characters; whereas any movement to the left of the norm will usually be interpreted as a movement away from verbatim report and towards 'interference'. (Leech, Short 334)

1.2 Categorization of thought presentation

Although the focus of the above part was directed at the presentation of speech, novelists, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth century, have sought to portray the thoughts of their characters, the “'internal speech', [the] vivid […] flow of thought through a character’s mind.” (Leech, Short 337)

One should keep in mind that any representation of a character’s thinking, even being in an extremely indirect form, is always artificial. One cannot access the thoughts of others, but can only deduce them from peoples’ actions, speech, facial expressions etc. Nevertheless, thought presentation is often used to explain motivations for a character’s actions and attitudes. As a novel is a medium in written form, these thoughts can only be expressed by writing them on paper, which then seem as an indirect version of speech presentation. It is as if the narrator would say, “This is what the character would have said if he had made his thoughts explicit.” (Leech, Short 345)

The categories a novelist uses to portray the thoughts of his characters are the same as those used for speech presentation. However, Direct Thought and Free Indirect Thought differ in their effects from DS and FIS, which will be examined further down. In order to provide a completeness of the terms of thought presentation as well, the less important forms briefly have to be looked at. The less direct form of presenting thoughts is the Narrator’s Representation of Thought (NRT), whereupon the reader is merely informed that a thought act has taken place. 'He was thinking about her for a while.' represents the act of thinking, whereas the example 'He was thinking about her unreliability.' presents the reader little more information about the topic the person was thinking about, accordingly entitled the Narrator’s Representation of Thought Acts (NRTA).

The rules for IS apply for Indirect Thought (IT) in the same way. The narrator uses his own words to describe what a character was thinking about and it is left in the narrator’s sole discretion how detailed he wants to work out a thought process. 'He thought that she would not be on time.' is a very simple example for an indirect account of a person’s thought. As the rules and effects for mentioned forms of thought presentation are exactly the same as for the analogical forms of speech presentation, the focus will now be turned to Direct Thought and Free Indirect Thought since the effects of these two categories turn out to be different from the equivalent speech forms.

1.2.1 Direct Thought

Assuming that the thoughts of characters in a novel are accessible to the narrator, Direct Thought (DT) is, like DS, the form that presents the thoughts of a character most genuinely and closely, which can be seen in an example from Pride and Prejudice . ‘"What will be his surprise," thought she, "when he knows who they are! He takes them now for people of fashion."’ (Austen 244) At first sight such a DT example looks as if it was expressed aloud, by reason of the inverted commas and the exclamation mark, and solely marked off as a thought act through the reporting clause. Novelists tend to leave out inverted commas and reporting clause to free this thought presentation of the appearance of DS and to turn it into Free Direct Thought (FDT). Furthermore, as it can be noticed in the example mentioned, DT is frequently used to present imaginary conversations characters have with themselves, which is why it often has the nature of conscious thinking. The example therefore is placed within inverted commas in order to stress the fact that it concerns an imaginary conversation. Besides, it has to be observed that any presentation of thought requires an omniscient narrator, who can provide an insight into characters minds.

Because any portrayal of character thought must involve the presence of an omniscient narrator, the more direct forms of presentation, DT and FDT, take on a somewhat different value from their speech counterparts. In the presentation of speech, the use of DS or FDS produces the impression that the character is talking in our presence, with less and less authorial intervention. Similarly, in DT and FDT authorial intervention appears minimal; but as the result is effectively a monologue, with the character 'talking' to himself, the thoughts he produces acquire a conscious quality. (Leech, Short 342)

1.2.2 Free Indirect Thought

Similarly as DT takes on a different value than DS, Free Indirect Thought (FIT) has a different effect than its speech counterpart. “Instead of indicating a move towards the narrator, it signifies a movement towards the exact representation of a character’s thought, [hence producing] a more vivid and immediate representation of the character’s thoughts as they happen.” (Leech, Short 344) “We feel close to the character, almost inside his head as he thinks, and sympathise with his viewpoint. This 'close' effect is more or less the opposite of the effect of FIS, which makes us feel distanced from the character.” (Short 1996, 315)

Another effect FIT can import is the representation of subconscious thought. Whereas the reader generally in FIT has the possibility to slip into the character’s mind to take part in his thought process, the free indirect form is occasionally used to let the reader know that some thinking process is going on, without the character being aware of it. Usually these thoughts are a matter of the subconscious cognition about the person’s own character or about being at fault about something. The form of FIT, on the other hand, stays the same as in FIS, using a mixture of Direct and Indirect Thought: “Oh! how acutely did she now feel it.” (Austen 266) Here again, as it has been the case in FIS, “it is impossible to tell by the use of formal linguistic criteria alone whether one is reading the thoughts of the character or the views of the narrator. The tense and pronoun selection are appropriate to either.” (Leech, Short 338)

The first person novel has provided a solution to this problem. Since the hero is the narrator at the same time, he can describe his thoughts and feelings from his knowledge and his perspective. Limited in this case is the presentation of other character’s thoughts. In contrast, an omniscient narrator is allowed the right of access to all characters’ thoughts; in return though, it is difficult to tell which mode is being used. This means, as well as in FIS, can be utilised to manipulate the reader’s view on the characters to a negative or a positive stance.

When we examined the choices of mode of speech presentation we noted that it was possible for a writer to make consistent choices with respect to his characters for general strategic purposes within his work. Novelists can use the presentation of thought in a similar way in order to control our sympathies. (Leech, Short 346)

The reason why DT and FIT imply different values than their counterparts in speech presentation is that the norm for the presentation of thought is IT and not the direct form as it counts for speech. The difference can be best explained on the basis of a scale for thought presentation in comparison with the model for speech introduced above.

1.2.3 Comparison of speech and thought presentation in a graphic model

It was noted earlier that DS provides a verbatim report of what a character said, but in IS the narrator presents the content of the speech without committing himself to use the original words of the utterance. DS therefore is the natural mode to express speech the way it was originally formed to a listener. On the contrary, thoughts are not directly accessible to a person, which is why a version that features the content of a thought is much more appropriate as a norm, especially in the third person narrative since thoughts usually are not verbally formulated.

If a writer decides to let us know the thoughts of a character […], he is inviting us to see things from that character’s point of view. As he moves along the scale towards the 'free' end of the thought presentation continuum, he apparently gives us the 'verbatim' thoughts of the characters with less and less intervention on his part. (Leech, Short 338)

As one can notice when comparing the two scales, any movement from IT to the right on the thought presentation scale can be interpreted as a step into the character’s mind with the narrator’s control reducing to zero. Any movement leftwards from IT leads to growing narratorial intervention, whereas on the speech scale every form leftwards from DS includes the interference of the narrator. Consequently, any deviation from the norm is perceived as a rather artificial form and can conveniently be utilised to achieve any suitable effect on the reader. (compare: Leech, Short 345) To recapitulate, a broad versatility of speech and thought presentation is available to the narrator to vary in point of view, tone and distance and to manipulate the reader’s perception according to the narrator’s intention.

2. Analysis of speech and thought presentation in the novel Pride and Prejudice

In the following part the terms of speech and thought presentation, defined above, will be analysed in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice . By far the most part of the account of speech acts is given in DS which predominantly includes dialogue between two or more people. IS, on the contrary, occupies only a small fraction of the narrative, which is why it will be less closely examined in the following section. Although FIS similarly takes up a negligible proportion of the whole story, it plays an important role in the overall essence of the novel and together with FIT will account for the major part of the analysis. The mental process of characters, especially of the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, is a crucial element of the novel as well. DT is used to shape the story in both structure and meaning, which will be discussed further down.

2.1 Speech presentation

2.1.1 direct speech.

As it was previously mentioned that DS is the most vivid form of speech presentation, it is not surprising that Austen wrote the novel to a degree of 47% (compare: Bühler 84) in the direct form, the reason being that the story is based on the relationships between people. Especially dialogue scenes are most suitable to demonstrate the vividness and originality of speech acts. “Austen’s descriptions of her characters’ physical attributes tend to be minimal; instead she allows their moral characters to be revealed through their words.” (Todd 28) Mrs. Bennet, whose anticipation to see her daughter Elizabeth married has been frustrated by Elizabeth’s denial of Mr. Collin’s proposal, addresses her unsympathetic husband:

"Oh! Mr. Bennet, you are wanted immediately; we are all in an uproar. You must come and make Lizzy marry Mr. Collins, for she vows she will not have him, and if you do not make haste he will change his mind and not have her ."

Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and fixed them on her face with a calm unconcern which was not in the least altered by her communication.

"I have not the pleasure of understanding you," said he, when she had finished her speech. "Of what are you talking?"

"Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr. Collins, and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy."

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The Representation of Thought

• First Online: 13 February 2018

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• Joe Bray 4  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style ((PSLLS))

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In this chapter Bray turns to a frequently-discussed aspect of Austen’s style: the way in which she represents the thoughts and feelings of her characters. While not denying the innovativeness of her use of free indirect thought (often considered to be her greatest contribution to the English novel), he argues that a full appreciation of Austen’s subtle examination of character psychology is best advanced by considering the often rapid alternations between categories of thought representation, rather than by a focus on one technique alone. Free indirect thought is often combined in particular passages with the slightly different, even more ambiguous technique of narrated perception, for example. The chapter investigates the complex blend of techniques through which the thought processes of all Austen’s heroines are represented.

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To some extent then NI parallels NV on the speech representation scale, though as Semino and Short observe, it is a broader category, allowing accounts of mental experiences which ‘can be rich and detailed in ways that NV and NW cannot be’ ( 2004 : 149). This is a result of the ‘ontological’ (149) distinction between speech and writing on the one hand and thought on the other; namely the fact that in contrast to speech and writing, thoughts are ‘not necessarily linguistic in nature’ (148). ‘Whatever its precise nature’, they add, ‘thought is clearly not silent, unuttered speech’ (148).

Though as the Introduction noted, this distinction between ‘early’ and ‘late’ novels is coming under increasing threat (see Sutherland 2005a ).

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Bray, J. (2018). The Representation of Thought. In: The Language of Jane Austen. Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72162-0_4

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• Presenting speech and thought

Speech and thought presentation looks at how a speaker or writer presents the speech or thought of other people. There is a range of ways in which writers and speakers can present others' words or thoughts, and the choices made are important in determining what sort of impression the reader or listener will get of the party who is being represented. For example, a politician might seek to affect voters' impressions of a rival politician by claiming to have access to their thoughts — 'Mr Osborne thinks he can get away with taking away people's livelihoods': this can portray the rival in an unfavourable light, even though the politician has no actual way of knowing what Mr Osborne thinks. Speech presentation

The main distinction made within speech presentation is between direct and indirect speech. Direct speech (DS) is seen as the norm, as it provides a verbatim account of what was said, while indirect speech (IS) expresses what was said in the words of the narrator. However, a number of methods of presenting speech are possible:

• Narrator's report of speech (NRS): She spoke.

• Narrator's report of speech act (NRSA): She disagreed.

• Indirect speech (IS): She said that she disagreed.

• Free indirect speech (FIS): She disagreed wholeheartedly.

• Direct speech (DS): She said "I disagree wholeheartedly".

Thought presentation differs from speech presentation in that it is the indirect form that is considered the norm, as it comes closest to acknowledging the fact that we do not actually have direct access to other people's thoughts and feelings by not claiming to correspond precisely to the thinker's precise thoughts:

• Narrator's report of thought (NRT): He thought about the economy.

• Narrator's report of thought act (NRTA): He considered the likelihood of a double-dip recession .

• Indirect thought (IT): He thought that he couldn't see past the gloom .

• Free indirect thought (FIT): He couldn't see past the gloom .

• Direct thought (DT): He thought "I can't see past this gloom" .

Recommended reading

'Presenting Others' Speech and Thoughts' explains and gives examples of the different speech and thought categories, as well as showing how the choices made in speech and thought presentation can have ideological effects:

Jeffries, Lesley. 2010. Critical Stylistics : The Power of English. Hampshire: Palgrave, 130-145.

' Speech and Thought Presentation ' in the following introduction to the application of stylistic analysis to fictional texts explains the various categories of speech and thought presentation , and their possible effects:

Leech, Geoffrey and Mick Short. 2007. Style in Fiction [second edition]. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 255-281.

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