This paper reports the corpus findings on the positions of reporting clauses of speech presentati... more This paper reports the corpus findings on the positions of reporting clauses of speech presentation. In direct speech, the preferred positions of reporting clauses vary according to text types, and the results are compared with those of Biber et al. (1999). In indirect speech, more than 90% of reporting clauses are found in the initial position. Although fronted reported clauses of indirect speech in fictional texts have been treated as an intermediate form between indirect and free indirect speech, the corpus data from news reports shows textual/contextual conditions where reported clauses tend to be fronted. This phenomenon in the press data seems to have different motivations from the one in fiction which often manipulates shift of viewpoints.
ABSTRACT People's speech can be misrepresented in the media in many ways, and such misrep... more ABSTRACT People's speech can be misrepresented in the media in many ways, and such misrepresentation is often disputed in court. As an example of misrepresentation of speech, this paper examines an Australian court case, in which newspaper articles featuring a Christmas cruise were decided to be misleading and defamatory. By analysing the news articles, the transcripts of the witnesses’ testimonies and the judge's decision, this paper investigates how people's speech can be misrepresented in news reports. After summarising the strategies which the applicant (the cruise company) and the respondent (the newspaper) adopted in court to disprove/prove the accuracy and credibility of the reported speech in the news articles about the cruise, examples of speech presentation in one of the articles are analysed from a linguistic perspective. In identifying misrepresentation, the court attempted to reconstruct the anterior speech events and negotiate the meanings of the key expressions, which appeared in the reported speech and were expected to have occurred in the anterior speech. The court proceedings show that the accuracy and credibility of the reported speech are closely related to the factual evidence. The analyses of the court transcripts reveal how the meanings of the key expressions in the original speech events can be modified through recontextualisation of the reported speech. Misrepresentation of speech can also be a product of an interaction between the textual structure of media discourse and untruthful speech presentation.
Over the past decade, more and more writers have used the present tense as the primary tense for ... more Over the past decade, more and more writers have used the present tense as the primary tense for their fictional narratives. This article shows that contemporary present-tense fiction has more lexical and syntactic characteristics which are similar to spoken discourse than past-tense fiction by comparing lexis and structures in two corpora: a corpus consisting of present-tense narratives and a corpus of past-tense narratives. It also discusses how the use of the present tense affects the management of viewpoint in narrative by relating its lexical, structural characteristics to the presentation of characters’ speech and thoughts.
This paper examines how particular multi-word sequences and a set of adjectives that are closely ... more This paper examines how particular multi-word sequences and a set of adjectives that are closely related to the leading protagonists’ viewpoints contribute to the character development and narrative construction in the fictional text, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (LCL). LCL is an iconic novel that explores sensuality and sexuality as being an essential part of humanity. To collect linguistic material for examination, I used a frequency list of the text of LCL as the primary source. From the frequency list, the most frequent mental verbs, perception verbs, body part nouns and adjectives were chosen for retrieving the most frequent 2/3-grams. These expressions, which occur frequently in the text, are primarily used for establishing the viewpoint of the leading character, Connie. These verbs, nouns and adjectives are also used to present the other main characters’ internal states, perceptions and viewpoints, although less frequently. These characters’ inner worlds, compared wi...
The narrative world of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1992 [1927]) is primarily composed of its chara... more The narrative world of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1992 [1927]) is primarily composed of its characters’ thought and speech presentation. One character’s flow of thoughts is connected with another character’s thoughts, and viewpoint shifts occur very quickly and frequently. This article analyses how the two connectives ‘but’ and ‘for’ contribute to viewpoint shifting by comparing their stylistic, pragmatic functions in contexts where similar types of viewpoint shifting occur. Adopting a corpus-assisted approach, sentences and clauses before and after ‘but’ and ‘for’ are compared when these sentences and clauses are identified as being in similar discourse presentation categories such as free direct thought and direct speech. ‘But’ emphasizes the distinction between the narration and a character’s discourse or between two characters’ discourse, whereas ‘for’ helps viewpoint shifting to take place more implicitly, as a result of which the boundary between the different voices tends to be blurred.
Although they have been characterized in terms of the mixture of a protagonist's and the narr... more Although they have been characterized in terms of the mixture of a protagonist's and the narrator's voices, the formal specifications of the free indirect forms of speech and thought presentation are not always applicable to actual cases, and the decision to make a free indirect speech (FIS) or free indirect thought (FIT) reading mainly depends on the contexts in which that decision occurs. This study compares prototypical FIS/FIT cases with those which are ambiguous between narration and either one of these forms (N-FIS/N-FIT cases) and tries to specify the textual/contextual elements which differentiate straightforward FIS/FIT and N-FIS/N-FIT ambiguities. The analysis, which is based on the data of the Lancaster Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation (SW&TP) corpus, shows that the management of viewpoint is the key to distinguishing straightforward FIS/FIT from ambiguous cases. It also suggests that N-FIS and N-FIT ambiguities with narration can have different effects on...
This paper reports the corpus findings on the positions of reporting clauses of speech presentati... more This paper reports the corpus findings on the positions of reporting clauses of speech presentation. In direct speech, the preferred positions of reporting clauses vary according to text types, and the results are compared with those of Biber et al. (1999). In indirect speech, more than 90% of reporting clauses are found in the initial position. Although fronted reported clauses of indirect speech in fictional texts have been treated as an intermediate form between indirect and free indirect speech, the corpus data from news reports shows textual/contextual conditions where reported clauses tend to be fronted. This phenomenon in the press data seems to have different motivations from the one in fiction which often manipulates shift of viewpoints.
ABSTRACT People's speech can be misrepresented in the media in many ways, and such misrep... more ABSTRACT People's speech can be misrepresented in the media in many ways, and such misrepresentation is often disputed in court. As an example of misrepresentation of speech, this paper examines an Australian court case, in which newspaper articles featuring a Christmas cruise were decided to be misleading and defamatory. By analysing the news articles, the transcripts of the witnesses’ testimonies and the judge's decision, this paper investigates how people's speech can be misrepresented in news reports. After summarising the strategies which the applicant (the cruise company) and the respondent (the newspaper) adopted in court to disprove/prove the accuracy and credibility of the reported speech in the news articles about the cruise, examples of speech presentation in one of the articles are analysed from a linguistic perspective. In identifying misrepresentation, the court attempted to reconstruct the anterior speech events and negotiate the meanings of the key expressions, which appeared in the reported speech and were expected to have occurred in the anterior speech. The court proceedings show that the accuracy and credibility of the reported speech are closely related to the factual evidence. The analyses of the court transcripts reveal how the meanings of the key expressions in the original speech events can be modified through recontextualisation of the reported speech. Misrepresentation of speech can also be a product of an interaction between the textual structure of media discourse and untruthful speech presentation.
Over the past decade, more and more writers have used the present tense as the primary tense for ... more Over the past decade, more and more writers have used the present tense as the primary tense for their fictional narratives. This article shows that contemporary present-tense fiction has more lexical and syntactic characteristics which are similar to spoken discourse than past-tense fiction by comparing lexis and structures in two corpora: a corpus consisting of present-tense narratives and a corpus of past-tense narratives. It also discusses how the use of the present tense affects the management of viewpoint in narrative by relating its lexical, structural characteristics to the presentation of characters’ speech and thoughts.
This paper examines how particular multi-word sequences and a set of adjectives that are closely ... more This paper examines how particular multi-word sequences and a set of adjectives that are closely related to the leading protagonists’ viewpoints contribute to the character development and narrative construction in the fictional text, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (LCL). LCL is an iconic novel that explores sensuality and sexuality as being an essential part of humanity. To collect linguistic material for examination, I used a frequency list of the text of LCL as the primary source. From the frequency list, the most frequent mental verbs, perception verbs, body part nouns and adjectives were chosen for retrieving the most frequent 2/3-grams. These expressions, which occur frequently in the text, are primarily used for establishing the viewpoint of the leading character, Connie. These verbs, nouns and adjectives are also used to present the other main characters’ internal states, perceptions and viewpoints, although less frequently. These characters’ inner worlds, compared wi...
The narrative world of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1992 [1927]) is primarily composed of its chara... more The narrative world of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1992 [1927]) is primarily composed of its characters’ thought and speech presentation. One character’s flow of thoughts is connected with another character’s thoughts, and viewpoint shifts occur very quickly and frequently. This article analyses how the two connectives ‘but’ and ‘for’ contribute to viewpoint shifting by comparing their stylistic, pragmatic functions in contexts where similar types of viewpoint shifting occur. Adopting a corpus-assisted approach, sentences and clauses before and after ‘but’ and ‘for’ are compared when these sentences and clauses are identified as being in similar discourse presentation categories such as free direct thought and direct speech. ‘But’ emphasizes the distinction between the narration and a character’s discourse or between two characters’ discourse, whereas ‘for’ helps viewpoint shifting to take place more implicitly, as a result of which the boundary between the different voices tends to be blurred.
Although they have been characterized in terms of the mixture of a protagonist's and the narr... more Although they have been characterized in terms of the mixture of a protagonist's and the narrator's voices, the formal specifications of the free indirect forms of speech and thought presentation are not always applicable to actual cases, and the decision to make a free indirect speech (FIS) or free indirect thought (FIT) reading mainly depends on the contexts in which that decision occurs. This study compares prototypical FIS/FIT cases with those which are ambiguous between narration and either one of these forms (N-FIS/N-FIT cases) and tries to specify the textual/contextual elements which differentiate straightforward FIS/FIT and N-FIS/N-FIT ambiguities. The analysis, which is based on the data of the Lancaster Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation (SW&TP) corpus, shows that the management of viewpoint is the key to distinguishing straightforward FIS/FIT from ambiguous cases. It also suggests that N-FIS and N-FIT ambiguities with narration can have different effects on...
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