Speech and Thought Presentation

Direct and Indirect Speech

The most elementary concepts in speech and thought presentation are those

of direct and indirect speech. Although you should know how to distinguish
between direct and indirect speech, it may be useful to go over some of the salient points of
comparison between them as they exist in fictional narratives. We will also be viewing them in
relation to the Hallidayan grammatical framework which we have been studying. It may be noted
as a preliminary that a feature which both direct and indirect speech share is the reporting
clause.

Some of the salient points of comparison between direct and indirect speech in fictional

narratives are given in the table below.

Table 19.1 Direct and Indirect Speech: Features

(A) (B) (C)
Direct speech: Indirect speech: Indirect speech:
Use of Character's discourse Narrator's discourse Character's
in 1st & 3rd person in 3rd person discourse
narratives narratives in 3rd person
narratives
1. Inverted Used. Not used. Not used.
Commas
2. Parataxis / Secondary clause Secondary clause Same as B2.
Hypotaxis is paratactically linked to is hypotactically linked
the primary clause. to the primary clause,
Parataxis omits and the subordinating
subordinating conjunction, whether
conjunctions ellipted or realised,
while hypotaxis  initiates the dependent
utilizes them clause.
such as the
terms "when",
"although", and
"after".
3. Pronouns Use of 1st person & 2nd 1st & 2nd person a) 1st person
person pronouns to refer pronouns converted narratives: 1st
to personages existing in to 3rd person pronouns. person pronouns
the discourse situation. used by
the narrator to
refer to himself.
b) 1st & 3rd  pe
rson narratives
-- reported
speech
embedded withi
 n direct speech
in  character’s
discourse:
 1st person
pronouns are
used by
the character to
refer to himself.
 2nd person
pronouns to refer
to the characters
who are being
directly
addressed to,
and who were
either the
addressers or
addressees of the
original
discourse.
 Otherwise,
all 2nd person
pronouns are
converted to 3rd
person
pronouns.
4. Tense Use of present tense to Change of present tense Present
describe circumstances or verbs to their past tense may be
entities existing within the tense equivalents. used if the
discourse situation. original speech
is in the
immediate past
of the act of
reporting, and if
the
circumstances or
entities stated or
described in the
original speech
still
exist. Otherwise
, the past tense
is generally
used, especially
in relation to the
reporting verb in
 the main clause.
5. Time When referring to events Time Time
Adverbials which are proximate to the adverbials mentioned in adverbials are
act of speaking, 5A, used according
relevant time are converted to then, o to the currency
adverbials like now, today,  n that day / the day or proximity
yesterday, may be used. before, the day after etc. of the reported
event in relation
to the act of
speech or
narration;
i.e. either 5A or
5B may be
relevant.
6. Demon- The ‘near’ The ‘near’ The ‘near’
stratives: Near demonstratives this, these, demonstratives demonstratives
or Remote and here are used to refer are converted to continue to be
to entities or situations ‘remote’ used if the
existing during the speech demonstratives: that, th entities or
event. ose, there. situations
existing during
the original
speech event still
remain. Otherwi
se, the
demonstratives
are converted to
their ‘remote’
counterparts.
Again, either
Features analysed in speech
6Apresentation:
or 6B may
Direct speech (DS)
be relevant.
Indirect speech (IS)
Narrative Report of Action (NRA)
Other Ways of Representing Speech
Narrative Report of Speech Act(s) (NRSA)
Free Indirect Speech (FIS)
In addition to direct and indirect speech (DS & IS), Direct Speech (FDS)
the following are also important in the analysis
of speech presentation: Narrative Report of
Action (NRA), Narrative Report of Speech Act(s) (NRSA), Free Indirect Speech (FIS), and Free
Direct Speech (FDS).

NRA is used to describe the physical action of characters, excluding their speech acts.
NRSA refers either to the speech acts of characters, excluding the content of their speech, or, to
the speech acts of characters plus a vague or general description of what has been said, using
a circumstantial adjunct instead of a reported clause (as in FIS and DS).
FIS and FDS operate when the narrator has less control over the speech of the characters than
in IS and DS.

In relation to the degree of control that the narrator has over the character's speech, it may be
useful to view the concepts we have studied in terms of what has been described as the
narrator's cline of interference (see chapter 10 of Leech & Short):

narrator has the most control narrator has the least control
over the narrative over the narrative
    >
NRA  →   NRSA →  IS →  FIS →  DS →  FDS

It may help us to view the concept of FIS from a clearer perspective if we view it as a half-way
house between IS and DS. In other words, FIS incorporates features found in both columns (A)
and (B); for example,

 inverted commas are not used,

 but one or some (but not all) of these features are found in the reported speech:
a. 1st and 2nd person pronouns,
b. present tense,
c. non-conversion of the appropriate time adverbials,
d. the use of the 'near' (instead of the 'remote') demonstratives,
e. exclamations, imperatives, incomplete clauses, frequent ellipses etc. which
'distance' the speech from the voice of the narrator and move it closer to the direct
speech of the character.

The crucial element in FDS which distinguishes it from both DS and FIS is usually the missing
reporting clause. In fact, DS minus the reporting clause (at least as far as Leech and Short's
definition of FDS is concerned), is FDS. But FDS can also occur without the inverted commas to
indicate that it is the speech of a character. In this case, distinguishing FDS from FIS may be
quite tricky, as certain examples of FIS also do not have the reporting clause. In this case, we
should adopt the following procedure:

if none of the features indicated in the previous paragraph is converted to their corresponding
'indirect' counterparts, then we are dealing with FDS (this occurs even if the reporting clause is
present), but if one or some of the above features are converted to their 'indirect' counterparts,
then we are dealing with FIS.

Thought Presentation

Thought presentation should not present us with any new major difficulty in comparison with
speech presentation, as thought presentation does not confront us with a completely new set of
rules. In terms of terminology, all the categories of thought presentation are derived by changing
the S in speech presentation to T: i.e. NRTA, IT, FIT, DT, and FDT. The cline of the narrator's
interference is also similar, i.e., the narrator has most control in NRTA and least control in FDT.
But the 'norm' for thought presentation is different. In speech presentation, DS is the norm,
whereas in thought presentation, it is IT.

Beginning with the categories of speech presentation, the ‘baseline’ form against which other
forms are often measured is Direct Speech (DS). In this mode, the reported clause, which tells us
what was said, is enclosed within quotation marks, while the reporting clause (which tells us who
did the reporting) is situated around it.

The following two examples of Direct Speech (DS) illustrate how the reporting clause in this
mode may be either put in front of, or, as is more common, placed after the quoted material:

(1) She said, ‘I’ll come here tomorrow.’

(2) ‘I’ll come here tomorrow,’ she said.

Direct Speech stands in contrast to (though is systematically related to) an altogether more
remote form of reporting known as Indirect Speech (IS). Here is the equivalent Indirect form of
the examples above:

(3) She said that she would go there the following day.

The method for converting Direct forms into Indirect ones requires you to carry out a series of
simultaneous grammatical operations. These are summarised as follows:

Stage 1: Make the reported material distant from the actual speech used.

Stage 2: Alter pronouns by shifting 1st and 2nd person pronouns (‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’) into
3rd person forms (‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’ or ‘they’).

Stage 3: Switch deictic words (see A7) from their proximal forms into their distal forms.

Stage 4: Change the direction of movement verbs.

Stage 5: Place tenses in their ‘backshifted’ forms. For example, if the primary tense is in
the simple present (eg. ‘know’) the backshifted tense will be in the simple past (‘knew’).
Through this process, a modal verb like ‘will’ becomes ‘would’, ‘does’ becomes ‘did’,
‘must’ becomes ‘had to’, ‘is’ becomes ‘was’ and so on. If the primary tense is already in
the past (‘knew’) the backshifted tense will be past perfect (‘had known’).

When these steps are carried out, the following changes are brought about to the report in our
Direct Speech example:
A further operation may be carried out on both the Direct and the Indirect forms above to render
them into their corresponding ‘Free’ variants. This involves removing the reporting clause and
removing, if present, any inverted commas. If this operation is only partially followed through,
then various intermediate forms present themselves. Here are the ‘Free’ versions, along with
possible subvarieties, of both the DS and IS forms introduced above:
Free Direct Speech (FDS):
(4) I’ll come here tomorrow, she said.
(5) ‘I’ll come here tomorrow.’
(6) I’ll come here tomorrow. (freest form)
Free Indirect Speech (FIS):
(7) She would be there the following day.
(8) She would be there tomorrow. (freest form)
The categories available for presenting thought in narrative fiction are formally similar to those
for speech. Here are examples of the four main types:
He wondered, ‘Does she still love me?’ (Direct Thought: DT)
Does she still love me? (Free Direct Thought: FDT)
He wondered if she still loved him. (Indirect Thought: IT)
Did she still love him? (Free Indirect Thought: FIT)
It is important to note that in spite of their formal similarities, there are significant conceptual
differences between the speech and thought modes. Whereas speech could be overhead and
reported by any bystander to an interaction, the presentation of thought is somewhat ‘counterfeit’
insofar as it presumes entry into the private consciousness of a character. To this extent, the
presentation of thought in stories is ultimately an artifice (see Short 1996: 290).
There is one more important category of speech and thought presentation which we can add to
our model. This is manifested in its speech and thought variants as, respectively, Narrative
Report of Speech (NRS) and Narrative Report of Thought (NRT). This technique involves a
narrator reporting that speech or thought has taken place but without offering any indication or
flavour of the actual words used. Here are two Narrative Report transpositions, one for speech
and one for thought, of the basic examples given above:
(9) She spoke of their plans for the day ahead. (Narrative Report of Speech)
(10) He wondered about her love for him. (Narrative Report of Thought)
Unlike the more explicit modes discussed above, where it is possible to work out the ‘words’ in
which something was said or thought, this mode can be used to summarise whole stretches of
reported speech or thought. That is not to say that the NRS and NRT modes are always more
‘economical’ than their more explicit counterparts – in fact, it is sometimes easier to report
verbatim what someone has uttered than to try to look for alternative ways of capturing what
they have said.

Practice
The practical work suggested in unit C8 of this thread is very detailed, requiring some fine
distinctions to be drawn between various modes of speech and thought presentation, so this is a
good place to begin firming up your knowledge of how the basic speech and thought categories
work. Admittedly a departure from the overall format of this introductory section, the remainder
of this unit therefore develops a short transposition exercise which is designed to test the
categories introduced thus far.
Examples a–e listed below are all written in the Direct mode of speech or thought presentation.
Working from these base forms, try to convert the five examples into their equivalent Free
Direct, Indirect and Free Indirect modes. Some suggestions on how to proceed are offered below
the examples:
a ‘I know this trick of yours!’ she said. [said to a male addressee]
Direct Speech: “I know this trick of yours,” she said.
Free Direct Speech: I know this trick of yours.
Indirect Speech: She said she knew that trick of him.
Free Indirect Speech: She knew that trick of him.
b ‘Can you get here next week?’ he asked. [said to a female addressee]
Free Direct Speech: Can you get here next week?
Indirect Speech: He asked her if she could get there the following week.
FIS: Could she get there the following week?
c ‘Why isn’t John here?’ she asked herself.
FDS: Why isn’t John here?
IS: She asked herself why John was not there.
FIS: Why was John not there?
d She said, ‘We must leave tonight.’
FDS: We must leave tonight.
IS: She told them they had to leave that night.
FIS: They had to leave that night.
e ‘Help yourselves,’ he urged them.
FDS: Help yourselves.
 IS: He urged them to help themselves.
FIS: They need to help themselves.

It is probably most straightforward if you convert them into their Free Direct counterparts first of
all. Then, going back to the Direct forms, convert these into their Indirect variants using the five
sets of criteria provided in the sub-unit above. It should also be possible to get from the Free
Direct variants to their equivalent Free Indirect forms by following these same criteria. That said,
there are certain types of grammatical patterns which block some transpositions and you may
come up against some them here. If so, try to account for any problems you encounter. Can you
construct some NRS and NRT forms for a–e also? For solutions and commentary, go to unit D8.

TECHNIQUES OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT PRESENTATION

Unit A8 introduced a basic model for assessing how speech and thought is represented in
narrative while in B7, some observations were made on different planes of point of view in
prose fiction. This unit offers, amongst other things, an opportunity to ‘marry’ both topics by
examining the way both narratorial viewpoint and character perspective can be mediated through
techniques of speech and thought presentation. The following sub-unit will look at the more
indirect techniques, dealing particularly with the special category of Free Indirect Discourse.
Then, attention focuses on some of the more direct forms of speech and thought presentation,
with particular emphasis on the Free Direct mode, in both its speech and thought guises. The
final sub-unit offers a short commentary on the connections between point of view and speech
and thought presentation.
Indirect discourse presentation
Whatever the particular category used, all of the techniques of speech and thought presentation
represent a shift away from basic narrative structure towards the discourse of a particular
character. The external narrative structure onto which the modes of speech and thought are
grafted is referred to as Narrator’s Representation of Action (NRA). It describes the actions,
perceptions and states that occur in the world of the fiction; it basically encompasses all non-
speech and non-thought phenomena (see Short 1996: 292). As noted in the first unit of this
strand, the most ‘minimal’ transition into a character’s speech or thought is where a narrator
reports that speech or thought has taken place but offers no indication or flavour of the actual
words used. Narrative Report (of speech/thought) thus marks the first step away, as it were, from
NRA and although it is often used to summarise whole stretches of reported speech or thought,
that is not the only narrative function it serves. Consider the following episode from Henry
Fielding’s novel Tom Jones. Here the eponymous hero, although required to leave the room
midway through the encounter, finds himself momentarily in the company of some ‘great
personages’:

. . . the conversation began to be, as the phrase is, extremely brilliant. However, as
nothing past in it which can be thought material to this history, or indeed, very material in
 itself, I shall omit the relation; the rather as I have known some very fine polite
conversation grow extremely dull, when transcribed into books [. . .]
He [Tom Jones] was no sooner gone, than the great personages who had taken no notice
of him present, began to take much notice of him in his absence; but if the reader hath
already excused us from relating the more brilliant part of this conversation, he will be
very ready to excuse the repetition of what may be called vulgar abuse . . . (Fielding 1970
[1749]: 277–8)

Fielding rather subtly uses the Narrative Report of Speech (NRS) mode both as a mechanism for
compressing a sequence of extended dialogue and as an ironizing device to critique the ‘great
personages’. With characteristically false modesty, Fielding’s narrator politely demurs from
transcribing such reputedly ‘fine’ talk thereby portraying as arid and effete the conversation of
the assembled socialites.
Of all the categories of the speech and thought framework, there is one mode that has come
under particular scrutiny from a stylistic perspective. This mode is Free Indirect Discourse (FID),
a term which usefully subsumes both its speech (FIS) and thought (FIT) variants. The
importance of this narrative technique is evidenced in the existence of numerous other terms for
it, such as erleßte rede, ‘indirect interior impression this mode gives of both a character and
narrator speaking simultaneously, through a kind of ‘dual voice’ (yet another term for FID!).
Recalling the definition offered in A8, this mode displays all the features of indirectness but,
crucially, it lacks a reporting clause and inverted commas. Consider the following brief example
of the technique ‘at work’. In this passage from Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano, M.
Laruelle is contemplating his future in Mexico just before, in the second paragraph, his thoughts
turn abruptly and rather more trivially towards the weather:
Yet in the Earthly Paradise, what had he done? He had made few friends. He had
acquired a Mexican mistress with whom he quarrelled, and numerous beautiful Mayan
idols he would be unable to take out of the country, and he had – M. Laruelle wondered if
it was going to rain . . . (Lowry 1984 [1947]: 16)
To give some idea of how effective this first paragraph of FIT is and of how smoothly it blends,
or gives the impression of blending, both narrator and character voices, it is worth rewriting it in
another mode. A useful technique in stylistic analysis, the transposition of a passage into other
structural possibilities often sheds light on the subtleties of its textual composition. If for
example the passage were written as Direct Thought (see the criteria in A8), the result would be
rather more stilted and contrived in feel:
‘Yet in the Earthly Paradise, what have I done?’ he wondered. ‘I have made few friends’,
he thought to himself. He pondered, ‘I have acquired a Mexican mistress with whom I
quarrel . . .’
Alternatively, a Free Direct version (see A8), which would dispense with both reporting clauses
and inverted commas, would certainly add some immediacy to the narrative representation:
Yet in the Earthly Paradise, what have I done? I have made few friends. I have acquired a
Mexican mistress with whom I quarrel . . .
With respect to Lowry’s original, however, the stylistic force of the Free Indirect mode inheres
in its seeming coalescence of the thoughts of the character with the structural framework,
including deixis and tense, of a third-person heterodiegetic narrative. This coalescence results in
an apparent blurring of focus where it is often difficult to distinguish whether the thoughts
relayed are to be attributed to a participating character or to the external third-person narrator.
This explains to some extent the jolt delivered by the second paragraph as it shifts into the
Indirect Speech mode: the dual voice of FIT evaporates as the narrative thread is brought more
tightly under the control of the narrator. In fact, such is the schism between the IS and FIT modes
here that it even suggests that M. Laruelle is someone other than the reflector of fiction in the
paragraph preceding.

These general principles of FID apply to third-person narratives, narratives which offer the
opportunity to fashion a seeming split between the voices of character and narrator. What, then,
of first-person narratives where narrator and character may be one and the same entity? In other
words, how does FID work in homodiegetic as opposed to heterodiegetic fiction? To answer
these questions, consider first of all the following extract from a homodiegetic narrative written
in the first person:
Wednesday. In the afternoon, Haze (Common-sensical shoes, tailor-made dress) said she
was driving downtown to buy a present for a friend of a friend of hers, and would I please
come too because I have such a wonderful taste in textures and perfumes. ‘Choose your
favourite seduction,’ she purred. (Lolita; Nabokov 1986 [1955]: 50)
Here, in what is a very common type of staged progression in narrative, a sequence begins in
Indirect Speech (‘Haze said she was driving downtown’), then ‘slips’ into more free and more
direct forms, before culminating in Direct Speech (‘Choose your favourite seduction’, she
purred.’). This sequence contains a transitional sequence of FIS: ‘Would I please come too
because I have such a wonderful taste in textures and perfumes.’ Now, the criteria for identifying
FID in a first-person, as opposed to thirdperson, narrative are slightly different because of a
variation in the overall pronoun system of the homodiegetic narrative. In reported speech, any
second person pronouns used to address the character-narrator are switched, not to the third
person, but to the first person. Whereas the FIS sequence highlighted does not capture the exact
words that would have been said to the narrator, a Direct Speech rendition of it would (‘Will you
please come too . . .’), thereby bringing it into line with the actual DS sequence following
(‘Choose your favourite seduction’). So although much of its stylistic import remains the same,
Free Indirect Discourse in first-person narratives behaves structurally rather differently from that
used in third-person narratives.

Direct discourse presentation

The Free Direct modes of speech and thought presentation have a very different kind of stylistic
currency compared to their counterparts in the Free Indirect modes. For example, Free Direct
Thought (FDT) is the mainstay of the so-called ‘stream of consciousness’ technique of prose
writing. This technique involves supplementing FDT with a type of grammatical abbreviation
known as ellipsis, to produce a fast-paced flow of sometimes fragmentary or partial thoughts as
they enter the consciousness of a character or narrator. Here is a brief example of the method at
work. Taken from ‘The Lotus Eaters’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, this fragment details Bloom’s
encounter with Bantam Lyons outside a chemist’s:
Shaved off his moustache again, by Jove! Long cold upper lip. To look younger. He does
look balmy. Younger than I am. (Joyce 1980 [1922]: 86)
It is the highly elliptical quality of the Free Direct Thought here, often pared down to its
grammatical bare bones, which engenders the ‘stream of consciousness’ effect By imputation,
then, this means that not all uses of FDT constitute stream of consciousness. For example, the
earlier transposition of the Lowry extract into FDTtook it only part of the way towards a fully
fledged stream of consciousness style.
Although that short passage seems not to lend itself especially well to ellipsis, here is an attempt
to push it that little bit further towards stream of consciousness:
In the Earthly Paradise. But what have I done? Few friends.
Mexican mistress, acquired. We quarrel.
Further discussion of the stream of consciousness technique, with a more cognitively driven
account of its stylistic impact, is developed in C10. It is a simple rule of thumb of speech and
thought presentation that the more free and/or direct the mode of presentation, the more a
narrator’s control over what was thought or said diminishes; so much so that a character is
permitted ultimately to express thoughts or speech in a seemingly unmediated way. In the speech
presentation mode, the freest and most direct form is Free Direct Speech, which is characterised
by the loss of reporting clauses or inverted commas, or both. In prose fiction, one of the stylistic
functions of FDS is to give an impression of untrammelled, free-flowing dialogue between
characters. Here is a second example from Ian McEwan’s novel Amsterdam (see B7) involving
one of the novel’s central characters, newspaper editor Vernon Halliday. Arriving late to his
office, Halliday finds that a queue of subeditors and secretaries awaits him:

. . . Everyone moved with him. Ball was saying, ‘This Middlesbrough photo. I’d like to
avoid the trouble we got into over the wheelchair Olympics. I thought we’d go for
something pretty straightforward . . .’
‘I want an exciting picture, Jeremy. I can’t see them in the same week, Jean. It wouldn’t
look right. Tell him Thursday.’
‘I had in mind an upright Victorian sort of thing. A dignified portrait.’
‘He’s leaving for Angola. The idea was he’d go straight out to Heathrow as soon as he’d
seen you.’
‘Mr Halliday?’
‘I don’t want dignified portraits, even in obits. Get them to show us how they gave each
other the bite marks. OK, I’ll see him before he leaves. Tony, is this about the parking?’
(McEwan 1998: 39–40)
When narrated in the Free Direct Speech mode, the sheer weight of the multiple and varied
requests to Vernon Halliday makes it very difficult both to follow the topic switches in this
interaction and to ascertain which interlocutor is asking which question.
After the opening sequence of Direct Speech, reporting clauses disappear altogether as the
dialogue picks up momentum. True, there are some clues in the form of vocatives which help
identify who is speaking at certain times. These terms of address, such as ‘Jeremy’, ‘Jean’,
‘Tony’ and ‘Mr. Halliday’, serve a deictic function by pointing out the intended addressee of a
particular utterance. Aside from that, however, the use of FDS gives a kind of ‘meaningful
incoherence’ to this dialogue insofar as it consolidates the impression of a busy newspaper editor
who, on entering his office, is subject to a rapid-fire question and answer routine involving
disparate and numerous topics.
Character viewpoint and speech and thought presentation
As a broad principle, when a character’s speech or thought processes are represented, we see
things, even if momentarily, from that character’s point of view. However, the reverse does not
necessarily apply, which is to say that it is possible to be located within a character’s viewpoint
without any of the formal modes of speech and thought presentation being employed. Consider
again the passage from McEwan’s Amsterdam which was examined in B7. It was noted that the
first part of this passage anchors spatial point of view within the perspective of a particular
character while the second part relays the active and (self )conscious thought processes of that
same character through Free Indirect Thought. The FIT strand ‘kicks in’ in the second sentence
of this sequence
One of the others was bringing a tray of coffees from the takeaway shop on Horseferry
Road. What could they ever hope to get that they didn’t already have?
and continues right to the end of the passage (and it can be tested by transpositions of the sort
suggested here and elsewhere). However, the point at issue is that only in the latter half of the
passage is Free Indirect Thought used even though the character of Rose Garmony has
consistently been the reflector of fiction for the entire passage. Thus, whereas the psychological
point of view adopted is hers throughout, it is only in part delivered by a formal mode of thought
presentation.
This unit is developed along its horizontal axis in unit C8, which offers some further extensions
and applications of the speech and thought model elaborated in A8. Along the vertical axis, the
interactive dimensions of speech and dialogue are developed. Unit B9 uses techniques in
discourse analysis to explore fictional dialogue, although the focus switches from speech in
novels to interaction between characters in plays.