FROM EMPATHETIC DEIXIS TO EMPATHETIC NARRATIVE: STYLISATION AND (DE‐)SUBJECTIVISATION AS PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE CHANGE

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper I try to relate a problem in the history of literary style to wider issues in the theory of language change. The stylistic question I address concerns the historical origin of empathetic narrative (Bally's style indirect libre). I contest the standard account, which associates its first appearance with the nineteenth‐century novel, and argue instead for a linguistic origin in the everyday use of shifted (empathetic) deictics and for a historical origin in the emergence of modern subjectivity in seventeenth‐century epistemology. I propose a quantificational method for comparing the incidence of empathetic narrative in texts and a theory of stylisation to account for its progressive development across a historical corpus. The paper's interest to non‐literary readers lies, on the level of data, in the evidence it presents of the use of tense‐adverb combinations as an exponent of aspect and, on the level of theory, in its challenge to Traugott's account of the role of subjectivisation in language change.

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