Representing Characters' Speech and Thought in Narrative Fiction: A Study of England England by Julian Barnes

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the choices, patterns and subtle variations in the presentation of characters‟ words and thoughts in an extract from Julian Barnes‟s novel England, England. My main aim is to show how Barnes‟s linguistic choices might affect readers‟ perceptions of, and potential empathy with, the characters involved. The analysis also demonstrates the explanatory potential of a model of speech, writing and thought presentation (SW&TP) that was developed on the basis of the analysis of a corpus of written narratives (Semino and Short 2004). This model accounts for a larger variety of phenomena than was previously the case, including, for example, the presentation of „hypothetical‟ words and thoughts, and the „embedding‟ of SW&TP inside other instances of SW&TP. Both of these phenomena are shown to be particularly central to the extract from Barnes‟s novel. Finally, the results of the analysis of the passage are consistently compared with the results of the analysis of a larger corpus, in order to make more reliable claims about its peculiar characteristics and potential effects.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.