Thought Presentation Twenty-Five Years On

Abstract

1. Introduction In this article I will briefly review the model of speech and thought presentation outlined in Chapter 10 of Style in Fiction (henceforth SIF, see 2 below) and how it has been developed through the corpus-based work of the Lancaster University Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation (SW&TP) project, which began in 1996. This project has resulted in a series of publications, (1) culminating in Semino and Short's Corpus Stylistics: A Corpus-based Study of Speech, Thought and Writing Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing (see 3 below). The brief review in sections 2 and 3 is an initial exposition to enable a preliminary exploration of some issues that the current version of the model has raised for the analysis of thought presentation, in the hope that this discussion will prompt further research and debate. The newer material constitutes (i) an attempt to use the notion of faithfulness in speech and writing report to explain the various effects on the different discourse presentation scales (and thought presentation in particular), (ii) an outline of an argument for the placing of NI (Internal Narration, see below) outside the thought presentation scale (as Toolan 141-2 has also suggested) rather than within it, as proposed in Corpus Stylistics, and (iii) a suggestion that we should explore treating embedded discourse (see 2 below) within a cognitive stylistics framework, rather than assuming (as we did in Corpus Stylistics) that embedded discourse presentation is embedded within a higher-level discourse category. Throughout I will use examples from fiction, though it should be remembered that the Lancaster SW&TP work relates to news report and (auto)biography as well. For ease of reference, I provide in Figure 1 a list of the main discourse presentation acronym used in this article and what they stand for. Each acronyms is explained when it is first introduced, but readers may, nonetheless find it helpful to have just one place to refer to in order to remind themselves of the acronyms and what they stand for. 2. Speech and Thought Presentation in SIF Chapter 10 of SIF has been quite influential since 1981 in the exploration of discourse presentation in fiction. It was the first attempt to distinguish systematically between speech and thought presentation and to propose explanations for the differences in effect between Free Indirect Speech (FIS) and Free Indirect Thought (FIT) by establishing a pair of parallel presentation clines along with a proposal that the norms for speech and thought presentation were at different points on the scales. The SIF presentation scales are given in Figure 2. On the speech presentation scale below, N = Narration, NRSA = Narrator's (Re)presentation of Speech Act, IS = Indirect Speech, DS = Direct Speech, and FDS = Free Direct Speech. The thought presentation scale had a parallel set of categories, where T (= Thought) replaced S. The NRSA and NRTA categories were first proposed in SIF, as was the siting of FDS (and FDT) to the right of DS (and DT) on the scale, rather than in between FIS and DS, as had been assumed earlier. Fig. 2. The SIF speech and thought presentation scales Speech presentation [N] NRSA IS FIS DS FDS Norm? Thought presentation [N] NRTA IT FIT DT FDT Norm? 3. Proposed Changes to the SIF Model Resulting from the Findings of the Lancaster SW&TP Project The Lancaster SW&TP project annotated exhaustively by hand more than a quarter of a million words of extracts of around 2000 words from 240 texts, divided equally among three text types: fiction, news report, and (auto)biography. Although the general SIF model of speech and thought presentation applied reasonably well to the data examined, and in spite of the inevitable human error involved in hand-annotation (especially when one remembers the extent of discourse presentation ambiguity--e. …

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