Pragmatics of Fiction 9783110431094, 9783110439700

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Pragmatics of Fiction HoPs 12

Handbooks of Pragmatics

Editors

Wolfram Bublitz Andreas H. Jucker Klaus P. Schneider Volume 12

De Gruyter Mouton

Pragmatics of Fiction

Edited by

Miriam A. Locher Andreas H. Jucker

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-043970-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-043109-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-043112-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. ” 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: efetova/iStock/thinkstock Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen 앝 Printed on acid-free paper 앪 Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface to the handbook series Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker and Klaus P. Schneider The series Handbooks of Pragmatics, which comprises thirteen self-contained volumes, provides a comprehensive overview of the entire field of pragmatics. It is meant to reflect the substantial and wide-ranging significance of pragmatics as a genuinely multi- and transdisciplinary field for nearly all areas of language description, and also to account for its remarkable and continuously rising popularity in linguistics and adjoining disciplines. All thirteen handbooks share the same wide understanding of pragmatics as the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behaviour. Its purview includes patterns of linguistic actions, language functions, types of inferences, principles of communication, frames of knowledge, attitude and belief, as well as organisational principles of text and discourse. Pragmatics deals with meaning-in-context, which for analytical purposes can be viewed from different perspectives (that of the speaker, the recipient, the analyst, etc.). It bridges the gap between the system side of language and the use side, and relates both of them at the same time. Unlike syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics and other linguistic disciplines, pragmatics is defined by its point of view more than by its objects of investigation. The former precedes (actually creates) the latter. Researchers in pragmatics work in all areas of linguistics (and beyond), but from a distinctive perspective that makes their work pragmatic and leads to new findings and to reinterpretations of old findings. The focal point of pragmatics (from the Greek pragma ‘act’) is linguistic action (and inter-action): it is the hub around which all accounts in these handbooks revolve. Despite its roots in philosophy, classical rhetorical tradition and stylistics, pragmatics is a relatively recent discipline within linguistics. C. S. Peirce and C. Morris introduced pragmatics into semiotics early in the twentieth century. But it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that linguists took note of the term and began referring to performance phenomena and, subsequently, to ideas developed and advanced by Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and other ordinary language philosophers. Since the ensuing pragmatic turn, pragmatics has developed more rapidly and diversely than any other linguistic discipline. The series is characterised by two general objectives. Firstly, it sets out to reflect the field by presenting in-depth articles covering the central and multifarious theories and methodological approaches as well as core concepts and topics characteristic of pragmatics as the analysis of language use in social contexts. All articles are written specifically for this handbook series. They are both state of the art reviews and critical evaluations of their topic in the light of recent developments. Secondly, while we accept its extraordinary complexity and diversity DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-202

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Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker and Klaus P. Schneider

(which we consider a decided asset), we suggest a definite structure, which gives coherence to the entire field of pragmatics and provides orientation to the user of these handbooks. The series specifically pursues the following aims: – it operates with a wide conception of pragmatics, dealing with approaches that are traditional and contemporary, linguistic and philosophical, social and cultural, text- and context-based, as well as diachronic and synchronic; – it views pragmatics from both theoretical and applied perspectives; – it reflects the state of the art in a comprehensive and coherent way, providing a systematic overview of past, present and possible future developments; – it describes theoretical paradigms, methodological accounts and a large number and variety of topical areas comprehensively yet concisely; – it is organised in a principled fashion reflecting our understanding of the structure of the field, with entries appearing in conceptually related groups; – it serves as a comprehensive, reliable, authoritative guide to the central issues in pragmatics; – it is internationally oriented, meeting the needs of the international pragmatic community; – it is interdisciplinary, including pragmatically relevant entries from adjacent fields such as philosophy, anthropology and sociology, neuroscience and psychology, semantics, grammar, discourse and media analysis as well as literary studies; – it provides reliable orientational overviews useful both to students and more advanced scholars and teachers. The thirteen volumes are arranged according to the following principles. The first three volumes are dedicated to the foundations of pragmatics with a focus on micro and macro units: Foundations must be at the beginning (volume 1), followed by the core concepts in pragmatics, speech actions (micro level in volume 2) and discourse (macro level in volume 3). The following six volumes provide cognitive (volume 4), societal (volume 5) and interactional (volume 6) perspectives and discuss variability from a cultural and contrastive (volume 7), a diachronic (volume 8) and a medial (volume 9) viewpoint. The remaining four volumes address methodological (volume 10), sociomedial (volume 11), fictional (volume 12), and developmental and clinical (volume 13) aspects of pragmatics: 1. Foundations of pragmatics Wolfram Bublitz and Neal Norrick 2. Pragmatics of speech actions Marina Sbisá and Ken Turner 3. Pragmatics of discourse Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron

Preface to the handbook series 

4. Cognitive pragmatics Hans-Jörg Schmid 5. Pragmatics of society Gisle Andersen and Karin Aijmer 6. Interpersonal pragmatics Miriam A. Locher and Sage L. Graham 7. Pragmatics across languages and cultures Anna Trosborg 8. Historical pragmatics Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen 9. Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication Susan Herring, Dieter Stein and Tuija Virtanen 10. Methods in pragmatics Andreas H. Jucker, Klaus P. Schneider and Wolfram Bublitz 11. Pragmatics of social media Christian R. Hoffmann and Wolfram Bublitz 12. Pragmatics of fiction Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker 13. Developmental and clinical pragmatics Klaus P. Schneider and Elly Ifantidou

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Preface The production and reception of a piece of literature, a novel, for instance, or a short story, constitutes a very complex communicative act. An author communicates with readers who he or she usually does not know personally and who may read this piece of literature many years, even centuries after its production. The content of the piece of literature normally contains different layers of communication as well. What literary scholars call an implied author communicates to implied readers and narrates events that contain characters that communicate with each other. The communicative complexities may increase even further through the intervention of actors if the piece of literature is a play or a movie. In view of the communicative richness of literary communication, it may seem surprising, therefore, that until not very long ago, most pragmaticists did not consider literature to be legitimate data for their investigations. By and large they preferred to focus on what they took to be natural and unconstrained everyday conversations. By comparison literature seemed artificial and far removed from the realities of life. But this has clearly changed, and this volume testifies to the wealth of recent scholarly work that focuses on fictional data from a pragmatic perspective. The articles provide detailed surveys of the state of the art in research in a large number of subfields of the pragmatics of fiction, and together they provide what we hope to be a reasonably comprehensive overview of this exciting new field of research in pragmatics. We would like to thank the numerous people who have helped to bring this volume into existence. First and foremost, we would like to thank our contributors for their diligence and cooperativeness. We have enjoyed the dialogue, and we have not only learnt much about the pragmatics of fiction but have also gained new insights when appreciating fiction for non-academic purposes. Our thanks also go to the Mouton team, especially Barbara Karlson, Birgit Sievert and Wolfgang Konwitschny, for their support. Finally, we thank Aline Bieri, Denise Kaufmann, Larssyn Staley and Andrea Wüst for their exceptional editorial help and insightful comments. Basel and Zurich, January 2017

DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-203

Table of contents  

Preface to the handbook series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

v ix

1. Introducing Pragmatics of Fiction: Approaches, trends and developments Andreas H. Jucker and Miriam A. Locher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

I.

Pragmatics of fiction as communication: Foundations

2.

Participation structure in fictional discourse: Authors, scriptwriters, audiences and characters Thomas C. Messerli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

3.

The pragmatics of the genres of fiction Janet Giltrow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

4.

Fictional characterisation Jonathan Culpeper and Carolina Fernandez-Quintanilla. . . . . . . . . . . 93

5.

The role of dialogue in fiction Monika Bednarek. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

6.

Narrative perspectives on voice in fiction Christian R. Hoffmann. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

7.

Pragmatics of style in fiction Beatrix Busse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

II.

Features of orality and variation

8.

Oral features in fiction Wolfram Bublitz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

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Table of contents

Doing dialects in dialogues: Regional, social and ethnic variation in fiction Gaëlle Planchenault. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

10. Multilingualism in fiction Miriam A. Locher. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 11. The pragmatics of estrangement in fantasy and science fiction Michael Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 III. Pragmatic themes in fiction 12. Pragmatics and the translation of fiction Roberto A. Valdeón. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 13. Subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text Marie-Noëlle Guillot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 14. (Im)politeness in fiction Urszula Kizelbach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425 15. (Im)politeness and telecinematic discourse Marta Dynel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455 16. Stance in fiction Daniela Landert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489 17. Language and emotion in fiction Andreas Langlotz. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515 18. Language change and fiction Derek Denis and Sali A. Tagliamonte. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553 Bionotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of authors of scholarly work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of authors of fictional work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of fictional sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subject index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

585 591 603 605 609

1. Introducing Pragmatics of Fiction: Approaches, trends and developments Andreas H. Jucker and Miriam A. Locher Abstract: In this introduction to the handbook on the Pragmatics of Fiction we introduce the aims of the collection and position it within the field of pragmatics. Considering fiction as texts that deserve to be studied in their own right, we argue that a pragmatic perspective opens interesting avenues of investigating both the techniques of fiction and how they pattern as well as the unique communication situation into which readers/viewers enter when engaging with fictional texts. We review the changing attitudes towards fictional data in the linguists’ community and then outline the themes of the collection. 1.

Setting the stage: Why the ‘pragmatics’ of fiction?

Fictional language exists in a multitude of different forms, ranging from novels and theatre plays to cinematic movies and radio or television dramas. And pragmatics offers a multitude of different perspectives to analyze all these forms and their effects on the readers/viewers. The research field of the pragmatics of fiction is correspondingly large and diverse. In accordance with the definition adopted for the entire series of handbooks in which this volume appears, pragmatics is understood here in a wide sense as the study of the use of language in its social and historical context (see Preface to this volume by the series editors). The definition follows the conceptualization of pragmatics that has been called Continental European in contrast to the more specific Anglo-American conceptualization (Huang 2007: 4) or social pragmatics in contrast to theoretical pragmatics (Chapman 2011: 5; see also Jucker and Taavitsainen 2013: 2–5 for an overview of the two traditions). Our conceptualization of pragmatics crucially includes the social context in which communication takes place, both at the level of the extradiegetic communication between the creator of a fictional text and its recipients, and at the level of the intradiegetic communication between the characters depicted within fictional texts. Social pragmatics relies on rich contextual data about the conversationalists, their relationships and the context in which the communication takes place. It subsumes the interests of theoretical pragmatics, which focuses more narrowly on the technical, philosophical and cognitive aspects of interactional processes. But even in this wide sense our conceptualization of pragmatics provides a clear focus for the contributions in this volume in that they are all concerned with DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-001 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 1–21. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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the communicative aspects of the language of fiction. They are concerned with communication that is depicted in written fiction, communication that is enacted in drama and in telecinematic discourse, and with the communicative aspects of fiction itself, that is to say with the communication between authors, scriptwriters, producers and so on and their audiences. On the intradiegetic level of depicted and enacted communication, the contributions deal with all those aspects of language use that pragmaticists generally investigate on the basis of natural spoken language and with the specificities provided by the fictional nature of the data. On the extradiegetic level of the communication between an author or scripwriter and his or her audience, the fictional text or discourse is seen as a complex communicative act connecting the originator and the addressee. From this point of view, a literary piece of work has a performative dimension and may be analyzed as “a way of doing things with words” (Miller 2001: 1, with reference to Austin 1962), i.e. as an extended kind of speech act and as such an act of communication (see also Bredella 1992; Giltrow Ch. 3, this volume; Messerli Ch. 2, this volume; Ohmann 1971; Pratt 1977; van Dijk 1976a, 1976b, [1980] 1981, 1985). In several of his publications, Mey (2000, 2001, 2011) explores the complexities of the communicative process between the author and the reader of a literary text. The literary text has to be re-created by the reader. It is the result of the collaborative work of author and reader (Mey 2001: 789). As defined by Mey (2011: 511) “[l]iterary pragmatics is about how language is used in the production and consumption of literary texts”, which puts the focus squarely on the extradiegetic level, on the communication taking place between the author and the reader. He disentangles the multiple complexities of this communicative event which arise from the intervention of various narrative voices, as he calls them (see Mey 2000). Sell (2000), too, focuses on the extradiegetic level of literature in his study of literary communication. He is concerned with the very special situation of a communication between writers and readers belonging to different historical periods and he establishes literary criticism as a mediating force between writers and readers. Despite the richness of this literature, we are still left with the important question of the type of pragmatics needed for an analysis of fictional language. Do we need a special set of tools to analyze fiction? Do we need a pragmatics of fiction? Or can we apply the same tools that have been developed for non-fictional language? In fact, there is an extensive discussion in the context of Relevance Theory that we need a field of literary pragmatics in order to provide a satisfactory account of the process of reading literary texts, but there is also a wide consensus that the standard tools of utterance interpretation can be used for this purpose (see in particular Blakemore 1992: 155–179; Pilkington 1991, 2000; Sperber and Wilson 1995: 231–237; Uchida 1998; Wilson 2011). Relevance Theory argues that utterance interpretation depends crucially on both a process of decoding linguistic stimuli and on an inferential process. The

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inferential process is necessary to complete the result of the decoding process. Addressees need to resolve the numerous ambiguities in virtually any linguistic stimulus; they need to identify the referents of referring expressions; and they need to identify the communicative intention that the speaker is trying to get across. It is the inferential processes of disambiguation, reference assignment and enrichment that solve these tasks (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 185). And it is exactly these inferential processes that are at work in the interpretation of literature or poetic language more generally (see also Giltrow, Ch. 3, this volume). Uchida (1998: 164), for instance, shows that literary texts often create suspense through sentences whose referring expressions cannot be immediately resolved or which cannot immediately be sufficiently enriched. Pilkington (1991) argues that the indeterminate nature of poetry is the result of a large range of weakly communicated implicatures or poetic effects. This accounts for the possibility of alternative interpretations of a poem. Two readings of a poem cannot be absolutely identical because of the different cognitive environments of different readers. But the literary interpretation, like any process of utterance interpretation, is constrained by the available evidence, i.e. the linguistic stimulus. Relevance Theory, so the argument, provides a consistent and comprehensive cognitive account of utterance interpretation, and, therefore, also of the interpretation of literary texts and their poetic effects. However, Relevance Theory does not provide a better understanding of literary texts. This is the realm of literary critics. But it does provide a better understanding of how literary critics, and readers in general, work out their interpretations (Wilson 2011: 72). Literary criticism, literary theory and many explorations in stylistics go beyond pragmatics and consider a different and possibly much broader range of aspects of fiction including evaluation and interpretation, aesthetic principles and values, plot structure and much more. Much of this work has direct or indirect relevance for the contributions in this volume, but in the context of this volume, such aspects are only relevant in relation to their communicative function. Narrative developments or stylistic choices, for instance, are discussed in detail in several contributions in this volume but always with a clear perspective on their pragmatic effects. Apart from the focus on a pragmatic perspective, the contributions in this volume do not pose any restrictions on the repertoire of analytical methods that are applied to the study of the language of fiction. They include quantitative and qualitative work, empirical and more heuristic approaches. But they always probe their suitability for the very special context of the language of fiction. The chapters provide as comprehensive an overview of the relevant work in this field as possible. Each of them provides a state-of-the-art account of a particular subfield, and in their entirety they give an overview of the wealth of literature in this particular field of pragmatic research. In the following section, we will reflect on the nature of fictional data and on the slippery nature of the boundary between the fictional and non-fictional. In Section 3 we will briefly survey some of the justifications

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that have been given for using fictional data for pragmatic analyses. Section 4, finally, will give an overview of the contributions in this handbook. 2.

What is fictional data?

Sentences that appear in fictional texts do not appear to differ in their linguistic form from sentences that appear in other types of texts. There are some phrases, such as “once upon a time”, or referring expressions, such as “unicorn”, “fawn” or “magic wand”, which immediately suggest the context of a fictional text, but otherwise there is nothing in the syntax or morphology of a sentence or in the choice of vocabulary which systematically differentiates between fictional texts and other texts. Nevertheless, fictional texts enjoy a special status. They are often considered to be artistic and they achieve many functions, among them aesthetic, didactic, cultural and emotional. Different expectations apply to the claims made in such texts and to the worlds depicted in them. Linguists have always had ambivalent feelings about fictional texts. In the very early days of linguistics and dictionary writing, fictional texts, and in particular fictional texts by celebrated authors, enjoyed a special status as examples of language use particularly worthy of linguistic description and integration into dictionaries (see for example the authors used as examples for the English grammar books and dictionaries of the 18th century, but also in the Oxford English Dictionary). Linguists interested in present-day languages shunned fictional texts more or less completely for a considerably period of time. They were considered to be not so much artistic as artificial, and, therefore, unsuitable for linguistic scrutiny. But things have changed again. Corpus linguists in particular have started to investigate language in a more comprehensive way, compiling corpora of language that include many different types of genres – including fictional ones as one important variety of language. In addition to the theoretical justification that fictional texts are important in a balanced mix of natural language, there has always been the advantage that fictional texts are more easily available in large quantities and in computer-readable form than, for instance, transcribed spoken interaction. For historical corpora, fictional texts have been even more important because of their higher chances of preservation in contrast to incidental everyday texts. Pragmaticists took somewhat longer to reconcile themselves with fictional texts. In the early days of pragmatics, in the middle of the last century, pragmaticists were either language philosophers, who relied on intuited data, or they were conversation analysts, who insisted on tape-recorded “real” language. Written language was considered a derived form of language and therefore unsuitable as data for analysis. It lacked the essential features of being unadulterated, spontaneous and dialogic. However, some pragmaticists, in particular those working in historical pragmatics and in stylistics, have always resorted to fictional data because, as

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they apologetically acknowledged, there was nothing else. We will come back to these arguments in Section 3. In recent years, however, more and more pragmaticists have started to use fictional data for their investigations, and they have started to do so without apologetic justifications. Fictional language is no longer seen as artificial, deficient or contrived. On the contrary, it has come to be seen as a rich source of data, albeit one that needs to be investigated on its own terms. Fictional language is not seen as representative of language in general but as a variety of language that is sufficiently interesting in itself to deserve closer scrutinity. Fictional language, like any other form of language, can be described with respect to its participation structure. For example, we can distinguish senders and recipients within a described communicative event and the act of the fictional text interacting with its reader/viewer. All these levels can be analysed from a pragmatic perspective. Giving justice to the complex participation structure of fictional texts has in fact emerged as a theoretical challenge in itself. For the purpose of this handbook we adopt a rather broad notion of fictional language with a clear-cut focus and broad and fuzzy edges. At the core of our notion of fiction, we find such written genres as novels, short stories, poetry and comics, or more generally narratives produced through the imagination of an author in which worlds are created that are populated by fictitious characters. We also include narratives produced by playwrights or screenwriters who invent plotlines and dialogues to be performed by actors. This incorporates theatre plays as well as telecinematic discourse into our notion of fictional language. The boundaries between fictional and non-fictional language are, by any account, fuzzy and slippery.1 Historical novels, for instance, may include a large range of dialogues, which may range from the entirely invented to ‘verbatim’ reproductions of actual historical dialogues. The author may invent characters and dialogues between them with only a vague claim that such characters and such dialogues would have been possible or plausible at the time in which the historical novel is set. The author may use known historical figures in his or her plot but invent dialogues between them. The author may depict a historically attested dialogue but invent the actual wording for this dialogue. Or the author may even use some of the phrases and wordings of an attested original interaction if they have come down to us in a reliable historical document. Television documentaries may include staged dialogues invented by a scriptwriter and performed by actors, reality television shows may include a mixture of scripted and improvised dialogues,

1



According to Roman Jakobson (1960) one of the functions of language is the poetic function. It is the predominating function in literary works of art but it is also important in advertising discourse, and it is present in all other uses of language in which the linguistic form of a message has communicative importance (see Waugh 1980).

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and there are shows that work with entirely invented languages. Thus, the basic distinction between fact and fiction is much fuzzier than it might appear at first sight, but for practical purposes the distinction is useful. Our broad and relatively eclectic notion of what fiction is allows us to cover the field of pragmatics of fiction as comprehensively as possible. As the surveys in this volume will reveal, pragmaticists who use fictional data for their investigations differ in their conceptualization of what fictional data is and how it relates to non-fictional data. This diversity enriches the overview given in this handbook. In the next section, we will survey a number of different attitudes taken by pragmaticists towards fictional data, but generally we can already state that pragmaticists do not have a unified theory about the nature of fictional language. For literary theorists, the true nature of fictionality is a hotly debated topic. The papers in the handbook on fictionality edited by Klauk and Köppe (2014a), for instance, testify to the extensive discussions in this field. In their introduction, Klauk and Köppe (2014b) provide an overview of literary approaches to the distinction between fictional and non-fictional, and they make careful and useful terminological distinctions. They distinguish between the terms “fictional” and “fictionality” (“fiktional”, “Fiktionalität” in the German original), which describe utterances, texts or other media, such as pictures, movies and comics, and the terms “fictitious” and “fictivity” (“fiktiv”, “Fiktivität”), which describe characters, entities and events that have no existence in our real world. Thus, fictional texts deal with fictitious characters, entities and events. And the term “fiction” (or “fictitious world”) describes the sum of fictitious events in a fictional text (Klauk and Köppe 2014b: 5–6). Fictional texts are distinguished from non-fictional or factual texts but factual texts do not necessarily have to be true in order to be factual. Even texts that assert falsehoods can be factual in this sense. Klauk and Köppe (2014b: 15–19) distinguish several different groups of theories of fictionality on the basis of how these theories distinguish between text types that are fictional and text types that are non-fictional even though the distinction is fuzzy and many individual texts contain both fictional and non-fictional passages. First, they discuss syntactic theories of fictionality, i.e. theories that propose certain grammatical and lexical elements (e.g. “once upon a time”) that signal the fictional status of a text. According to them such theories are hardly ever proposed on their own, since syntactic elements are not compulsory and can be creatively manipulated. Second, they discuss semantic theories of fictionality. According to such theories a text is fictional if it makes assertions that are not true or if it uses non-referential expressions (e.g. names for people who do not exist), or at least a certain number of assertions are not true, etc. The third group of theories discussed by Klauk and Köppe focuses on the production of fictional texts. Its main proponent is John Searle and his 1975 paper “The logical status of fictional discourse”. According to this theory fictional texts cancel the normal felicity conditions of assertions. The speaker or writer does not have to commit himself or herself to

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the truth of the expressed proposition; he or she does not need to have evidence for its truth, etc. (Searle 1975: 322). The fourth group of theories focuses on the reception of fictional texts. There is a receptive pattern of “make-believe” that is typical of fictional texts but that, according to its main proponent, Walton (1990), is not restricted to fictional texts. Coleridge’s (1817) famous soundbite, that readers of fictional texts demonstrate a “willing suspension of disbelief” also fits into this category, but Klauk and Köppe (2014b: 17) argue that a careful reading of Coleridge reveals his position to be untenable. According to them, readers do not continuously and actively suppress an automatic interpretation of everything as untrue (see also Bredella 1992: 326–327 for a similar argument).2 And finally the fifth group of theories focuses on the context of fictional texts and the conventions and rules that appertain to certain types of texts. This theory overlaps with aspects of some of the other theories. Klaus and Köppe (2014b) conclude that most modern theories of fictionality distinguishing between fictional and non-fictional text types can – in a wider sense – be described as pragmatic because in one way or another they try to focus on the conventionalized interaction between authors, texts and readers. (Klaus and Köppe 2014b: 18, our translation)

Thus, a text is fictional because of a silent agreement between the author and the recipient (reader, theatre goer, television viewer etc.) that the characters and events in this particular text, or more generally in this type of text, are to be treated as fictitious. However, such a conceptualization does not explain the paradox of fiction, i.e. the emotional reactions of recipients of fictional texts in spite of their awareness of the fictitious nature of the events in the fictional text. Why do we fear Dracula, Klauk and Köppe (2014b: 23) ask, even if we know that Dracula is a fictitious figure from which we do not have to fear any real danger for ourselves? Such emotional reactions, according to them, can be described as irrational. However, it might also be argued that we only experience fear if we identify sufficiently with one of the characters for whom Dracula represents a threat in the fictitious world of the fictional text. The real issue, from this perspective, would be the empathy we feel for fictitious characters and our willingness to share their feelings (on emotions, see Langlotz, Ch. 17, this volume). The commonalities among all of the theories reviewed by Klauk and Köppe (2014b) is that they try to systematically distinguish between fictional and non-fictional texts while at the same time allowing for fuzzy boundaries. They thus reject the notion of panfictionality, i.e. the idea that there is no useful distinction between

2



However, see Giltrow (Ch. 3, this volume), who shows how readers are “keyed” (Goffman 1974: 130) into understanding that they are dealing with fiction, so that once this is established they need not actively and continuously suppress an automatic interpretation as untrue.

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fictional and non-fictional texts at all. All texts, according to panfictionality, are fictional. Konrad (2014: 237–238) discusses the epistemiological foundations of such theories, which maintain that a distinction between references to different types of worlds is not tenable. Factual texts no more refer to real worlds than fictional texts, and, therefore, the distinction between factual and fictional disappears. Such a position seems particularly attractive in our modern world with its ever increasing stream of information whose epistemiological status is more and more difficult to asses. However, Konrad (2014: 245) argues that the essential distinction between non-fictional and fictional texts is not so much the different references to real or imagined worlds but the conventions of assuming such a difference. Put simply, readers generally have different expectations when they read a newspaper article or a scholarly paper and when they read a poem or watch a play. Such differences are pragmatically relevant and they form the basis of this handbook. 3.

Why fictional data?

In the following we are going to review some of the different attitudes that linguists have taken towards fictional language as data for their investigations and how such attitudes have changed over time. Historical linguists, for instance, have no access to native speaker intuitions about the language they are investigating and they have to rely on the data that has survived the vagaries of time. And literary language has often had a better chance of being preserved for posterity. As a result, historical linguists have a long tradition of using literary language as data for their explorations of language use in historical periods and into the processes of language change. In fact, for a long time, the canon of good literature was considered to be the most reliable source for investigations into the historical stages of a language. It was only with the emergent availability of a broad range of non-literary genres in the last quarter of the last century that historical linguists moved away from literary sources and started to focus almost exclusively on non-literary language. Traditionally, theoretical linguists dealing with present-day languages have generally tended to rely on their own intuitions as the only acceptable source of data in their search for the innate language competence of a native speaker of a language. Sociolinguists and pragmaticists (following the European definition of pragmatics, see above), on the other hand, have relied on empirical investigations of what was considered “real” language, i.e. spontaneous spoken language. Written language was seen as derivational and as a secondary level of language use, and, therefore, not sufficiently interesting for pragmatic analyses or not reliable enough for sociolinguistic queries. Fictional language, in addition to being written language, was considered to be invented, contrived and artificial, and, thus, even less amenable for pragmatic analysis.

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It was against this, admittedly somewhat simplified, picture of total rejection of fictional language as legitimate data for linguistic investigations that several paradigm shifts started to change the situation (see Traugott 2008; and in particular Taavitsainen and Jucker 2015). First of all, there was the pragmatic turn in the 1970s and 1980s, in which linguistics turned from a focus on the competence of an idealized native speaker to a focus on actual language use, and, as a result, linguistics became more interested in empirical investigations of actual, everyday language use rather than native-speaker introspections. At the same time, there was a paradigm shift that Taavitsainen and Jucker (2015: 7) call the dispersive turn. Linguistics began to extend its interest to elements that up to then were considered marginal and unworthy of systematic study, such as discourse markers, repair structures, hesitation phenomena and the like. And it started to be more interested in the heterogeneity and variability of language. Language was no longer seen as a more or less homogeneous system but as a heterogenous system of patterned variability. The search for patterns within the observed heterogeneity and variability was guided by insights from anthropology and sociology so that variables such as education, class, gender, age, ethnic background, but also the purpose and context of an interaction became the focus of investigation. The shift can be exemplified with two monumental grammars of the English language published in 1985 and 1999. While Quirk et al. (1985) set out to provide a comprehensive grammar of the English language (as the title boldly claims), Biber et al.’s (1999) grammar highlights the variability of the English language, and even the title refers to the distinction between spoken and written language. Quirk et al. acknowledge the variability of the English language, but they explicitly focus on what they call the common core of English (Quirk et al. 1985: 16) and often relegate differences between, for instance, British English and American English to footnotes. In contrast, Biber et al. provide a systematic account not only of the differences between American English and British English and between spoken English and written English but also between the four genres conversation, fiction, news and academic writing. Against this shift in research interests and underlying assumptions about the nature of language, attitudes towards fictional language as a legitimate source of data for linguistic investigations changed as well. Fictional language came to be seen no longer as a deviation from “real” language and as a poor approximation to actual spoken language but as an interesting variety in its own right and accordingly was included as one of the four major genres accounted for in the grammar by Biber et al. This shift in attitude is also reflected in the way in which historical pragmaticists, who more than others had to rely on fictional language for their investigations, justified their use of fiction. For a long time, historical linguists felt a need to apologetically justify their choice of data. Salmon ([1965] 1987), for instance, uses Shakespeare’s work in her pioneering study of colloquial Elizabethan English and justifies her choice of data as follows:

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Andreas H. Jucker and Miriam A. Locher It is, of course, a selective and inadequate representation of speech; but the more skilful the dramatist, the more skilful he will be, if presenting the normal life of his time, in authenticating the action by an acceptable version of contemporary speech. (Salmon 1987: 265)

The choice of data, in her eyes, is not ideal but justified because no other data is available for the purpose and because Shakespeare as a great author must have been able to capture something of the flavor of the spoken language of the day. Dramatic texts provide “the only possible source – the language written to be uttered as though spontaneously arising from a given situation” (Salmon 1987: 265). In their study of Early Modern English politeness, Brown and Gilman (1989: 170) justified their use of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama “because there is nothing else”. They argue that dramatic texts provide the best information on colloquial speech of the period. They also claim that the psychological soliloquies in the tragedies provide access to inner life that is necessary for a proper test of politeness theory and add as a further justification of their use of fiction for their investigation the fact that Shakespearean tragedies represent the full range of society in a period of high relevance to politeness theory (Brown and Gilman 1989: 159). More recently, and in the wake of the paradigm shifts in linguistics mentioned above, the argumentation has become less apologetic. Fictional data is of sufficient interest in itself. It is one very rich type of data and needs to be considered on its own terms. Claims about the particular skills of authors to write dialogues that are sufficiently real to serve as approximations or substitutes for the real thing are no longer needed, as shown in Busse’s (2003) words on Shakespeare and Jucker’s (2015) thoughts on fictional language as a fertile data source for pragmaticists in general: Obviously, Shakespeare must have been well aware of the social conventions of the day, and he surely exploited them skilfully for dramatic purposes. Nonetheless, on the basis of this investigation we can only construct a “social grammar” of Shakespeare, but we should not conclude that the language of drama with its carefully constructed speeches bore any close resemblance to real people talking, because it is not always possible to take such renditions at their face value. (Busse 2003: 216) Fictional language provides a fertile data source for pragmaticists if it is not seen as a deviation from more basic forms of language but as a specific form of communication with its own characteristic features that warrant an analysis in and of itself. (Jucker 2015: 67)

Fictional language provides a wealth of material for research questions about how historical authors communicated with their audiences and – in particular – how they created characters and dialogues between them. Patterns of language use in fictional texts can then be compared to similar patterns in other contexts. For historical material such comparisons are more limited than for modern material. Speech patterns in Shakespeare can be compared to courtroom proceedings,

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for instance, or to private correspondence. For present-day material, on the other hand, there is a much wider range of material available for potential comparisons because of the availability of speech recordings and the advanced (digital) storage systems for text. The fictional sources have also expanded to include telecinematic disourse or even youtube narratives (e.g. Androutsopoulos 2012a, 2012b; Bednarek 2010; Hodson 2014; Kuhn 2014; Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi 2011; Planchenault 2015). We fully endorse Alvarez-Pereyre (2011: 62) and Androutsopoulos (2012a: 142, 2012b), among others, who argue that telecinematic data should be discussed as cultural artifacts in their own right. The argument is that “[t]he very fact that the lexicogrammatical structures have been, carefully and non-spontaneously, chosen to fulfill the particular functions assigned, makes them extremely good specimens for the study of the relationships between forms, meanings and functions” (Alvarez-Pereyre 2011: 62, emphasis in original). Language, whether fictional or “real”, is always contextualized, and the context in which it occurs must always be an important part of the analysis. This means that conversations between characters of a soap opera must be analyzed within the complex communicative context of a soap opera, and a dinner table conversation must likewise be analyzed within its communicative context. It might be interesting to compare the two situations but both situations are sufficiently interesting in themselves and neither of them should be seen as either derivative of or more real than the other. Stylistics, the field in linguistics that has probably the longest tradition in exploring fictional data next to historical linguistics, also serves as an inspiration for this handbook. While we share the notions that fictional data deserves being studied in its own right and we also do not prescribe a particular methodology, our aim is not to produce a handbook on stylistics (see, e.g., the recent Burke 2014; Chapman and Clark 2014; Sotirova 2016; Stockwell and Whiteley 2014) nor to demonstrate the functioning and usefulness of pragmatic concepts for the analysis of literary and other texts (see, e.g., Black 2006; Culpeper 2001; Jeffries and McIntyre 2010; Leech and Short 2007; McIntryre and Busse 2010; Nørgaard, Montoro and Busse 2010), of which there are excellent specimens. Instead, we want to give the notion of pragmatics center stage, as explained in the next section, so that our handbook will draw on insights from many different linguistics disciplines, including stylistics, that deal with language use and communication. 4.

Overview of the handbook

This handbook consists of three parts devoted to (I) the foundations of the pragmatics of fiction, (II) features of orality and variation, and (III) specific themes pertinent to the combination of pragmatics with fiction research. Each chapter

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provides a thorough introduction to the topic in question by giving both an overview of theories and concepts as well as applying these to examples from fiction. Part I on the foundations of pragmatics of fiction turns our attention to the unique nature the communicative situation of fictional texts with their readers/ viewers and also introduces a number of core concepts without which a pragmatic approach to fiction would not be complete. The contributions in Part II and III are to be read with this knowledge in mind. In Chapter 2, Thomas Messerli sets the scene by elaborating on the complex participation structure of fictional texts. He illustrates the involved participant roles in different models with the help of examples from telecinematic discourse and links this to work of literary fiction. He shows how Goffman’s (1976, 1979) seminal work finds entry into contemporary thinking on fiction and is developed to take into account the complex mediated communicative situations that readers and viewers find themselves in. Chapter 3 by Janet Giltrow is on the pragmatics of fiction genres. She first discusses how the concept of genre is understood in a number of different linguistic and literary traditions. In doing so, she makes the links between “genre”, “activity type” and “frame” apparent, but also looks for insights from Rhetorical Genre Theory and Moretti’s distant reading of literary types. In the second part of her chapter, she discusses in depth how literary genres work with respect to the invitation of weak implicatures and processes of meaning making. Since engaging with fiction is an act of communication, Giltrow explores the sociality of language users’ experience. She highlights that reading/viewing fiction is a social action and that the processes of meaning making that are involved are not separate from other such processes but situated on a continuum between fictional and non-fictional language use. Importantly, fiction genres are theorized as adding to, and updating the readers’/viewers’ knowledge of the social order. The next three chapters focus on linguistic strategies employed for creating fictional characters and worlds. In Chapter 4, Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla introduce the concept of ‘characterisation’ in fictional texts. In the creation of fictional worlds, characters play a crucial role. In the case of written genres, the characters are purely evoked through language (e.g. in the description of a character’s appearance and action and in the reported speech assigned to the characters dialogues, thought processes, etc.; see Culpeper 2001 on implicit, explicit and authorial cues); in the case of telecinematic data, we also get visual information on appearance (age, gender, clothes, etc.) and we see actions (or inaction) that further shape the perception of the characters. This chapter draws on insights from a number of different disciplines and fields, such as stylistics and narratology. Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla describe “how characters are constructed in the interaction between top-down knowledge from the reader/perceiver’s head and bottom-up information from the text” and they argue that “three dimensions are key in characterisation: narratorial control, the presentation of self or other, and

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the explicitness or implicitness of the textual cue” (p. 93). Narratorial filters, character indexing and inter-character dynamics are discussed and illustrated as key elements of characterization in fiction. Monika Bednarek concentrates on the role of dialogue in (televised) fiction in Chapter 5. Kozloff (2000: 33−34) identifies two groups of functions of dialogue in narrative film. The first set refers to communicating the narrative and contains six categories (“1. anchorage of the diegesis and characters; 2. character revelation; 3. communication of narrative causality; 4. enactment of narrative events; 5. adherence to the code of realism; and 6. control of viewer evaluation and emotions”). The second set of functions refers to “aesthetic effect, ideological persuasion, commercial appeal” and comprises three further categories (“7. exploitation of the resources of language [poetic/humor/irony]; 8. thematic messages/authorial commentary/allegory”; and “9. opportunities for ‘star runs’”). Drawing on this knowledge from film studies (Kozloff 2000; Jaeckle 2013), which has a long tradition in working on the functions of diaologue in fiction, Bednarek complements this work with insights from linguistics and her own work. With respect to fictional dialogues, she identifies three research trends in the study of characterization, realism/naturalism, and humour. The first constitutes an overlap with the issues discussed in Chapter 4 on fictional characterization. Illustrating her insights with examples from telecinematic discourse, her chapter also offers insights on the function of dialogue in fiction in general. Opening the scope once more beyond the role of dialogue in fiction, Christian Hoffmann elaborates on narrative perspectives on voice in fiction more generally in Chapter 6. Fiction allows us to perceive thought processes and witness different points of view that are not usually accessible to the analyst in face-to-face interaction. Literary texts have long exploited different points of view techniques from stream of consciousness to omniscient narrator and telecinematic text also makes use of voice-over, sub-titling or written indicators of place and location to frame the narrative, or voice-over and subtitles to make thoughts accessible to the audience, etc. (see, e.g., Jahn 2003). Hoffmann reviews the literature from stylistics, narratology and film theory which is relevant for a pragmatics of fiction that wants to tackle the concept of “voice” and the related concepts of “perspective” and “mind style”. Finally, Part I is concluded with an overview of the contribution of the field of stylistics research to the pragmatics of fiction by Beatrix Busse in Chapter 7. Busse particularly highlights the study of voices in fiction, the complex interplay between fictional and non-fictional discourse and the importance of adopting a multimodal approach for the study of fiction. Furthermore, she offers an insightful discussion of the history and overlap of stylistics and pragmatics. Part II of the handbook turns our attention to features of orality and variation that are well studied in data from face-to-face encounters. In the case of fictional texts, the creators of characters (and the actors who potentially animate text) have

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to decide how to let them speak. What variety of a particular language? A dialect? A sociolect? An ethnolect? Will hesitations and false starts be included or excluded? In the case of multilingualism and code-switching: How do the creators deal with the challenge that the readers/audience might not have access to the different codes? What effects are potentially created? The chapters in this part explore how and to what extent the typical oral features identified in face-to-face communication make it on screen or into a book (turn-taking, overlaps, interruptions, false starts, hesitation markers, repetition, silence, discourse markers, intensifiers, etc.). There is of course no claim for authenticity by writers/movie makers, but we should not lose sight of the fact that it is a choice to include typical oral features. With respect to his corpus of telecinematic data, Rossi (2011) argues that: In contrast to what happens in spontaneous speech, the analysed films exhibit a low frequency of dialogue ‘drawbacks’, such as hanging or shifting topics, selfrepair, redundancy, overlapping and interrupted utterances. In a similar vein to written language, film dialogues present a high degree of coherence, cohesion and conciseness, bearing traces of the (written) screenplay. It follows that film dialogues appear more akin to literary language than to orality and spontaneous speech […]. (Rossi 2011: 21)

He continues, “[t]he reproduction of reality is always a compromise: authors pretend to offer the audience a piece of reality, with an ‘illusion of spontaneity’, which the audience feigns to believe, thanks to the ‘suspension of disbelief’, necessary ‘to collaborate in this fiction’ (Kozloff 2000: 16, 47). Yet ‘film dialogue […] is never realistic; it is always designed for us’ (Kozloff 2000: 121)” (Rossi 2011: 45). The complexity of authentic face-to-face interaction is rarely transported into fiction so that processes of reduction are at work. This reduction, however, is interesting in its own right. As quoted above, Alvarez-Pereyre (2011: 62) points out that “[t]he very fact that the lexicogrammatical structures have been, carefully and non-spontaneously, chosen to fulfill the particular functions assigned, makes them extremely good specimens for the study of the relationships between forms, meanings and functions” (emphasis in original). In the same vein, Androutsopoulos (2012a: 139) points to the underlying linguistic ideologies and indexicalities: “We think that cinematic discourse ought to figure large at this intersection due to its popularity as a site of sociolinguistic representation and its complexity as a multimodal semiotic artefact”. Because of the complexity of this field of studies, four chapters deal with aspects of orality and variation. Chapter 8 by Wolfram Bublitz explores “(1) features of metacommunication, (2) features of turn management, (3) features of topic management (whose predominant functions are planning, repairing and organizing), (4) features of involvement and the micro-level category (5) features of formal reduction” (p. 235, emphasis removed). In Chapter 9, Gaëlle Planchenault expands on the multi-modal treatment of character-positioning of Chapter 4 by focusing in particular on dialectal language variation. She demonstrates how lin-

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guistic features are used to index regional, social or ethnic traits, which are then associated with values. In Chapter 10, Miriam Locher complements the overview on dialectal variation in fictional texts in the previous chapter with an overview of studies on fictional texts that use different languages and thus create multilingual situations. The main focus lies on the potential pragmatic effects that the texts can achieve (e.g. scene creation/enrichment, character creation, the creation of humor, the display of social criticism, realism and ideological debates of difference and belonging). Finally, Michael Adams addresses the pragmatics of estrangement in fantasy and science fiction in Chapter 11. The fiction genres fantasy, science fiction and also historical fiction have a vibrant tradition of drawing on linguistic means to create estrangement. Adams discusses this phenomenon, which occurs on onomastic, lexical and stylistic levels, from a pragmatic perspective by treating estrangement as a literary illocutionary act. Part III, finally, is devoted to a range of additional themes that are currently under debate within the study of the pragmatics of fiction, which, however, can all be linked to the insights offered in the previous parts. Chapters 12 and 13 continue the discussion on linguistic variation started in Part II and represent entire fields of research in their own right. In Chapter 12, Robert A. Valdeón offers a survey of research on the challenges of translating pragmatic aspects of language in fiction. Having established in the previous handbook chapters how complex the linguistic effects of authorial linguistic choices can be, it comes as no surprise that translating pragmatic effects poses a challenge. This theme is continued in Chapter 13, in which Marie-Noëlle Guillot reports on research on subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text. According to her, the field of audiovisual translation has neglected the aspect of pragmatics for subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text. She reports on two main areas “narrative aspects and characterization” and “communicative practices in their interlingual representations” (p. 397) and draws on the concepts of audience design, stance, voice, and verisimilitude for her illustrations. Chapters 14 and 15 turn to the well-established topic of norms of conduct, i.e. politeness and impoliteness, in pragmatics. Urszula Kizelbach reviews the extensive literature in (im)politeness in literary fiction (with a special focus on aspects of the English canon), while Marta Dynel offers a synthesis of the work on (im)politeness within telecinematic discourse. Especially in the latter contribution, the fuzzy boundary of fictional texts mentioned in Section 2 is further developed and the concept of verisimilitude is discussed as well in light of (im)politeness evaluations. In Chapter 16, Daniela Landert sheds light on the concept of stance and explores the usefulness of this concept for the study of the pragmatics of fiction. She shows that stance can express evaluative, epistemic and affective attitudes. Realized in character speech, narratorial voice as well as expressed through non-verbal action, Landert demonstrates how this concept can be linked to the discussion of characterization in Chapter 4 and voice in Chapter 6.

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Andreas Langlotz, in Chapter 17, picks up an issue introduced by Giltrow in Chapter 3. Giltrow mentions that the emotional involvement of the readers/viewers, who are well aware that what they read/see is fictional, is one of the key issues that bears further exploration. Langlotz tackles this desideratum by outlining “the repertoire of verbal and non-verbal cues along which emotional utterances are patterned in literary and telecinematic fictional discourse” (p. 515). He then argues that “fictional discourse must be attributed a special status for human emotional experience” (p. 515). Finally, the handbook concludes with a chapter by Derek Denis and Sali Tagliamonte on language change and fiction. This chapter returns to the question of the distinction between ‘fictional language as data’ and ‘fictional language as communication’ (outlined in Section 3 of this introduction) by first reviewing literature on the usefulness of fictional data for general linguistic questions and then turning to a discussion of whether fiction also triggers language change (rather than reflecting it). 5.

Concluding remarks

The chapters in this handbook continue the dialogue on the pragmatic component of fiction, which started in the second half of the last century. We hope that the critical reviews will give interested readers an entry point into the state of the art of current thinking and the concepts, themes and challenges raised in the three parts of the collection. It goes without saying that this handbook does not present an endpoint to our scholarly endeavours in this field. This is not only so because new theoretical and methodological insights sharpen our understanding of the pragmatic phenomena of fiction but also because many new and exciting forms of fictional practices are emerging in a vast range of different contexts. For example, there are interactive fictional worlds in online environments (such as World of Warcraft or Second Life), practices of sharing narratives in the form of youtube clips and vlogs/video diaries, or practices by fans who write spin-offs of their favorite works or dub telecinematic material into their own language, etc. Since telling and sharing narratives is such a fundamental human discourse practice, we will not be short of new data to analyze. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Magdalena Leitner and Larssyn Staley for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this introduction. The usual disclaimers apply.

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Salmon, Vivian 1987 Sentence structures in colloquial Shakespearian English. In: Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (eds.), A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama, 265–300. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. First published Transactions of the Philological Society 64(1): 105–140 [1965]. Searle, John R. 1975 The logical status of fictional discourse. New Literary History 6(2): 319–332. Sell, Roger D. 2000 Literature as Communication. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 78.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sotirova, Violeta (ed.) 2016 The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Sperber, Dan and Deidre Wilson 1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd Ed. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Stockwell, Peter and Sara Whiteley (eds.) 2014 The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker 2015 Twenty years of historical pragmatics: Origins, developments and changing thought styles. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 16(1): 1–25. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs 2008 The state of English language studies: A linguistic perspective. In: Marianne Thormählen (ed.), English Now: Selected Papers from the 20th IAUPE Conference in Lund 2007, 199–225. Lund, SE: Lund Studies in English. Uchida, Seiji 1998 Text and relevance. In: Robyn Carston and Seiji Uchida (eds.), Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications, 161–178. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 37.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. van Dijk, Teun (ed.) 1976a Pragmatics of Language and Literature. Amsterdam: North Holland. van Dijk, Teun 1976b Pragmatics and poetics. In: Teun van Dijk (ed.), Pragmatics of Language and Literature, 23–27. Amsterdam: North Holland. van Dijk, Teun 1981 The pragmatics of literary communication. In: Teun A. van Dijk (ed.), Studies in the Pragmatics of Discourse, 243–263. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. First published in: E.Forastieri-Braschi, G. Guinness & H. Lopez-Morales, (eds.), On Text and Context: Papers of the Int. Conference on Literary Communication (Rio Piedras, April, 1977), 3–16. Rio Piedras, PR: Editorial Universitaria [1980]. van Dijk, Teun A. (ed.) 1985 Discourse and Literature: New Approaches to the Analysis of Literary Genres. (Critical Theory 3.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Walton, Kendall L. 1990 Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Waugh, Linda R. 1980 The poetic function in the theory of Roman Jakobson. Poetics Today 2(1): 57–82. Wilson, Deirdre 2011 Relevance and the interpretation of literary works. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 23: 69–80. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/linguistics/research/ uclwpl/uclwpl23

Part I Pragmatics of fiction as communication: Foundations

2.

Participation structure in fictional discourse: Authors, scriptwriters, audiences and characters Thomas C. Messerli

Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of the participation structure in fictional discourse by discussing the relevant theoretical participation frameworks. The main focus is on the discourse of film and television, which is discussed in-depth, before the participation structures of literary fiction and drama are also addressed. The discussion highlights the participant roles each of the models describes for authors/producers, characters, and particularly for recipients/readers, which are given most focus in pragmatic research. One of the key differences between different frameworks has been the conceptualization of recipients/readers as either ratified participants or unratified overhearers. The chapter explains the terms as they are used by Goffman (1976, 1979) as well as the different positions that the respective theoretical approaches adopt. 1. Introduction Fiction, as it is understood in this handbook, is far from being a monolithic entity. The first chapter pointed to the fuzzy boundaries between the non-fictional and the fictional, and it included as part of fictional language not only traditional written genres, such as the novel, but also drama and telecinematic discourse.1 This points to a heterogeneity of fictional texts and fictional language, and to variation in terms of production and reception processes. Writing and reading a novel, for instance, are conceivably different from staging and attending a play, or from writing/directing and viewing a film or television series. Accordingly, it may be necessary not to speak of a singular participation structure in fictional discourse, but of a plurality of structures or frameworks that will establish the participant roles of either authors and readers, of playwrights and theatregoers, or of scriptwriters/ directors and cinematic/televisual audiences. Studying the relevant literature in such fields as stylistics, literary pragmatics or the pragmatic literature on drama and on telecinematic discourse, one will indeed find a clear separation between different fictional domains – with participation in written fiction largely confined to literary pragmatics and stylistics, and that

1



Telecinematic discourse is the umbrella term used by Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi (2011) to refer to both the discourses of cinema and fictional television.

DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-002 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 25–54. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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of drama and telecinematic discourse to their respective subfields in pragmatics. A first observation about the current state of the literature on fictional participation is then that no general theory of fictional participation that would give equal weight to fictional works in drama, film and literature has been put forward to this date. Despite the differences between the various subcategories of fiction and despite the absence of a general theory of participation in fiction, it is worthwhile to consider the commonalities, which include the fact that any work of fiction will be based on some form of creative process that leads to the production of a fictional artefact, and that this artefact will be received in some way by one or several recipients. Moreover, these processes will lead to a form of mediated communication between creators and recipients, in which meaning-making and understanding processes are anchored on the cultural artefact. From a pragmatic point of view, this form of communication needs to be understood as a type of language use that takes place in a specific setting and entails specific relationships between all those participants that it involves. Describing the participation structure of fiction thus means defining those relationships between participants – a task which is complicated by the fact that the fictional artefact itself contains further embedded acts of communication. These communicative acts within fiction are performed by fictional participants, the characters. An overview of the participation structures in fiction then needs to include the role of characters as well as their relationship to the relevant participants outside the fictional artefact. In order to provide such an overview of participant roles and relationships between participants in fiction, I will return to the particular participation structures of one of the subcategories of fiction, viz. telecinematic discourse. This is necessary first of all, because, as already mentioned, the relevant literature almost invariably focuses on one specific type of fictional data and thus also on a particular structure of participation. It is also preferable because choosing the particular as a starting point allows the inclusion of examples from fictional data. Rather than starting with an abstract conceptualization of the participation structure(s) in fiction, I will thus turn to an example from telecinematic discourse, which is the type of fictional discourse on which this chapter lays its main focus. This example will be used to illustrate the different theoretical approaches that can be taken towards the participants on- and off-screen. It will be instrumental in pinpointing the characteristic features of telecinematic participation, but it will also be described based on the assumption that the telecinematic participation framework is similar to participation structures in other fictional settings. While the analysis of Example 1 in Section 2 takes place specifically on an extract from telecinematic discourse, I will thus assume that very similar observations could be made about dramatic and literary discourse. However, an important subsequent step will be to describe the actual similarities and differences between different fictional discourses, which is the subject of the main Section 3, in which several

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participation models for telecinematic discourse are discussed, as well as of Section 4, which provides a brief overview of participation in dramatic discourse (4.1) and in literary fiction (4.2). 2.

Fictional characters and Goffman’s (1979) participation framework

2.1.

A fictional conversation in the US sitcom Seinfeld (1989–1998)

As a starting point for the discussion of the interaction of fictional characters, I will use a short scene from the well-known US American sitcom Seinfeld (NBC 1989–1998). Representing a dialogue between two of the main characters of a television series, it is both simple in its setup and thus accessible even to those unfamiliar with the specific scene or even Seinfeld at large, and in many ways typical as far as fictional interactions and their reading by audiences are concerned. The extract – represented here by a transcription of the broadcast (Example 1) – is taken from the television series’ pilot, with the title “The Seinfeld Chronicles”. In order to set up the interaction in this example, I will provide some context about some of the participants and the communicative setting. Although the extract is situated at the beginning of the very first episode, it needs to be mentioned that a large proportion of the contemporary US American audience will have been familiar with the main actor, Jerry Seinfeld, who was already a well-known stand-up comedian and a regular guest on late night television. In the sitcom, which uses his last name as the title of the series, Jerry Seinfeld plays a fictional version of himself. Prior to the excerpt presented here, the prologue of the episode showed him as a stand-up comedian in a comedy club, performing a routine about going out. Now he and his friend George are sitting in a coffee shop somewhere in New York, and they are having a conversation over coffee. After a few turns, a waitress, Claire, approaches the table and has a brief conversation with George. The detailed transcription conventions are included as part of the appendix to this chapter, but to facilitate the reading of the example, a few explanations need to be added: The numbering refers to camera shots (sequences of film between cuts); the second column from the right transcribes the verbal interaction as well as some of the more significant bodily gestures; and the right most column serves as a short description of the visible communicative setting (mise-en-scène). For the sake of readability, the laugh track, i.e. the recorded audience laughter that forms part of the broadcast, was not transcribed.

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(1) “The Seinfeld Chronicles”, Seinfeld (NBC, 1989–1998) Shot Speaker Dialogue/Gestures 1 Jerry See now to me that button is in the worst possible spot.

2

The second button= +-left hand points at George---+ =literally= +-left index finger points at George--+ = makes or breaks the shirt.=

3

=Look at it,= +--left hand points at George---+

4

= it’s too high! It’s in ↑no-man’s land. You look like you live with your mother!

George 5

Jerry

6

George

7

Jerry

Are you through? &-turns both palms upwards-& You do of course= +-open hand gesture--+ = try on when you buy? Yes! It was purple! I liked it!                                                                                       &-turns palms upwards-& I don’t actually recall considering the button.                                                                         &--both hands point forward-& Oh, you don’t reca::ll?

Shot description Ext. coffee shop, the camera zooms in towards the coffee shop. Fade to interior of a coffee shop. There is a round table at the front of the picture, Jerry is sitting on the right, looking towards George, who is sitting on the left. Both are visible from their knees on upwards (medium shot), their bodies are positioned at an angle. In the background, other customers are sitting at tables, and Claire, the waitress, is serving coffee. On “Look”, the scene cuts to a frontal medium close-up of George, Jerry’s hand gesture is at the front of the picture. On “It’s too” cut back to medium shot of Jerry and George (same as 2).

Frontal medium close-up of Jerry. Frontal medium close-up of George.

Frontal medium close-up of Jerry.

Participation structure in fictional discourse  8

George

9

Jerry

= Mr. Seinfeld. (.) Mr. Costanza                                                                              &-covers cup with hand---->

George

Are you sure this is decaf? Where’s the orange ------------------------------------------------------indicator? ----------& It’s missing. I have to do it in my head. “Decaf ↑left, regular                                                                                                       §--alternates raising--> ↑right. Decaf ↑left, regular ↑right.” It’s ve:ry ---left and right hand-----------------§ cha:llenging work.

10

11 12

Jerry

13

Claire

14 15

Frontal medium close-up of George. Medium shot of Jerry and George. Claire approaches the table from the background, between George and Jerry, at the centre of the picture. Claire pours coffee into Jerry’s cup with her right hand, then tries to poor coffee into George’s cup with her right hand.

Ehh, no, ehh not at this time. &-uses pen like a microphone -& Well, Senator, I’d just like to know what you knew and when you knew it.=

Claire

Claire

Can you relax? +-------open hand gesture--+ It’s a cup of coffee. +---both palms upwards--+ Claire’s a professional waitress.= Trust me, George. No one has any interest in seeing you on caffeine.

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Frontal medium close-up of Claire.

Frontal medium close-up of George. Frontal medium close-up of Jerry.

Medium shot of George, Jerry and Claire. Frontal medium close-up of Jerry. Frontal medium close-up of George. He smiles. + Jerry & George § Claire

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One first way of examining the multimodal interactions between the characters is to take a naïve stance and understand it as represented dialogue. This will be done here in order to both introduce and contextualize the example that will be used throughout the chapter, as well as to briefly outline Goffman’s (1979) participation framework, on which most theoretical approaches to fictional participation are based (see discussion of individual models in Section 3). I will thus assume the non-expert position of the television audience that watches this first episode and approach the interaction in this scene as if it were a one-to-one representation of an interaction that could take place in any non-fictional coffee shop in New York City. From this point of view, the main focus will likely be on the interaction between the two main characters, Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza, and from shot 9 onwards also on the waitress Claire, who takes the floor. In the first turn (shots 1 to 4) for instance, Jerry makes a comment about the second button on George’s shirt, while other guests in the coffee shop are drinking their coffees and the waitress in the background is refilling a customer’s cup. Looking through the television set into that coffee shop and turning a blind eye to whatever context there may be outside of the fictional world in which the interaction takes place, it is a simple task to identify some of the participant roles that are represented in this turn: the speaker Jerry; the addressee George; and those uninvolved in the ongoing interaction in the foreground. Accordingly, one may start by simply applying the tools of a theoretical framework for face-to-face interaction to the conversation between Jerry and George in order to describe the communicative setting of this example of fictional discourse. Even from a naïve perspective that leaves away the roles of those involved in TV production and reception, a discussion of the participation structure within the represented coffee shop will have to take note of the fact that George and Jerry are not alone. Therefore, a theoretical approach that goes beyond a purely dyadic view of talk will be necessary in order to arrive at a full picture of the communicative setting, which manages to also include what role the characters in the background may play in the way the interaction in the foreground takes place. 2.2.

Goffman’s (1979) participation framework

One of the main foci of Goffman’s (1976, 1979) influential work is to go beyond a traditional analysis of talk which is limited to two participants and cannot successfully describe the workings of all those conversational encounters where three or more people are present. In earlier work, Goffman (1967) already describes the ratification processes between speakers and listeners and acknowledges the differences between ratified and unratified participants of talk (see footnote 24 in Goffman 1967: 34), and he explains in more detail the different types of ratified and unratified listeners in Goffman (1976). But he only brings forward his notion

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of participation framework and a clear description of the different participation roles involved in a typical communicative setting in his essay on footing (Goffman 1979). There, it becomes clear how conversation between ratified participants is influenced by those around it who are listening in or looking on. I will return to the button remark in Example 1 to illustrate the framework that Goffman envisions. Apart from the speaker, Jerry, and the addressee, George, who are the ratified participants here, there are a number of customers as well as the waitress present in the scene. In Goffman’s terms, these unratified participants may either be eavesdroppers, overhearers, or bystanders. Assuming that they remain unnoticed by the ratified participants, they are either eavesdroppers, if they intentionally listen in on the conversation, or overhearers, if “the opportunity has unintentionally and inadvertently come about” (Goffman 1979: 8). They are bystanders, on the other hand, if George and Jerry are aware of their presence. Even as acknowledged bystanders, the characters in the background are not directly involved in the actual conversation between ratified participants, but as Goffman (1979: 10) points out, they will nonetheless be influential, because: “speakers will modify how they speak, if not what they say, by virtue of conducting their talk in visual and aural range of nonparticipants”. In other words, the fact that George and Jerry’s conversation takes place in a public place (the coffee shop) and that it is at least potentially overheard by the other customers and the waitress, will influence the linguistic choices of the two ratified participants and the way the conversation evolves. Insofar as characters, places, events etc. are understood as representations of real people, real places and real events, Goffman’s participation framework for non-fictional face-to-face interaction can thus be used to describe the participation roles of the fictional participants, which is done by simply mapping each fictional character role to the non-fictional referent it represents.2 Essentially, this amounts to the observer taking the position of a character that shares the space of the other fictional characters and operates entirely oblivious to the fictionality and constructedness of the fictional world. Arguing from this position, an interactional analysis of the scene may focus on a range of features that may strike the researcher as different from other interactions in coffee shops.3 For instance, turn-taking happens in such a fashion that there are no overlaps; there are no false starts and turns almost exclusively consist of syntactically well-formed sentences; there is only a single hesitation marker (George in shot 8); and the interlocutors show a propensity for rhythmically stressing several words per intonation unit and accentuating those stresses with the help

Understanding fictional characters as if they were real-life people is what Culpeper (2001) calls the humanising approach. 3 The extract here can be compared, for instance, with the examples in Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974). 2

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of hand gestures. In other words, the interaction can be described as exceedingly orderly and thus different from what may be expected when analysing spoken face-to-face interaction in an informal setting (see Bublitz, Ch. 8 on features of orality). Here at the latest, when trying to explain this orderliness of the displayed turn-taking, the naïve position of audience-as-character will no longer be sufficient to explain the interaction – it becomes necessary to look past the represented fictional situation and include the telecinematic context in which the interaction takes place. The most obvious answer to the question why an analysis of the spoken interaction in Seinfeld is markedly different from spontaneous face-to-face interaction is then quite simply that it is not spontaneous interaction. While circumstantial evidence within the fictional world points to an informal talk between friends in a coffee shop, there is also clear evidence that this is taking place within a fictional television series – for instance in the form of the conventional metacommunicative cues that are available to audiences in TV guides, their own viewing context or the cues within the broadcast itself (see Brock 2009). It is thus safe to assume that most audiences of Seinfeld will share the knowledge that the representation on screen is not the product of the surreptitious recording of an actual conversation between Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander (the actor who plays George Costanza in the sitcom), but that there is some form of TV-making apparatus at work, which involves writers, producers, directors, actors, as well as operators of cameras, sound, lighting and other telecinematic parameters. Whereas spontaneous spoken interaction involves negotiating turn transitions between interlocutors as well as thinking and speech production processes in each participant, such negotiating and processing is absent or greatly reduced in the case of fictional interactions, because the interaction is scripted and thus prepared not only in terms of the formulation of individual utterances, but also in terms of the turn-taking between interlocutors. This distinction can best be clarified with the help of the concepts of animator, author, and principal (Goffman 1979), i.e. the differentiation of three roles involved on the speaker-side of any interaction. While the animator is the one vocalizing the utterance, the author formulates it, and the principal is the one whose set of beliefs are being expressed in language (Goffman 1979: 16–17). All three roles are performed by the speaker in spontaneous spoken interaction, who has something she means to express in mind, formulates it and utters it. In fictional discourse, however, these roles are separated: The actor Jerry Seinfeld vocalizes what the writing staff of Seinfeld formulated and the creators/producers of the sitcom meant to convey. This is to say that the synchronous interaction between Jerry and George in Example 1 is in fact part of a larger communicative context of TV-making. The interaction on the surface depends on communicative processes on another level, which include the collective of those involved in making the fictional artefact – in

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this case the sitcom – as well as those involved on the recipient-side, i.e. the audiences or readers that are observing the fictional interaction.4 2.3.

Communicative levels

Within pragmatics as well as media and television studies, there is wide agreement that this duality of levels needs to be taken into account when approaching the communicative setting of telecinematic discourse and of mass media communication (see Chovanec and Dynel 2015: 5), as well as that of other forms of fiction. The levels in fictional discourses have been discussed using different terminology – and broadly speaking two different spatial metaphors have been brought forward to conceptualize their relative position within the communicative setting. The first one understands fictional interaction as embedded in communication between authors/producers and audiences; the second one places inter-character talk on a layer on top of the primary layer between the producers and recipients of the artefact. Despite the spatial difference between the two understandings both conceptualizations are similar in that they highlight a dependency of the fictional level on the primary communication between authors/producers and audiences. Examples following the first paradigm include Short (1981), who speaks of dramatic discourse in terms of embeddedness; Burger (Burger 1984, 1991; Burger and Luginbühl 2014), who follows the same notion of embeddedness when he situates mass media communication in different communicative circles (Kommunikationskreise); and Androutsopoulos (2012: 140–141), who uses the term double framework – in explicit analogy to models from literary studies – and states that “communication in the fictional world is embedded into the communicative relation between ‘author’ (or ‘producer’) and ‘reader’ (or ‘audience’)”. Essential to the second paradigm is Clark (1996: 353), who regards as a commonality of the language of “novels, plays, movies, stories, and jokes, as well as teasing, irony, sarcasm, overstatement, and understatement” that they involve a form of joint pretence between participants, which opens up a second domain or layer of action. Clark emphasizes the clear hierarchy between the layers, with layer 2 being dependent on layer 1. The model visualizes the fictional layer (as well as other dependent layers) as a stage, and layer 1, on which it rests, as a representation of the “actual world” (Clark 1996: 16). The notion of layers is taken up by Kozloff (2000) and also by Bubel (2006, 2008), who includes Short’s (1981, 1989) embeddedness and Burger’s (1984, 1991) communicative circles, but most heavily relies on Clark’s (1996) conceptualization for her own model of screen-to-face communication. Bednarek (2010)

4



The different conceptions of the role of the audience/reader will be discussed in Section 3.

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in turn discusses television language based on Bubel’s model, whereas Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi (2011) only implicitly follow the same spatial hierarchy when they speak of a double plane of communication. Desilla (2012), following Vanoye (1985), regards the communication between authors/producers and audiences as happening on a vertical level, which is opposed to the horizontal level of fictional interactions. Dynel (2011) and Brock (2015) both develop their own models and visualizations and speak more generally of communicative levels (see the discussion in Sections 3.3 and 3.4). Despite the range of different terms and different spatial metaphors employed in the theoretical works mentioned here, there will be a clear consensus when analysing Example 1 from any of the theoretical vantage points that the interaction between Jerry and George is in some way dependent on – i.e. it is embedded in or rests upon – another level of communication between authors/producers and television audiences. Furthermore, all scholars represented here will agree that this dependency of fictional communication will greatly affect the form Jerry and George’s interaction takes – both with regard to the linguistic realization of the individual utterances and the interactional organisation of the conversation between the two characters. There are, however, substantial differences with regard to how exactly the roles of authors/producers and audiences are conceptualized, and how the meaning-making and understanding processes on both sides are theorized in the different approaches. 3.

The participation framework of telecinematic discourse

Having established the Goffmanian participation framework as well as the multi-­ layeredness of telecinematic discourse, and by extension of fictional discourse at large, this section will discuss four theoretical approaches to a specifically telecinematic participation framework as they have been put forward in the last decade. All of these models focus on the audience and their understanding processes, while the actual production of the telecinematic artefact is only marginally represented. However, as the chronological discussion will show, a tendency towards a more fine-grained look at production-side processes can be observed. The first theoretical framework discussed here is the one put forward by Bubel (2006, 2008), which is commonly referred to in connection with the viewer-as-overhearer paradigm. Bubel adopts the notion that audiences are overhearers from Kozloff (2000), and the same view is also shared by Richardson (2010). Section 3.2. will discuss Bednarek’s (2010) additions and specifications to Bubel’s model. Dynel’s (2011) viewer-as-ratified hearer approach will be discussed in Section 3.3, and finally Brock’s (2015) comparison of different comedy genres will be presented in Section 3.4.

Participation structure in fictional discourse 

3.1.

35

Participation in Bubel (2006, 2008)

The central notion in Bubel’s (2006, 2008) participation model of telecinematic discourse is that audiences have to be conceptualized as overhearers – an understanding which had already been put forward in film studies by Kozloff (2000). Like all other theoretical approaches presented here, she is indebted to Goffman, but her model is notable for a more in-depth integration of cognitive pragmatics and specifically for the inclusion of the audience’s thinking processes. In order to characterize Bubel’s understanding of telecinematic discourse, it is thus best to briefly look back to Goffman (1979) and to include the elaboration on the Goffmanian framework by Clark and Schaefer (1992) and Clark (1996), which will illuminate how Bubel transfers the relevant aspects of participation to the telecinematic domain. As Bubel (2008: 62) acknowledges, Goffman himself already addresses the role of theatre as well as radio and TV broadcast audiences, and he positions them as different from participants and non-participants in ordinary face-to-face conversation: Audiences for Goffman are participants in stage events rather than in talk, and he explains that there is a need for participation frameworks specific to theatre, radio and television (Goffman, 1979: 12–14). Bubel, however, does not focus on Goffman’s notion of audience, and instead is interested in what the communication situations of the everyday overhearer and that of the television or film audience have in common: The cognitive processes going on in the spectator while he or she is listening to film dialogue are generally parallel to those that occur in everyday life, when we take on the role of an overhearer, whether or not the conversation we are overhearing is meant to be heard by us, and whether or not the conversationalists are aware of our listening in. (Bubel 2008: 61)

Bubel’s discussion of spectators first of all follows Clark (1996) in using a wider definition of overhearer, which encompasses all three types of non-ratified listeners mentioned by Goffman (1979) and envisions overhearer roles on a continuum between bystanders and eavesdroppers. Irrespective of such terminological differences to Goffman, Bubel’s (2008) model for what she terms screen-to-face discourse positions audience members as unratified participants, who are thus outside of the main communication situation and have no “rights or responsibilities” (Bubel 2008: 64; see also Clark 1996: 14) in the on-going interaction. For Bubel (2008: 64–65), this lack of rights and responsibilities compared to ratified participants leads to a disadvantage for overhearers in general, and telecinematic overhearers in particular, when they try to understand conversations on screen. Bubel (2008: 64) specifies first of all that spectators have limited personal common ground with the characters. Using Clark’s (1996) terms she states that characters and audience have few shared experiences due to the limited time of interacting with each other (the length of the film or TV series). Moreover, the experiences that

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they share are one-sided, with audiences gathering knowledge about characters, but not vice versa. The same one-sidedness of the shared experiences leads to an inability on the side of the audience to play an active part in negotiating meaning (Bubel 2008: 64). These disadvantages serve as a stepping-stone to convincingly explain the motivation behind what Bubel terms overhearer design, which is how she labels the version of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s (1974) recipient design she uses in her model. This means that fictional conversations do not just occur of their own accord, but are written with a television audience in mind. On the one hand, Bubel (2008: 62) thus acknowledges that spectators strictly speaking cannot be regarded as eavesdroppers or bystanders, because – as Short (1989: 149 quoted in Bubel 2008: 62) points out – “the situation is arranged to be overheard on purpose”. On the other hand, she lists two reasons for insisting on referring to them as overhearers. The first one is the similarity she sees between television audiences and those overhearers of face-to-face conversations that are not only acknowledged by the ratified participants, but who are meant “to glean certain information from what [the conversationalists] are saying” (Bubel 2008: 62). The second reason has to do with the separate layer of action on which the fictional interactions take place. Just as this layer is conventionally sealed off from the interaction between authors/producers and audiences, face-to-face conversation of ratified conversationalists is equally separated from an overhearing third party (Bubel 2008: 62). The resulting model, as it is reproduced here in Figure 1, thus marries two at least seemingly contrary positions of the audience, which has to be understood as both the target of the author/producer’s overhearer design, and also as the hermetically sealed off and disadvantaged overhearer listening in on inter-character conversations. For this combination of different audience roles, Bubel leans on Clark and Schaefer’s (1992) elaboration on Goffman’s (1979) notion of overhearer. Their discussion of attitudes towards overhearers identifies disclosure as one possible attitude, which means that “the conversationalists want the overhearer to gather certain information from the conversation, providing the overhearer with enough evidence to make correct conjectures” (Bubel 2006: 55). This is central for Bubel because it combines an intention to be understood with the notion of overhearing. As Figure 1 illustrates, the fictional verbal interaction at the centre of the framework is designed by the film production crew with overhearers in mind; and film recipients use cognitive processes of conjecture to read the cues designed for them and to understand the interaction on screen “with the help of the part of their world knowledge that overlaps with the world knowledge the production team projects onto the characters” (Bubel 2008: 67). While the visualization specifically puts verbal interaction at the centre of the model, Bubel (2006, 2008) also explicitly includes other telecinematic sign systems, such as camera angles and the editing process as part of what is designed for the overhearing audience, but she does not further discuss such aspects of multimodality.

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Figure 1. Participants in telecinematic discourse in Bubel (2006: 58)

Bubel (2006, 2008) also addresses the degree to which the audience can be said to be aware of the fictionality of the ongoing interaction. Bubel follows Clark (1996) here and adopts his binary pair of imagination and appreciation. They describe two types of cognitive processes in viewers, which take place on different layers of action. Imagination refers to Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” (see e.g. Kozloff 2000: 47; Bednarek 2012: 47) – which means that audiences at least to some degree willingly pretend that the utterances and actions performed by the fictional characters are products of the actors’ own will and intent rather than of the writing processes involved in film and television making. The result of this process of imagination is a key component in audiences’ enjoyment of fiction: “One effect of film is that it transports the audience into the realm of the story and, doing that, evokes emotions and suspense” (Bubel 2008: 59; see also Clark 1996: 366). In contrast, the second process of appreciation requires that audiences are aware of the constructedness of the fictional layer and enjoy the craftsmanship

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of the production-side processes that lead to its construction. In her discussion of appreciation, Bubel (2008: 60) also points to Kozloff (2000: 55–60), who highlights that characters may overtly or discretely address the viewers and thus break the illusion, which is the case for instance in moralizing speeches, allegorical elements and authorial messages. In other words, while imagination immerses audiences in the topmost fictional layer, appreciation draws attention to those underlying layers necessary for its construction. The duality in the different notions of overhearer as outlined above thus finds its equivalence in an oscillation between two very different viewing processes that, in Bubel’s view can both be in operation at different moments in the telecinematic viewing situation. Applying Bubel’s model to Example 1, Jerry and George can be said to address each other, and to be doing so in a fashion that invites audiences to read specific cues and make inferences based on them and on their world knowledge. Audiences “retrieve stored cognitive models or frames that are prompted by the utterance” (Bubel 2008: 63), which in this case will include information about interactions among friends, events that happen in coffee shops, but also knowledge about film and television in general and sitcoms in particular. The fact that the cues designed by the production crew guide the understanding processes of the audience gives a plausible explanation, for instance, for the fact that the waitress in shot 9 addresses the customers Jerry and George with their full last names, and in shot 13 refers to George with his first name. Jerry similarly uses the first name of the waitress in shot 12, when he mentions that “Claire is a professional waitress”. Irrespective of whether or not such usage of first and last names may be odd in non-fictional coffee shops, Bubel’s approach will highlight that this information neatly complements prior knowledge of the television audience, who – as stated in Section 2.1 – are likely to already know the main actor/character Jerry Seinfeld, but will have no knowledge of the names of any of the other characters. Apart from whatever motivation there may be within the fictional setting for the characters to use each other’s names, this information is quite clearly written by the scriptwriters for the benefit of the television audiences. Later in this episode, and in subsequent episodes, knowledge of these character names can be assumed to be part of the production crew’s and the regular audience’s common ground. The fact that the camera in shot 1 shows the exterior of a coffee shop can be understood in similar ways. Based on the conventions of continuity editing, this exterior shot can be inferred to be of the same coffee shop in which the verbal interaction takes place a moment later. Thus, the telecinematic signals indicate the location of the subsequent interaction to the television audience – notably in absence of any characters in the initial exterior shot. A further case in point is the positioning of the characters which sit at an angle of approximately 45 degrees, which is to say that their upper bodies can still be said to face each other, while also being pointed at the camera. The montage is done in such a fashion that the speaker is always optimally visible, as can be seen for instance in the medium

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close-ups in 5 and 6 – the same goes for the audibility of their utterances. In short, the entire telecinematic apparatus is employed in such a fashion that audiences are in the best possible position to overhear Jerry and George’s talk and to arrive at the understanding that the production crew envisioned. 3.2.

Participation in Bednarek (2010)

Bednarek’s (2010) contribution to research on telecinematic discourse is substantial in a range of aspects, which include work on characterization and the use of corpus linguistic methods on telecinematic data (see also Bednarek 2012). This chapter’s discussion of her view on participation structure will be kept short, however, since she makes use of Bubel’s (2006, 2008) model in her work rather than developing a participation framework of her own. Nevertheless, her discussion of Bubel’s (2006, 2008) model is worth including here because it specifies a number of aspects that were only mentioned in passing in Bubel’s discussion. Two of these aspects are highlighted here. The first aspect that needs to be mentioned is the distinction between target audience and actual audience, which – as Bednarek (2010: 17) states – is only implied in Bubel’s (2006, 2008) model. Bednarek illustrates how target audiences are being construed not only by the film or the television series itself, but also by other texts, such as those present on DVD cases. In this regard, she opts for a stronger focus on production-side processes than Bubel (2006, 2008), and she also takes into account a larger context of telecinematic production and reception, which includes commercial factors. On the side of television and film production this means that creative agents can be differentiated from commercial agents; on the side of the reception, target audiences can be regarded as a commodity for advertisers (Bednarek 2010: 17). Bednarek (2010) makes explicit the difference between target and actual audience, and she describes in some detail how target audiences are construed in televisual artefacts as well as in and by ancillary products. She is less specific about actual audiences, which fall outside the scope of her empirical research on Gilmore Girls (The WB television network 2000–2007). That individual audience members view and understand telecinematic discourse differently is addressed, however, when Bednarek (2010: 214–220) discusses the relationship between the ideologies manifest in the artefact and the audience. Here, she relies on Hall’s (1994: 209–211) distinction of three different viewer positions when decoding meaning in television discourse (Bednarek 2010: 217). Hall (1994: 209) offers a “hypothetical analysis of some possible decoding positions”, which distinguishes (1) a dominant-hegemonic from (2) a negotiated and (3) an oppositional position. While the first, ideal-typical case has audiences “decode[] the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded” (Hall 1994: 209), the third, oppositional position suggests that audiences may decode meaning completely on their

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own terms and thus reject the dominant reading (Hall 1994: 211). Between the two poles, the second, negotiated position partly accepts the dominant framework for decoding the message, but “contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements” (Hall 1994: 210). In transferring Hall’s viewer positions to the reception processes of the audiences of fictional film and television, Bednarek (2010: 217–218) finds that a distinction of decoding positions, as it is offered by Hall (1994), does not only relate to ideologies, but also to reading and viewing more generally: Audiences “engag[e] differently with media texts, mediating their interpretation with mental representations” (Bednarek 2010: 218). None of the extant theoretical models of participation in telecinematic discourse offer insights on audience reception based on empirical research with actual television or cinema audiences. However, Bednarek’s (2010) study makes explicit the necessary distinction between target audience and actual audience and hints at the influence of the former on the production-side meaning-making processes as well as the significance of distinguishing subtypes of the latter in order to conceptualize different audience participation roles. The second aspect on which Bednarek elaborates is that of multimodality, which again is only implied in Bubel. Bednarek (2010) distinguishes multimodality in characters, i.e. gestures, gaze, facial expressions as they are performed by the characters on the fictional layer, from multimodality in the product, which refers to “the meaning potential of the moving image itself” (Bednarek 2010: 20) and includes such aspects as camera, editing, lighting, but also different dimensions of sound. With regard to the understanding of the participation structure, Bednarek’s discussion of multimodality highlights the range of communicative acts and semiotic systems that need to be taken into account as part of the communicative setting in and of fiction. As part of multimodality in character she also observes that bodily gestures of characters and actors are conflated in telecinematic discourse (Bednarek 2010: 19), which means that they simultaneously take place on the fictional layer and on the layer of production crew, recipients and actors. Whereas Bednarek (2010: 143–176) dedicates an entire chapter to multimodal performance, in which she is mostly interested in the multimodal construal of character identity, the notion of signals that take place simultaneously on several levels, and the effect of this simultaneity on audiences are not further discussed by her. This issue resurfaces in Brock (2015), however, and will be further discussed in Section 3.4. 3.3.

Participation in Dynel (2011)

The participation structure proposed by Dynel (2011) positions itself opposite that of Bubel (2006, 2008). Dynel’s (2011: 1629) aim is to “argue against the viewer-as-overhearer approach and advance a new conceptualization of the film viewer as a listener to film discourse/talk”. She takes issue with the two contradictory

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audience participation roles inherent in Bubel’s term of overhearer design, as they were discussed in Section 3.1 of this chapter. To reiterate, whereas the term overhearer positions the audience as unratified participants sealed off from the space in which characters interact, design suggests that the fictional interaction is aimed at and written for that same audience. Based on a literature review of how overhearers have been understood in ordinary interaction, Dynel arrives at a general definition that defines overhearer as: an unratified participant (rather than a non-participant) who listens to (and usually also watches) an utterance (or a turn) being performed in an ongoing interaction without the speaker’s permission (and usually, but not always, the ratified hearer’s/hearers’ permission). (Dynel 2011: 1629)

The central aspect here is the lack of permission or, as Dynel adds, the fact that the speaker does not intend to be overheard. Based on this definition, Dynel finds the use of the term overhearers for audiences ill-advised, even though it is frequently applied to audiences of mass media (Dynel 2011: 1630). With regard to film audiences, Dynel takes into account Richardson’s (2010: 60) point that film viewers can be seen as overhearers because they are usually not directly addressed, as well as Bubel’s argument which has been discussed here in Section 3.1. She highlights, however, that the collective sender, the umbrella term she uses for all those involved in the production of fictional film and television, designs character dialogue specifically for the audience, and that viewers therefore need to be regarded as ratified participants in telecinematic discourse. Based on Goffman’s imagined recipients and Hutchby’s (2006) distributed recipients5 she proposes to refer to film and television audiences with the term recipient instead. As can be seen in Figure 2, Dynel (2011) visualizes her understanding in the form of nested containers, with the fictional level 1 embedded in the communication between collective sender and recipient on level 2. On that second and superior level, the role of the ordinary recipient is further distinguished from that of the metarecipient, which is a term reserved for more analytical recipients, such as researchers. She explains the concept of metarecipient as follows: This is an informed recipient who watches a film as if from a privileged position, analysing its discourse consciously and, frequently, making insightful observations about a meaning conveyed and methods employed to achieve this end in the collective sender’s production layer. (Dynel 2011: 1633)

5



Hutchby (2006: 14) proposes the term distributed recipients to refer to the audience of broadcast talk, because it “seems to capture the sense in which the audience is addressed, albeit often indirectly, and situated as a ratified (though non-co-present) hearer rather than an eavesdropper”.

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Figure 2. Participants in telecinematic discourse in Dynel (2011: 1634)

Contrary to the analytical metarecipient, Dynel repeatedly defines the ordinary recipient as immersed in the fiction and oblivious of its constructedness: “Normally, the viewer willingly forgets about the real production end and engages in characters’ interactions” (Dynel 2011: 1632), and further: “The viewer normally assumes that there are no other authors of utterances than the characters, which is the essence of regular film watching” (Dynel 2011: 1632). Dynel attests that the rigid separation between recipients and metarecipients is done for methodological clarity, and she acknowledges that ordinary recipients may in fact share some of the analytical observations typically associated with metarecipients. Dynel’s distinction thus at least potentially marks two endpoints of a continuum between immersion and awareness of the artefact – or in Clark’s (1996) and Bubel’s (2006, 2008) terms between appreciation and imagination of the recipient. This is important because it points towards more attention in the theory towards individual differences in the audience. The metarecipient/recipient dichotomy is based on ideal viewer types rather than real viewers, but it can be read as a first step away from a universal audience. The cognitive processes that Bubel (2006, 2008) included into her framework can of course also be read as an acknowledgment of a diversified audience in which each individual viewer is influenced not only by the cues that are provided on the fictional layer, but also by their individual prior knowledge. Bubel (2006, 2008), however, speaks only of different processes on the part of the viewers, not of different viewer types or even individual viewers that would need to be distinguished. With regard to the extract from Seinfeld (Example 1), distinguishing meta­ recipients and recipients will result in two different understandings of the scene. Ordinary recipients will follow the initially offered naïve interpretation of the

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scene as if George and Jerry were real people in a real coffee shop in New York. Taking the initial discussion about shirts as an example, the recipients may relate to or even identify with the process of having to choose a shirt in a store, they may agree or disagree with the notion that the position of the second button is important for selecting what shirt to buy, and they may make inferences about what kind of people George and Jerry may be. In other words, they will willingly suspend their disbelief and listen to the conversation as if it were taking place between two strangers or acquaintances. Metarecipients, on the other hand, will be aware of some of the ways in which linguistic and other means are employed for the construction of the scene. They may observe, for instance, how the actors perform their roles, that the topic being discussed is pronouncedly ordinary in the context of its representation in a fictional artefact, or how incongruities are constructed in the dialogue for humorous effect – in short, their viewing will be similar to the one offered here at the end of Section 3.1. 3.4.

Participation in Brock (2015)

The last approach to telecinematic participation presented in this section is the one put forward by Brock (2015). It is important for a number of reasons: First of all, it addresses the overhearer/ratified participant difference in the role of film and television audiences and offers a view that combines both approaches. Secondly, it suggests a more explicitly dynamic model of recipientship than those of Bubel (2006, 2008) or Dynel (2011). Finally, it compares a range of different comedy genres and thus highlights important questions with regard to the universal applicability of fictional participation frameworks. Brock’s (2015) approach to participation in sitcoms and other comedies follows Dynel (2011) in its understanding of television audiences as ratified participants. Brock (2015: 28) refers to the audience as: “addressee and indeed the central and intended recipient of the communicative system of the TV discourse”. He chooses the term TV viewer instead of Dynel’s recipient, but this is a mere terminological difference. He also subscribes to the same hierarchy of levels, and refers to the level between collective sender and TV viewer as Communicative Level 1 (CL1), which is “the primary and only real level of communication here” (Brock 2015: 29–30). Interaction between characters takes place on CL2. Interestingly, however, Brock does not discard the viewer-as-overhearer notion as completely as Dynel (2011). Similar to Bednarek’s (2010) mention of character and actor gestures being conflated on the speaker-side (see Section 3.2), Brock argues on the hearer-side that TV viewers can be in different roles at the same time. While they are always ratified addressees on CL1, they can be overhearers, but also speakers or addressees of individual characters on CL2. In order to position TV viewers in a certain way, Brock (2015: 32) envisions that “a fictitious participation slot is constructed into the participation framework

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on CL2 in order to accommodate the viewer”. The default camera position in the television comedies that Brock analyses resembles that of a person present in the scene, and the fictional characters conventionally ignore the presence of a camera altogether (Brock 2015: 32). As a result, the constructed participation slot “resembles the position of a natural overhearer and […] becomes the main (fictitious) identification point for the real TV viewer to slip into” (Brock 2015: 32–33). The positioning of the viewer as a fictitious overhearer is thus considered a collaborative achievement by the collective sender, who prepares the slot, and the viewer, who plays along – just as viewers generally need to suspend their disbelief in order to engage with the fictional layer. While the range of extracts discussed by Brock (2015) cannot be discussed here in full, it is worth mentioning that he provides convincing examples from less conventional comedies that construct a different fictitious participation slot. For instance, he shows how the British sitcom Peep Show (Channel 4 2003–2015) positions viewers as speakers and addressees of inter-character conversations: Using point-of-view shots, which are achieved by “strapping a camera to an actor’s head or holding it before his/her face” (Brock 2015: 37), the sitcom aligns the perspective of the television viewer with that of the speaking or addressed character. Making use of voice-over at the same time, which may represent the respective character’s thoughts or speech, the telecinematic apparatus invites the audience to become the fictional character (Brock 2015: 36) and to pretend to interact with the other characters as if they all shared the same fictional space. More generally, Brock’s separation of viewer participation roles on CL1 and CL2 means that the viewers of the comedies he is interested in are in two roles at the same time. They need to be immersed in order to empathically follow the fictional story, but they also need to be akin to Dynel’s (2011) metarecipients in order to laugh at the humour that is being constructed for them. Returning to Example 1, we are overhearers insofar as we listen to Jerry and George’s conversation without them acknowledging our presence, but we are also ratified participants who laugh about the humorous events that the writers and creators have conceived and that are realized in the actors’ performances. The audience-as-ratified participant position is particularly salient in moments where the collective sender employs telecinematic means that go beyond the capturing of naturalistic actor-as-character performances. They range from the use of poetic language (Kozloff 2000: 51–52) to actors emphasizing their own performance (60–61), to voice-over narrating and directly addressing the audience. In the case of Seinfeld, examples are the blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, which is achieved by emphasizing the similarities between the fictional character and the actor portraying him, the prologue in which Jerry Seinfeld performs as a stand-up comedian (as described in Section 2.1), and the laugh track which forms part of the broadcast. The duality of audience positions can be seen as reminiscent to the inherent

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contradiction in Bubel’s (2006, 2008) concept of overhearer design, which makes the audience both overhearer and target of character interaction. However, explicitly foreseeing two participation roles for viewers on different communicative levels is an important addition by Brock, which will need to be explored further in future research. One question that immediately presents itself is whether this combination of viewer imagination and appreciation can be transferred to other film and television genres, or if it is a characteristic of comedies that they position their audiences in such a dual role. If the latter is the case, this would mean that other, more traditionally narrative genres could still follow the ideal of the immersed viewer, which Dynel (2011) assumes as the default. A final methodological achievement in Brock’s (2015) framework is the comparative position he takes with regard to participation, moving from different subtypes of television comedies to other comedy genres (stand-up comedies and candid camera comedies). The result of this approach is a range of different participation models and visualizations, which are all based on the same theoretical understanding as it was outlined here, but show a different participation configuration for each particular communicative setting. 3.5. Summary This section has discussed four different theoretical approaches to the participation structures of telecinematic discourse in order to illuminate the communicative setting and the participant roles as they are described in different pragmatic frameworks. There is first of all a consensus that telecinematic and other fictional communication takes places on two separate levels or layers, which comprise the communication between the collective sender or film production crew and the television or film audience on one level, and the fictional interaction between characters on another. There is furthermore wide agreement that the communication on the fictional level is subject to overhearer or recipient design (the term used by Dynel 2011), i.e. that those conversations which take place in the seemingly self-contained fictional world are in fact written with a television or film audience in mind, and that viewers are meant to understand the meaning that is construed by the collective sender. While the roles of participants on the fictional layer are straightforward and can be explained with the help of participation frameworks for non-fictional discourse, such as the one presented in Goffman (1979), there is some debate about the way in which the film or television audience has to be envisioned. Whereas the term overhearer is used by Bubel (2006, 2008), Bednarek (2010) and by a number of works in film studies (Kozloff 2000; Richardson 2010), Dynel (2011) argues that film audiences have to be understood as ratified participants or recipients. Brock (2015) combines both views with the help of the two different communicative levels: He regards audiences as ratified participants on the level between

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collective sender and real audiences, but suggests that on the fictional layer slots for different participation roles can be constructed, which the audience can then inhabit as part of their suspension of disbelief. While Brock gives examples for a range of different roles, he regards the role of overhearer as one of the typical slots that is opened for viewers. Thus viewers-as-overhearers and viewers-as-ratified participants both find their place in Brock’s (2015) framework. 4.

Participation frameworks of literary fiction and dramatic discourse

Given that Section 3 has outlined in some detail how fictional participation is understood in pragmatic research on telecinematic discourse, it will be the task of this section to complement the telecinematic frameworks with a brief look to other subcategories of fiction and to different research traditions and participation frameworks that, for the most part, precede the ones presented in the main section. I will first address playwrights and theatregoers and will then turn to participation in literary fiction. 4.1.

Participation and drama

It has to be noted first of all that, due to the theoretical position from which telecinematic frameworks of participation describe collective sender, audience and characters, there is no reason why drama could not be included in the same models. In fact, despite the focus on telecinematic data, all presented frameworks can be said to implicitly serve as general models of fictional participation. While more recent participation models have shown more awareness for individual audience members and differences between genres, they still do not consider specific viewing situations and pay no heed, for instance, to how seeing a television show on a tablet or laptop might differ in terms of participation from seeing it together with other people at the cinema. Traditional categorization based on the production and staging of the fictional interaction will say that film, television and drama are three distinct art forms. However, in terms of participation structures, seeing a film at a cinema shares some similarities with seeing a play that it does not share with seeing a film on one’s own – most notably the fact that the action of viewing is in both cases shared with an audience. At the same time, there are of course differences between the staging of a play and television/film production, which are only of interest here, however, insofar as they influence participation structures and in particular the role of the audience. Despite obvious similarities between drama and telecinematic discourse, most research on participation in fictional film and television has paid little attention to work on dramatic discourse. Herman (1995: 3) states, however, that there has tra-

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ditionally been very little research on dramatic dialogues, which may also explain the sparsity of references to dramatic participation. Goffman discusses the conventions of the theatrical frame in some detail and includes notions such as the willing suspension of disbelief, which is expressed in the description “voluntarily supported benign fabrication” (1986: 136). His distinction between onlookers and theatregoers is worth mentioning here, because it implies a similar conflation of audience roles as it appears in Brock (2015). Goffman (1986: 130) uses laughter as an example and states that the onlooker is sympathetic and laughs about the staged humorous actions, whereas the theatregoer laughs about an unscripted blunder by the actor on stage. Onlooking, Goffman (1986: 131) adds, is similar in the case of reading and viewing a play, (and surely also in the case of viewing a television show or film), whereas the other role – in this case theatregoing – is markedly different. With regard to the role of the audience, Goffman (1986: 141) also states that their response “is systematically built into the interaction on stage”. He adds: “the audience is given the information it needs covertly, so the fiction can be sustained that it has indeed entered into a world not its own” (Goffman 1986: 142). Thus he includes the notion of fiction being designed for an audience as well as that of the playwright making particular information available to audiences, while still maintaining the illusion. Herman (1995: 29) speaks of the “double axes of character-character interaction and stage-audience reception” and includes similar aspects of audience design or information management on the production-side. That is, some of the information that is provided may be of more interest to either the characters on stage or the audience, and differences in knowledge between the two may be used for specific effect, such as dramatic irony (Herman 1995: 29–30). The most complex pragmatic model for dramatic discourse, both as communication mediated through the written text and through the performed play, is the one presented by Hess-Lüttich (1991). He understands dramatic communication as aesthetic communication, which embeds character dialogues in public communication (1991: 234). Text and performed play also incorporate the implied author and the fictive reader/anticipated audience, which means that their relationship is accessible in the text. It seems, however, that within linguistics the participation framework in Short (1981, 1989) is still the framework most widely cited, both in research on dramatic and telecinematic discourse. Short (1981) was already mentioned in Section 2 as an example for a theory that envisions character interactions as embedded in the communication between audiences and, in this case, the playwright and others who are involved in the writing and staging of theatre. Short offers a model that, considered within the anachronistic order that his chapter follows, can be read as a predecessor of telecinematic frameworks. He envisions dramatic communication on two levels, with the playwright sending a message to the audience on one level, and charac-

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ters sending and receiving messages on the other (Short 1981: 188). The discourse between characters is embedded into the dramatic discourse and becomes part of the message from the playwright to the audience. Short refers to the audience as the main addressee and refutes the notion that they could be overhearers. Drama as performance can thus be understood as similar in participation to film and television viewing. As long as individual reception settings are not differentiated in detail, there is no reason why pragmatic research cannot devise a unified participation framework that can explain both the participant roles in telecinematic and in dramatic fiction. Drama as text, i.e. reading plays, or screenplays for that matter, will be treated here as part of literary fiction. As Short (1981: 182) states, theatrical criticism needs to address performance, whereas the text can be analysed within literary criticism. 4.2.

Participation and literary fiction

Participation frameworks in telecinematic discourse and theatrical performance are rooted for the most part in pragmatic theories of participation developed for face-to-face interaction and more generally spoken interaction. Author, reader and character roles in literary fiction, in contrast, have been theorized in literary criticism, stylistics and more recently in literary pragmatics. On the one hand, it can be said that the foundations for later work on literature as communication were already laid in early literary criticism; on the other hand, it has to be pointed out that an interest in readers is relatively recent, and for the most part can be traced back to reader response criticism in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas the earlier paradigms of formalism and New Criticism focused on the text (Riddle Harding 2014: 68), reader response criticism shifted that focus to include the role of the readers. As Peplow and Carter (2014) point out, much of the ensuing work was, however, primarily interested in idealized or implied readers, which is Iser’s (1972) equivalent on the side of the reader to Booth’s (1961) famous notion of the implied author. The implied reader is a construct in the text and has been described as: “a reader who has the necessary linguistic and cultural knowledge to understand and appreciate the text” (Black 2006: 54). The literary work, in other words, is written with an ideal reader in mind, which is a notion quite similar to that of recipient or overhearer design as it is taken up by all telecinematic frameworks presented in Section 3. In the same section, it has also been mentioned that telecinematic discourse is only slowly turning towards a more detailed look at different audiences or even individual audience members. There is thus a similarity in the conceptualization of the audience, which in both approaches is potentially diverse, but treated in the actual theory as a homogenous whole. As Riddle Harding (2014) points out, the interest of reader response criticism in readers has later been taken up by many different subdisciplines of literary theory and criticism. Among others, she mentions different cognitive approaches

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to reading, which focus quite literally on the cognitive processes involved when engaging with a literary text, more sociological approaches such as gender studies, reception studies, and empirical reading studies that focus on actual readers and their responses to literary works (Riddle Harding 2014). Riddle Harding (2014: 79) herself defines the process of reading as follows: “Reading […] is a creative process in which a reader detects textual cues by engaging actively with the text”. This is a stance very similar to that of Dynel’s (2011: 1633) active recipientship, which positions audiences as active viewers of films and television shows, but Riddle Harding here also emphasizes the individual creativity required of the reader. Most relevant for this discussion of literary participation is the work of Sell (1991, 2000, 2001, 2014) and the Literary Communication Project of Åbo Akademi University. Sell (2014: 3) programmatically states that he and the LitCom group regard “writing, reading and performance of so-called literary texts as acts of real communication between real human beings as they engage in what is fundamentally a kind of dialogue”. More specifically, Sell positions himself between the structuralist view of literary texts as products of their socio-cultural context and a subjectivist notion of authors and readers as idiosyncratic individuals. He sees human beings as social individuals that possess both their own imagination, but are also influenced by historical factors (Sell 2000, 2014). This understanding of authors and readers is also expressed in his theory of a historical yet non-historicist literary pragmatics (Sell 2000), which also highlights the necessity of a mediating critic that bridges the gap between the socio-historical context of the author and that of the reader. Sell (2000: 2) adheres to a basic triangular understanding of literary communication, which is to say that author and reader are communicating about the literary work as a third entity. This is not different in principle from the telecinematic frameworks by Bubel (2006, 2008) and Dynel (2011), but the latter two explain in more detail the intrinsic structure of the fictional third entity and the processes that lead to its production and comprehension. One crucial difference between literature and film is of course that the latter is inevitably a product of multiple authors, i.e. the collective sender, and often received by an audience rather than by an individual. Literary fiction, on the contrary, is prototypically written by one author and read by one reader. Perhaps due to this difference, Sell (2000) and literary pragmatics more generally base their understanding of fictional participation more directly on a dyadic model of dialogue. That Sell’s notion of the mediating critic has the semblance of a translator between two interlocutors from different sociocultural backgrounds may be explained by this difference. However, such differences in focus aside, Sell’s communicative understanding of literature is quite similar to recent pragmatic understandings of participation in telecinematic discourse, and his notion of reading as an active part of communication (Sell 2000: 72) is in accordance with both Riddle Harding’s (2014) creative reading process and Dynel’s (2011) active recipients.

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5. Future directions and concluding remarks One of the issues raised in the introduction of this chapter is the lack of substantial theoretical work that would offer a participation framework for different subtypes of fictional discourse. Given the fact that research on participation in telecinematic discourse explicitly or implicitly draws on previous work from drama and from literary fiction, and taking into account the similarity in production and reception processes between the different fictional genres, such a unified theory of participation in fiction would prove a fruitful addition to pragmatic research. Accordingly, this chapter has focused on commonalities between participation in different forms of fictional discourse. The clear focus here has been on telecinematic frameworks, and theoretical observations from dramatic discourse and literary pragmatics and stylistics have retrospectively been identified as predecessors of more recent participation frameworks. In terms of the future directions of the field, a trend towards a more finegrained look at film and television viewers and by extension at theatregoers and readers has been suggested. It seems plausible based on current trends that future research will produce conceptualizations of participation structures that pay more heed to differences between recipients, but also between different genres and subtypes of fiction. This expected diversification is not to be understood as anti­ thetical to a unified theory of fictional participation – Brock (2015), for instance, shows nicely how juxtaposing different participation settings under one unifying theoretical approach can be a productive way of highlighting both commonalities and differences in various kinds of fictional communications. This chapter has followed the research it presents in focussing on the recipient’s point of view. The production processes that are included in the different frameworks are invariably removed from the actual production and placed instead inside the communication between text and reader, as part of what can be detected or inferred by metarecipients but may not be noticed by ordinary recipients. This recipient bias raises the question, however, whether communication between author and text deserves more weight in pragmatic research. Especially in tele­ cine­matic discourse, real viewer research, in analogy to real reader research in literary pragmatics, could be complemented by real production crew research. While current frameworks at best make assumptions about how fictional artefacts might have been created, the collaborative construction of meaning between scriptwriters, directors, but also the cast and crew of films and fictional television is taking place within a different type of communicative setting altogether. A pragmatics of fiction production would then need to shift its attention from the artefact as a finished fictional product to the elaborate joint processes that lead to its existence: Instead of recipient design, for instance, it would examine recipient designing.

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Appendix. Transcription conventions (based on Jefferson 2004; Mondada 2014) [ ] (.) = ___ : ↑↓ .,?! *±§^ *----* *----> ----* 34

overlapping speech short gap between utterances latch stress indicates lengthening of the previous sound shift to high or low pitch punctuation indicates usual intonation symbols to identify participants delimits action/facial expression by participant action continues on subsequent line(s) action ends numbers in left-hand column refer to camera shots

References Primary sources Peep Show 2003–2015  Screenplay by Martin Becky, Tristam Shapeero and Jeremy Wooding, Channel 4. The Seinfeld Chronicles 1989 Dir. Art Wolff. Screenplay by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. NBC. Gilmore Girls 2000–2007  Screenplay by Amy Sherman-Palladino. The WB Television Network. Secondary sources Androutsopoulos, Jannis 2012 Introduction: Language and society in cinematic discourse. Multilingua 31(2–3): 139–154. Bednarek, Monika 2010 The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London: Conti­ nuum. Bednarek, Monika 2012 “Get us the hell out of here”: Key words and trigrams in fictional television series. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17(1): 35–63. Black, Elizabeth 2006 Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Booth, Wayne C. 1961 The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Brock, Alexander 2009 Humour as a metacommunicative process. Journal of Literary Theory 3(2): 177–193. Brock, Alexander 2015 Participation frameworks and participation in televised sitcom, candid camera and stand-up comedy. In: Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 27–47. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bubel, Claudia M. 2006 The Linguistic Construction of Character Relations in TV Drama: Doing Friendship in Sex and the City. Universität des Saarlandes. http://scidok.sulb. uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2006/598/pdf/Diss_Bubel_publ.pdf Bubel, Claudia M. 2008 Film audiences as overhearers. Journal of Pragmatics 40(1): 55–71. Burger, Harald 1984 Sprache der Massenmedien. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Burger, Harald 1991 Das Gespräch in den Massenmedien. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Burger, Harald and Martin Luginbühl 2014 Mediensprache: Eine Einführung in Sprache und Kommunikationsformen der Massenmedien, 4th Ed. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Chovanec, Jan and Marta Dynel 2015 Researching interactional forms and participant structures in public and social media. In: Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 1–23. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Clark, Herbert H. 1996 Using Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Herbert H. and Edward F. Schaefer 1992 Dealing with overhearers. In: Herbert H. Clark (ed.), Arenas of Language Use, 248–273. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Culpeper, Jonathan 2001 Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow: Longman. Desilla, Louisa 2012 Implicatures in film: Construal and functions in Bridget Jones romantic comedies. Journal of Pragmatics 44(1): 30–53. Dynel, Marta 2011 “You talking to me?” The viewer as a ratified listener to film discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 43(6): 1628–1644. Goffman, Erving 1967 Interaction Ritual. Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books. Goffman, Erving 1976 Replies and responses. Language in Society 5(3): 257–313. http://www.cambridge.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/ Goffman, Erving 1979 Footing. Semiotica 25(1–2): 1–29.

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Goffman, Erving 1986 Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. First published Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [1974]. Hall, Stuart 1994 Encoding/decoding. In: David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett (eds.), Media Texts: Authors and Readers, 200–211. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Herman, Vimala 1995 Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. New York: Routledge. Hess-Lüttich, Ernest W. B. 1991 How does the writer of a dramatic text interact with his audiences?: On the pragmatics of literary communication. In: Roger D. Sell (ed.), Literary Pragmatics, 225–259. New York: Routledge. Hutchby, Ian 2006 Media Talk: Conversation Analysis and the Study of Broadcasting. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Iser, Wolfgang 1972 Der implizite Leser. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Jefferson, Gail 2004 Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In: Gene H. Lerner (ed.), Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, 13–31. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. http://www.liso.ucsb.edu/liso_archives/Jefferson/Transcript.pdf Kozloff, Sarah 2000 Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mondada, Lorenza 2014 Conventions for multimodal transcription. https://franz.unibas.ch/fileadmin/ franz/user_upload/redaktion/Mondada_conv_multimodality.pdf Peplow, David and Ronald Carter 2014 Stylistics and real readers. In: Michael Burke (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, 440–454. Oxon: Routledge. Piazza, Roberta, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi 2011 Introduction: Analysing telecinematic discourse. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 1–17. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Richardson, Kay 2010 Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Riddle Harding, Jennifer 2014 Reader response criticism and stylistics. In: Michael Burke (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, 68–84. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson 1974 A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50(4/1): 696–735. Sell, Roger D. 1991 The politeness of literary texts. In: Roger D. Sell (ed.), Literary Pragmatics, 208–241. New York: Routledge.

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Sell, Roger D. 2000 Literature as Communication: The Foundations of Mediating Criticism. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sell, Roger D. 2001 A historical but non-determinist pragmatics of literary communication. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2(1): 1–32. http://www.redi-bw.de/db/ ebsco.php/search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN =2001931532&site=ehost-live&scope=cite Sell, Roger D. 2014 Introduction. In: Roger D. Sell (Ed.), Literature as Dialogue: Invitations Offered and Negotiated, 1–20. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Short, Mick H. 1981 Discourse analysis and the analysis of drama. Applied Linguistics 2(2): 180– 201. Short, Mick H. 1989 Discourse analysis and the analysis of drama. In: Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson (eds.), Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics, 139–168. London: Unwin Hyman. Vanoye, Francis 1985 Conversations publiques. IRIS: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound 3(1): 99–188.

3.

The pragmatics of the genres of fiction Janet Giltrow

Abstract: With a principal but not exclusive focus on literary fiction, this chapter takes a phenomenological rather than formalist approach to genre, and looks for explanation in the sociality of language users’ experience. Section 2 finds such an approach in Levinson’s Activity Types, in aspects of historical pragmatics, in Goffman’s frame analysis, in Rhetorical Genre Theory, and in Moretti’s “distant reading” of literary types. Aligning with Grice’s Maxims and, in particular, with the “weak implicatures” of Sperber and Wilson’s revision of Grice, Section 3 reviews pragmatic accounts of fiction (Adams, Mey, Pilkington, Black) and also stakes, with Wilson, a fundamental continuity between fictional uses of language and other uses. With this continuity in view, Section 3 emphasises a social-action rather than aesthetic account of fiction genres: fiction genres build on language users’ capacity for invention (Chafe); for accommodating to overhearing (Clark); for “engrossment” (Goffman); for drawing inference from the representation of others’ voices (e.g. Bakhtin, Vološinov); and above all for weak implicature – in fiction deriving uncertain inferences at the outer limit of what a writer might plausibly have intended to mean. Hazarding a social explanation for literary fiction, Section 3 suggests that the exploitation of these capacities by literary fiction genres, in their long and unceasing development, up-dates readers’ intelligence of the social order. As that social order changes, so will the conditions of this intelligence. The chapter mentions and concludes with brief discussion of “meta-genre” (Giltrow): talk and activity around a genre, and their social ramifications. 1. Introduction As a term and concept, genre has enjoyed a modest sinecure in literary studies. Although by no means a prestigious term of art, it can nevertheless point to a long history of use, arguably from Aristotelian distinctions amongst both aesthetic and civic types of speech, through Renaissance and Enlightenment applications to more recent ones. In recent applications – with important exceptions to be discussed below – genre has two main roles. In one role, genre can be an inverse term of praise in evaluating literary works: a literary work can be celebrated for defying genre expectations. In this application, genre is a measure of purity, with a reputation for predictability. In its second role in today’s literary studies it is simply the name for something that is newly discovered – a so-far unnoticed trend – or something that is old, yet so far unnoticed as having reappeared. The notice can be DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-003 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 55–91. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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of a motif, for example, or a theme or a style or stance, or even a kind of character. In both uses in literary study, the term is undertheorised, or untheorised. Where the term genre arrives already attached to the term fiction, we get genre fiction: genre fiction includes the types of fiction which are quickly recognised and may be chosen by readers for the predictability of their content (Baldrick 2015). Westerns and fantasy novels, detective novels and thrillers, spy stories, courtship romances – all these and more can be pointed to as instances of genre fiction. The term can express the suspicion that the writing has been done for commercial rather than aesthetic purposes, or has been dictated by the tastes of niche audiences. Baldrick (2015) is not alone in observing the opposition between genre fiction and literary fiction. Even with its modest status in literary studies, genre is so used to being associated with, for example, sonnets, or detective fiction that it seems to belong with artistic and entertaining uses of language, and to be properly kept separate from practical uses of language. Where they are known by their forms instead of by their practical purposes uses, literary genres have been protected from questions about what they are for, what work they do (unlike, say, the judge’s written opinion or the pop-up advertisement). This chapter aims beyond formalism, and towards a phenomenology of genre with implications for understanding the social action of fiction genres. Questions about the sociality of fiction are addressed if not definitively answered in Section 3. Section 2 sets the stage for these questions by reviewing linguistic-pragmatic reasoning about genre in both Anglo-American and European-Continental traditions (2.1); bringing to the question of genre Goffman’s frame analysis (2.2); introducing Rhetorical Genre Theory (2.3); describing recent additions to concepts of genre in literary studies, with particular emphasis on Moretti’s “distant reading” (2.4). Section 3 reviews pragmatic accounts of fiction and also stakes, with Wilson (2011), a fundamental continuity between fictional uses of language and other uses. With this continuity in view, Section 3 emphasises a social-action rather than aesthetic account of fiction genres and suggests that the exploitation of these capacities by literary fiction genres, in their long and unceasing development, up-dates readers’ intelligence of the social order.

2.

Contemporary reasoning about genre in Anglo-American and European-Continental linguistic-pragmatics, rhetorical studies, and literary theory

2. 1.

Pragmatic approaches to genre

In comparison to its long use in literary studies, the term genre has a relatively short record of use in what is regarded as the Anglo-American tradition in prag-

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matics: most narrowly, study of the resolution of reference and indexicals; of the dependence of sentences’ meaning on context; and of non-literal meaning. Pusch­ mann’s (2009, 2010) pragmatic studies of on-line genres are recent and effective instances, focussing on indexicals. There is, however, in the Anglo-American tradition an early contribution whose potential for genre studies at first went relatively unnoticed in that field but was eventually taken up by more sociological language study. In 1979 Levinson proposed and defined “Activity Types” (AT) as “goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded, events with constraints on participants, setting, and so on, but above all on the kinds of allowable contributions”, and as “any culturally recognized event”, such as teaching, interviewing for a job, cricket (1979: 368, emphasis in original). The event could occur with or without speech. In proposing AT, Levinson was working with the problem of sentences depending on context for their meaning; he points to Wittgenstein ([1953] 1999) (and “language games”) as originator of the line of reasoning he takes up. Levinson recognizes the proximity to AT of Hymes’ (1974) ethnography of speaking, but rejects its taxonomic focus (who speaks, in what role, what channel, etc.) as less important than “structure and style” (1979: 369). Compellingly, Levinson (1979: 371) says that the constraints on contributions (themselves measured by their functionality in the activity) have their “mirror image” in “inferential schemata”. Both constraints and schemata – production and reception – derive from language users’ deep knowledge of the activity and its situation. He demonstrates these schemata with examples from courtroom questioning and classroom questioning. Without the schemata, the utterances of both questioners and answerers would be uninterpretable; they would not make sense. Levinson’s focus on situated and extended discourse is unusual, and the Anglo-American tradition in pragmatics may itself be relatively inhospitable to genre study, for its focus on snippets of conversation, often invented, does not immediately bring into view issues associated with genre. And when pragmatics in the Anglo-American analytic-philosophical tradition has looked at literary expression, it has often been attracted to figurative language and its resolution as non-literal. While the effects of figurative language are not inconsequential to fiction genres (or to any genres), the main story for the pragmatics of fiction genres is probably not about figurative language. Later sections of this chapter return to the Anglo-American-pragmatic conceptions of inference, including weak implicature and “poetic effects” (Sperber and Wilson 1995), for their potential to contribute to study of the pragmatics of fiction genres. In the meantime, we find in the European-Continental tradition of pragmatics a more visible profile for genre, particularly when that tradition is extended to include broadly discourse-analytic techniques. Taking a systemic perspective, Bax (2011), for example, locates genre centrally amongst key terms in the last half century of study of language in context: mental model, for example, script and schema, intertextuality. At the centre of this terminological network, “genre” is

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positioned vis-à-vis “discourse”. To arrange this pair, Bax (2011: 54–56) sets aside “text type” and gives its place to “discourse mode”. Despite his choosing discourse mode over the more commonly used text type, Bax nevertheless joins a stream of reasoning which seeks to reconcile classification at a high level – e.g. narration, description, instruction, argument – with classification at a lower level of cultural specificity: for example, rather than “narration”, “broadcast news report of crime”. The trend has been to give the lower level of classification to “genre”, genres being then analysable for using some of the higher level text types (or, as Bax prefers, discourse modes): narration, description, etc. The Sydney School of Systemic Functional Linguistics has not joined the trend towards two-level classification, and has stuck to the higher order terms alone. More important for this chapter, however, than the two-level design of Bax’s approach is the result, for study of pragmatics of fiction, of his taxonomic project aligning terms and nomenclatures. His table of relations between genre and discourse provides for function: “Genres typically perform particular functions” and “As we use genres, we can draw on any of the various discourse modes in flexible ways” (Bax 2011: 57, emphasis added). The genre “novel” is one example of this instrumental relationship. The “function” of the novel is said to be “Entertainment, aesthetic” (Bax 2011: 57). While this taxonomic system may satisfy imperatives in “classifying and organising genres” (Bax 2011: 51), the unexamined function termed “Entertainment, aesthetic” holds little promise of addressing the pragmatic problems presented by fiction genres – problems in the sociality of linguistic consciousness, and the trepidations of inference and implicature. Similarly, Busse (2014) locates genre study amongst a multitude of terms: almost everything that is on the table today for study of language in context (even Cameron’s [1995] “verbal hygiene” makes a brief appearance, [Busse 2014: 104]). In this terminological matrix, it is hard to see what genre and genre study would not be. Busse is, however, less taxonomical in her approach than Bax, and also urges genre study beyond “frequency patterns and statistical significance alone” (2014: 104). More promising to a pragmatics of fiction genres than taxonomic efforts are the techniques, principles, and findings of historical pragmatics. Historical pragmaticists make a case for the value of diachronic genre study: by these means we get a sense of genres’ responsiveness, over time, to socio-cultural conditions, including technological change. Taavitsainen (2011) proposes a relatively transparent relation between form and purpose, feature and function, representing Swales’ (1990) position on genre as their being “created to meet the needs of discourse communities” (2011: 83), and describing genres as “‘inherently dynamic cultural schemata used to organise knowledge and experience’” (Taavitsainen 2001: 139–140, as quoted in Taavitsainen 2011: 83). While there may be reason to question the conscious agency attributed thereby to genre creators and users, Taavitsainen (2011: 83) offers convincing evidence for the manifestation of new “thought styles” of “enquiry” in the appearance of modern medical case reports: genre “conventions”

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developed over time in contrast to the genres of medical scholasticism. In their articulation with social structure, thought styles are richer conceptions than function as it might be accounted for by terms like “Entertainment, aesthetic” (Bax 2011: 57). Historical approaches are useful to genre study – and genre is useful to historical approaches. Insofar as genres “[guide] language activities, both the production of texts and their reception”, “investigations into genre distinctions also contextualise pragmatic elements” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2010: 20). Rather than deliver direct form-to-function relations, a pragmatic element under investigation can be reconstituted in its original environment: “What is the social context in which a particular element is being used? Who uses it in what genre/communicative situation?” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2010: 21). Similarly, Jucker and Taavitsainen (2013: 58–60) demonstrate the context-responsiveness of discourse markers and interjections as they thronged the genre of medieval romance: these features marked turn-taking in dialogues at a time when literacy was rare and reading aloud the rule. They served as signposts for speaker changes, making it easier for the audience to follow the turn-taking in dialogic passages. (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2013: 58)

Like others in both literary and pragmatic fields, Jucker and Taavitsainen (2013) see genres as “[guiding] readers’ interpretations and [indicating] the mode in which utterances should be understood, whether serious or ironical, for example” (146); “for authors [genres] act as guidelines and for readers they provide clues for interpretation” (148). Claims like these tend to point to oft-repeated elements, such as the fairy-tale “fixed formula ‘once upon a time’” as “[signalling] the genre and [creating] a horizon of expectations” (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2013: 202), as this anticipatory effect was termed by Jauss (1979). Much has been made of language-users’ recognising genres by means of such signals of formulaic wordings. Does form then have a dual function? If forms are functional in achieving a social purpose, and they aggregate according to a need or social goal, is their function as genre indicators or signals to readers/listeners then epiphenomenal? As the discussion of Bax (2011) above has suggested, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) advances its own version of genre classification, one adopted by Critical Discourse Analysis. In addition to this important player in genre study, we find also the widely-adopted ‘moves’ analyses offered by Swales (1990) in applied-linguistics traditions, and Biber’s influential record of inquiry, probing since the 1980s conceptual distinctions and commonalities between genre and register (Biber 2006; Biber and Conrad 2009; Biber and Finegan 1988, 1989). Each of these models has important reasoning to offer. This chapter, however, finds each of these approaches, while often benefitting from formalism, also limited by it, especially in its remoteness from the context-sensitive, real-time consciousness of language users and their resources for inference and ostensive action.

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Frame Analysis

Broadly, the role of genre in traditions of pragmatics has been varied, with the steadiest focus in historical pragmatics. In addition, in the work of one of pragmatics’ founding uncles (if not founding fathers), we find a sustained perspective which has much to offer genre study: Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974). Responsible for “the organisation of experience”, frames, according to Goffman, sort activities into “strips”. The strips indicate to those who come upon them what kinds of events they are, and answer the question “‘What is it that’s going on here?’” (Goffman 1974: 8–9). A frame response to such a question might identify in one case a sales pitch, or in other cases a figure-drawing class, or an agent’s showing of a house to potential buyers, or a doctor-patient interview. Strips may include speech or even require it: most of Goffman’s examples, he notes, are analysed for “the act of saying things” (1974: 496). “Primary frameworks” vary in “degree of organisation”: while some might be “neatly presentable as a system of entities, postulates, and rules …, most others appear to have no apparent articulated shapes, providing only a lore of understanding, an approach, a perspective” (Goffman 1974: 21). People acquire that mainly tacit “lore” which in depth and density is capable of organising their experience, and they thereby recognise types of events across many instances – “a seemingly infinite number of concrete occurrences” (Goffman 1974: 21). As well as recognising types, people also acquire the “lore” that enables them to take up roles in those recurrent types of events. We can see the “frames” of consciousness and the “strips” of activities as parallel to Levinson’s Activity Types. Especially significant for inquiry into the pragmatics of fiction genres is Goffman’s observation of the potential of the primary framework to change into something else: to be “keyed” differently, while still being patterned after the experience captured in the primary framework. For example, a primary framework that is a physical fight between adversaries – with weapons, or with fists – could be (re)‘keyed’ as “play”, with weapons transformed into playthings (Goffman 1974: 43), or fists choreographed. Thus keyed, the action may be more scripted: in a fencing match, for example. Or it may be fully scripted, as when – say – a doctor-patient interview is keyed as a theatrical performance. All participants – audience, actors, facilitators – in a theatrical performance recognise the re-keying and the “theatrical frame”, and the roles that attend it. A theatre-goer, watching the scripted doctor-patient interview, will not break the frame by offering advice or comfort to the ‘patient’, but will “sympathetically and vicariously [participate] in the unreal world generated by the dramatic interplay of the scripted characters” (Goffman 1974: 130). The theatre-goer is a “ratified” onlooker, and part of the theatre frame. (Goffman [1974: 131] extends this position to reading fiction but the parallel is not drawn far.) As onlookers, members of the audience are “official eavesdroppers” (Goffman 1974: 135); in that official capacity they know not to interact with performers (127), even as they occupy the same physical space. (See Messerli, Ch. 2,

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this volume, on Goffman’s [1979] participation roles in communicative settings, and their application to fiction genres, telecinematic ones in particular.) The re-keying transforms the strip by arranging for ratified on-looking, with no direct interaction (or reduced, highly specified interaction such as applause when the performer signals that the playing is over): we could say that the re-keying takes theatre-goers’ knowledge of the primary framework – the visit to the doctor – and layers it with another level of consciousness as to how to recognise and respond to the visit’s representation in the theatre. But the re-keying – crucially for a pragmatic approach to aesthetic representation – does more than this. It has transformed the primary framework for “high significance” (Goffman 1974: 143): “dramatic interaction”, unlike interaction in primary frameworks, proceeds “on the assumption that nothing that occurs will be unportentous or insignificant … the audience need not select what to attend to: whatever is made available can be taken as present for a good reason” (143); the audience will know to attend to “the whole stage”, to “[read] the whole stage” (144), in a search for contextual effects. In pragmatic terms, in a primary-framework doctor-patient interview, the sound of traffic outside, for example, cars arriving at or leaving the clinic carpark, might be a basis for inference by the patient or the doctor: there are a lot of patients still to see … . But the inference would be entirely on the observer’s own authority: the sound of cars is not ostensive – that is, not placed in the scene by an author or director for inference. In the re-keyed framework, however, the sound of traffic, composed by the author or director, could be grounds for weak implicature. Aware of the genre’s mandate to “[read] the whole stage”, the observer may accordingly estimate an author’s or director’s intention to mean. Several instances of sustained, pragmatically-theoretical reasoning about fiction genres will be considered in Section 3, but one early contribution will appear here, for its parallel to Goffman’s frame analysis. Adams (1985) points to the fundamental “convention” of fiction. He might have said, instead, “frame”: that is, a deep and embracing formatting of experience, or consciousness of experience. What Adams describes is a framework for, as Goffman would say, the “organisation of experience”: “the major convention that constitutes fictional discourse” is “the writer [attributing] the words he writes to someone else” (Adams 1985: 12). (Adams makes no mention of Goffman’s work.) The “major” status of this convention eclipses conventions less fundamental, perhaps more variable sociohistorically (Adams 1985: 35), perhaps more operative in differentiating sub-genres (53). Adams’ (1985) notion of genre may be under-theorised, resting on unexamined notions of abstract categories (for example, for Adams [1985: 49] “explanation, argument, and analysis” are genres). But his claim for the “major convention” of fiction nevertheless calls for attention for its being radically pragmatic, that is, more than stylistic indications and deeper into the configuration of speaker, hearer and Common Ground. On the one hand, it sorts for the fundamental pragmatic indices: the resolution of pronouns, and expressions of time and space (roughly, you cannot

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assign reference to here in a narrator’s statement by tracking down the whereabouts of the author at the time of the utterance). In addition, this claim for “the major convention” provides some basic tools for analysis: writers (authors of fiction) attribute to others – speakers – the utterances they compose, these speakers addressing not readers of the fiction but ‘hearers’. (Adams dismisses other models of address, involving the Implied Reader, the Model Reader, and other proposals of the time, as distorting this basic pragmatic foundation of fiction.) Adams (1985: 70–71) usefully points out that, while in non-fiction the writer is always the speaker, the reader may not be the hearer: he has in mind cases like editions of letters, such as those collecting a long exchange between two prominent people. Adams (1985: 71) says that this condition of the reader being “outside of the communicative context” lays down a “pragmatics of interpretation” similar to that of fiction, and readers’ experience with this situation in non-fiction explains their facility as readers of fiction, where they are, again, not the hearer addressed by the speaker. We will see below that many other forms of experience of language may attune readers to this position “outside of the communicative context” (Adams 1985: 71). 2.3.

Rhetorical Genre Theory

Initiated in US departments of rhetoric and speech, the revival of genre as an active rhetorical concept is traced to Bitzer’s (1968, 1980) proposal for “situational rhetoric”: a theory which re-attached form to function. Forms were not manifestations of universals but timely, practical responses to situations in which people found themselves. In these situations, people experienced “exigence” – a conscientious feeling that something should be done (said) now. The something took a form, and the form provided an efficient response to these situations: the eulogy in the situation of death, or the warnings and cautions issued by agencies in the situation of protecting of the environment, for example. The situations recurred, as manifestations of culture, and so did the formed responses. At this point, the shadow of standardisation could fall across genre, but it is dispelled by motive, a term drawn from the so-called new rhetoric of the most prominent US rhetorician of the 20th century, Kenneth Burke. Burke (1966: 45) is well known for declaring the “suasive nature” of not just advertisements or political oratory or religious sermons but of all language, of “even the most unemotional scientific nomenclatures”. Such a declaration warrants research into the rhetoric of institutional and professional genres – the rhetoric of everything. However, equally important but perhaps less appreciated is Burke’s ([1950] 1969) rendering of motive: that it is not only the hearer who is moved but also the speaker. Speakers are motivated and persuaded by the situations of their life and times to speak out (or write), just as the hearer is motivated by situations to listen and heed the speaker’s words, or read them. Taking a pragmatic perspective on this condition, we could say that speaker and hearer mutually recognise the exigence in the situation; a hearer recognises a speaker’s

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motive in uttering, that is, what he or she is likely to intend by the utterance. Such a perspective aligns with the focus in at least the Anglo-American tradition in pragmatics, which regards the reception of an utterance as conditioned by the hearer’s reasoning about what the speaker could feasibly have intended to mean. Miller’s (1984) watershed article “Genre as social action” drew together and defined the work of rhetoricians in the Burkean tradition who had developed Bitzer’s early proposals for situational rhetoric. Miller’s most pronounced contributions were first the disavowal of form as the principal expression of genre, and then its replacement with action. In thus disavowing form, Miller rejected taxonomy as the goal or instrument of rhetorical study of genre. Study of genre was to capture the intersubjective experience of language users, not to find the means of formal classification. Amongst the most influential researchers in Rhetorical Genre Theory, Medway, in his (2002) study of architecture students’ sketchbooks as a genre, advanced the possibility that instances of some genres shared no formal characteristics, and were united on other grounds: users of the sketchbook genre shared consciousness of the books’ diffuse, nuanced articulation with the profession’s scenes of activity. The revival of genre as a term was not uncontroversial amongst US rhetoricians. Some saw it as extinguishing appreciation for creativity and originality, and privileging practicality rather than eloquence. Such reservations may be parallel to the distaste aroused in the literary palate by the concept of genre. While Bitzer and Burke are far from the research and theoretical practices of pragmatics, the third luminary to be invoked by rhetorical genre theorists – Mikhail M. Bakhtin – is not as remote. Mey (1999), Pilkington (2000), and Black (2006) are amongst literary pragmaticists who are informed by Bakhtin (see Section 3, below), although not in the interests of theorising genre. To genre theory, Bakhtin brought some excitement: rather than a vehicle of timeless order or of routine compliance, genre in Bakthin’s poetics and language philosophy was the site where language differentiated into multiple speech forms (Bakthin 1981, 1986). What he called “secondary” genres, and distinguished from the “primary” genres of small talk and “everyday” conversation (1986: 60–65), emerged from these congregations of sociality, people involved in shared work: a concept stabilising and expanding the “situation” presented by Bitzer (1968, 1980). These spheres are, as Bakhtin says again and again, professional, generational, institutional, political, aesthetic, and so on; continuing and developing (1981, 1986). From this view, we see genres as never alone, as always embedded in on-going actions and interactions, and imprinted by the activities of these spheres. Bakhtin (1981: 320–323) also saw the novel, as genre, as living off the primary and secondary genres, being composed of them – conversation, diaries, confessions, letters, lectures, news articles, barter, sermon, military commands. Drawing from Bitzer, Burke, and Bakhtin, Rhetorical Genre Theory is phenomenological rather than formalist. As a manifestation of consciousness and lan-

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guage users’ more or less shared social experience, genre is both enduring and vulnerable. Rather than rule governed and mandated, it is an expression of mutually experienced exigence. Where they do show up, rules are epiphenomenal. Like Goffman’s analysis of awareness and action into frames, Rhetorical Genre Theory’s analysis of people’s recognition of recurring experience found, instead of explicit rules, tacit know-how. What Goffman says of frameworks – while some might be “neatly presentable as a system of entities, postulates, and rules …, most others appear to have no apparent articulated shapes, providing only a lore of understanding, an approach, a perspective” (1974: 21) – could also be said of genres as conceptualized in Rhetorical Genre Theory. Rhetorical theorists of genre are, however, somewhat more concerned than Goffman with how this “lore” is structured, and distributed. They are interested, that is, in what Miller (1984) called the “intersubjectivity” of genre knowledge, or its sociality. So in the genre (or, equally, framework) of the doctor-patient interview, as doctors ask health-related questions and patients report sensations or concerns, individual participants intersubjectively share recognition of this question-and-answer pattern as the proper way to proceed. The doctor may have had some coaching in conducting interviews; she may have witnessed interviews during her training. The patient will have had no training, and will probably not have witnessed others being interviewed, but from interaction will have grasped the forms for the exchange. And the patient will also have been informed by the genre’s coordination with the surrounding social order: the interview does not occur all by itself. It is embedded in a sphere of activity – a system for making appointments, for taking a turn, for meeting in a small room, for having in mind a range of maladies and therapies, for interacting with other practitioners and staff. The sphere of activity itself is grounds for the rapid and efficient inferences studied by pragmatics: it is the context of accessible assumptions, as Levinson points out with his concept of Activity Type. For example, the doctor asks, Are you having trouble sleeping? The sphere of activity instantly, without searches through literal meanings, supports the pragmatic enrichment Are you having trouble sleeping at night? – not right now. (An attendant on an inter-continental flight, when the shades are down and the lights are off to simulate night, might use the same words to a passenger – Are you having trouble sleeping? – and the sphere of activity would instantly supply assumptions supporting a literal interpretation.) The sphere of activity will also warrant the doctor’s motive in asking: the doctor’s question about sleep will be motivated by assumptions about depression or shoulder pain or heart palpitations; they will be interpreted as relevant by the patient even if the patient does not know the medical assumptions regarding, for example, sleep and palpitations. Rhetorical Genre Theory is most emphatic in saying that genres, insofar as they can be said to exist at all independent of their instances, are sociohistorically, culturally contingent: perishable, and local. And they are unevenly distributed. Some people will know some genres: that is, experience exigence. But other genres they

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will only recognise from a distance. Not everyone will be motivated to attend a football match, to stand, shout, and chant when others do, but most people would recognise from outside the stadium the sounds and actions of those participating in that sphere of activity. The unevenness is cross-cultural as well as intra-cultural. While most people in Western cultures will know something like the doctor-patient interview, it is not known the same way in other cultures or even in all Western cultures (Bow 2013: 67, e.g., investigates “sensitive questioning in intercultural doctor-patient interviews”). Even the assumptions about trouble with sleeping, and its link to depression or palpitations, will be socio-historically contingent. Goffman’s frames and rhetorical theory’s genres are compatible on many dimensions: the “lore of understanding, […] approach, […] perspective” (1974: 21) of a framework matches the tacit understanding which inform users of a genre; frame analysis’ “doings” and the query “what is going on here?” match rhetorical theory’s locating genre in a sphere of activity; neither frames nor genres highlight form, let alone privilege it as a classifying phenomenon. On other dimensions, frame and genre are complementary: where frame finds organisation of experience, genre finds exigence and motive. To questions of fiction, however, frames and (rhetorically conceptualised) genres bring distinct materials. Goffman’s re-keying is an important resource for thinking about fiction genres. Rhetorical theory’s genre, however, is, at first glance, a potential embarrassment. From Bit­ zer’s situational rhetoric to Miller’s “Genre as social action”, rhetorically-conceptualised genre has been anchored in action in the social order, this action being not only the outcome of the genre’s production but also the means of its dissemination: how people learn to recognise, produce, and receive the genre. These actions are contingent on time and place (the doctor-patient interview’s cultural specificity being an example). In contrast, the image of literary genres has leaned towards universality and timelessness. The literary effort is often regarded as demeaned rather than endowed by social purpose. Canonical literary texts outlive their social context often by many centuries: presumably if they once had a social intention it has been burned away by time, leaving only the purely literary. Or perhaps they owe their survival to never having had that local, dated intent. Can literary genres answer the challenges as to the social action they perform? Can we say they do? In attempting an answer, it is first not correct, I believe, to equate social action with purpose. Motives and sensations of exigence will be much more complex and will infiltrate more deeply into consciousness than an express purpose. I have argued (Giltrow 2011) that motive will be overdetermined (in the Freudian sense): the speaker or reader will be bid to speak or listen (write or read) from multiple directions, so many that the social action makes perfect sense or, at least, common sense. Accordingly, the social order corroborates sensations of exigence and motive. For example, the purpose of the doctor-patient interview could be stated as getting a diagnosis and treatment for a complaint. But different times, places, and cul-

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tures will have widely different notions of how to achieve such a purpose or even how or whether to define health-related purposes. In contemporary cultures in the European tradition, the doctor-patient interview is webbed to many other social manifestations, and over-determined by them: medical training, billing practices, pharmaceutical markets, medical architecture and professional bodies, systems of health information ranging from friendly conversation to print, broadcast and digital media and even to narrative representations of health and treatment in cinema, television, and literary fiction itself. From all these determinants (rather than from rules) a person knows how, when, and why to schedule an interview. It makes perfect sense to do so. Compared to the doctor-patient interview, the literary genres may still have a lot to answer for. However, an expanded, diffused notion of action, reaching beyond immediate purpose, has a better chance of capturing literary genres for analysis. As it concentrates on pragmatic conditions, Section 3 assumes this wider perspective. But just before taking the question of social action to fiction genres, I will introduce another concept from Rhetorical Genre Theory, one which brings into view some sectors of the social order. The doctor-patient interview is embedded in a network of activities more or less coordinated in people’s experience of them. Into the network of activity we can also introduce the possibility of “meta-genre” (Giltrow 2002): talk and writing about a genre, often in the form of advisories and cautions – how to write or speak, how not to – and also in the form of praise or fault-finding. There is a relatively small but significant meta-genre attending the doctor-patient interview: research on effectiveness of certain interview styles (e.g. Bow 2013); training for doctors. A much larger and more commanding meta-genre attends the fiction genres, hosted by the sphere of activity which includes the processes of selecting manuscripts for publication, editing and distributing them; notifying the public that they are for sale by means which include author tours, book clubs and word-of-mouth, and so on. Entering into these activities and stretching far beyond them will be talk about the genre: what makes one novel “literary” and another not; how writing and reading should be done; how they were once carried on and how they are now; what should be read by whom; prize-giving, and, of course, canon formation, including the making of curriculum for schools as well as for the professional preparation of those who manage the reading of literary fiction by populations. It is possible that one pragmatic avenue to the genres of fiction may be found through the literary meta-genres, including dictates for interpretation. 2.4.

Genre theorised in current literary studies

Section 1 suggests that in literary studies the tradition of reasoning about genre is long but, by measures which pragmatics might apply, shallow. Recent exceptions are worth noting here.

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2.4.1. Moretti’s “distant reading” As demonstrated in Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), Moretti’s methods are quantitative and aggregating; they displace the close reading familiar to most students of literature, and institute “distant reading” practices. These methods expose the wave-like “oscillations”, the “hidden tempo” of the history of the novel (Moretti 2005: 29). These cycles are manifested in “temporary structures”: that is, in genres. The genres arrive in “clumps”, thrive or survive over a 25-year period, and depart in clumps, their morphological resources exhausted by new realities: their readers stop reading and “[vanish] at once” as new forms arrive and capture readerships (Moretti 2005: 20). The cycles revealed by Moretti’s methods are composed of 44 sub-types of fiction – for example, epistolary, sentimental, ramble, spy, evangelical, school (Moretti 2005: 19). Moretti (2005: 31–33) identifies the types and their instances through nearly 60 scholarly sources: that is, he uses others’ reading, classifying, and publication data. The types may approximately match the “genre fictions” mentioned above (Section 1). Moretti’s case study of one of the types, the “village story” in British and other literatures, finds this genre arriving early in the 19th century and collapsing morphologically half a century later. The collapse is keyed to political and technological change, for the forces of social conflict drive formal innovation and obsolescence in fiction (Moretti 2005: 64). Moretti’s (2005: 76) methods are hospitable to the view of genre taken in this chapter insofar as they reject the practice of choosing a “‘representative individual’, and through it [defining] the genre as a whole”. This practice is a hazard of bringing literary close reading to questions of genre, and, according to Moretti, a big mistake for literary history. In the cycles and oscillations, and in the evolutionary model of divergence and convergence in what he sees as an evolutionary speciation – his “trees” – and in his focus on structure, Moretti proposes a system of forces, generations, extinctions and survivals almost independent of readers’ experience – almost but not quite, for the arrival and departure of genres are expressions of readers’ behaviour, their finding or missing the relevance of these forms. For these forms are not timeless universals, or even heavenly bodies orbiting to their own calendar; they are latched to history, to demographic and industrial actualities, such as the building of railways and the movements of populations. In the case of the village stories, Moretti traces these actualities in the stories’ morphological changes – “maps” which follow the stories’ point of view re-visiting village sites or, tellingly, rambling beyond. Although seemingly remote from the sentence enrichments or indexical resolutions of Anglo-American pragmatics, or the feature and form/function analyses of European-continental traditions in pragmatics, Moretti may be nevertheless a pertinent figure, for his taking all data of book production in making his determinations, not just reaching for canonical examples, or for the books brought to his

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desk by his personal reading experience. So far, with the exception of historical pragmatics, practices in the pragmatics of fiction genres have tended to gather data from canonical or personal experience and to exemplify with what is admired and handy. Amongst literary scholars who take up Moretti’s suggestions for genre as evolutionary (and thus tree-shaped as a phenomenon), Dimock (2006) is one who seizes Moretti’s earlier suggestions for genre as “world system” but discards his “distant reading” for the traditions of close reading. Dimock’s (2006: 86) claims for genre show the excitement this old concept can newly awaken in literary sensibilities: genre, she says, is “a self-obsoleting system, a provisional set that will always be bent and pulled and stretched by its many subsets” – unavoidably thus pressured, for “what genre is dealing with is a volatile body of material, still developing, still in transit, and always on the verge of taking flight”. 2.4.2. Cohen, Frow, and classification In respected and influential contributions since the 1980s, Cohen (especially 1986) has pointed to genre as a classificatory activity, rather than one which dictates or regulates the production of texts. That is, genre comes into view after the fact, as a means of reception or observation. Moreover, it is a contingent, socio-historical activity, not an expression of pre-existing universals. Since Cohen’s proposals, there has been some revival of literary-theoretical interest in genre and classification. Frow’s Genre (2nd Ed., 2014) is the most substantial expression of this interest. It even-handedly reports most if not all contemporary thinking about genre, while concentrating on the genres of the culture spheres (mainly literature but also cinema, television, and visual art). Frow (2014) finally, like Cohen but in different terms, presents genre as a classificatory activity. In this regard, many of his observations on classificatory know-how (e.g. people deciding which film to watch, according to their knowledge of genres, see Frow 2014: 56) are convincing, and possibly relevant to a pragmatics of fiction genres. However, the view of genre is finally formalist – with the addition of form’s being recognised. So, it is not to analysts but to ordinary language users that genres present their familiar faces: Frow (2014: 113) draws on Bakhtin’s claim that people can identify a genre from the first few words. But what are people doing when they come across those few words? How are they situated? Frow’s (2014: 113, 123) demonstration of how he himself recognises the genre indications for the musical Showboat raises more of such questions than it answers, for he seems to picture himself coming across the screening out of the blue, one minute unaware of the show, the next minute an absorbed spectator gradually realising that it is a musical he is watching. Frow, then, acknowledges the ordinary familiarity of genres for ordinary language users, going ahead practically – is this the kind of book I want to read? –

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rather than analytically. This is a phenomenological position but a limited one, for Frow’s discussion soon turns to formal analysis of “mixes” of genres, the aesthetic genres being complex. Effective in producing literary-critical interpretations, analyses of these mixtures may have more to offer to literary studies than to the pragmatics of fiction genres. Not unaware of pragmatic reasoning, Frow does summarise Grice’s Cooperative Principle, finding it deficient because of its focus on the conversational model of communication and what Frow takes to be its mistaken presumption of rational bases for conversation. Frow (2014: 88) finds Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) account “asocial” and no improvement on Grice. Both Grice’s Maxims and Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory will be taken up below, as relevant to the pragmatics of fiction. 3.

Pragmatics of fiction genres, their ‘social action’

Concurring with Wilson (2011), Section 3.1 establishes fiction genres as pragmatically continuous with other uses of language: at the very least, invention and engaging storytelling are found outside fiction. Section 3.2 then asks the question as to social action – what does fiction do? – directly of several pragmaticists who have written on fiction. Finding their answers useful but incomplete, Section 3.3 suggests that – again continuous with language users’ experience beyond fiction – overhearing is a fundamental condition of language use, and arrangements to overhear are in turn concentrated in fiction genres. Section 3.4 takes up Black (2006) and Mey (1999) on “voices”; Section 3.5 goes further, appreciating – with Mey – Vološinov, and also taking Vološinov (1973: 86) up on his description of speakers getting “verbal shape from another’s point of view”; Section 3.5 suggests that the accommodations characterising overhearing are themselves ostensive. Section 3.6 joins others in recognising weak implicature as central to aesthetic genres, and reconciles this centrality with the Conversational Maxims, but also finds a tension between, on the one hand, weak implicature and, on the other hand, the confidence with which literary interpretations are offered. Section 3.7 proposes that the development of fiction genres is a socio-historical response, a social action which contributes to up-dating readers’ sense of the consciousnesses of others in an era of increasing socio-global complexity. 3.1.

Fiction’s continuity with other genres: The Maxim of Quality

Subject to repeated analyses and re-analyses, including the monumental revision presented by Relevance Theory, Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP), with Conversational Maxims, continues to figure in reckonings of the pragmatics of genres, including the fiction genres. While only acknowledging and not thoroughly entertaining Grice’s CP and Maxims, Adams’ (1985) proposal for the “major conven-

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tion” of fiction is within the Gricean scope: as Adams points out, if the utterances of narrators of fiction were not attributed to another speaker, the writer would be lying – a full defiance of the Maxim of Quality. Once writers attribute the utterance to another, and decline to vouch for the quality of the contribution, they “key” the framework, to use Goffman’s terms. Does the genre afford a special dispensation for language users, one unique to fiction? We may be tempted to take the Maxim of Quality too strictly: that there will be one way and only one way, the truthful way, to fulfill the Maxim. Yet different speakers – in un-keyed, primary frameworks – could sincerely say different things in response to another’s utterance or to a situation; at the very least there may be multiple truths which would comply with the Maxim. But beyond this, how far does the commitment to truth go? All the time, speakers assert, declare, pronounce – without getting sworn testimony or data analytics. Speakers boast or self-deprecate, emphasise or downplay, exaggerate or reduce, repeat rumours or keep mum, all in tune with their immediate intentions and with their motives in the situation. Moreover, beyond the “major convention” of the genres of fiction, there may be speech habits commonly experienced by all language users, where the speaker is not exactly vouching for the exact truth of their utterance. Drawing on recordings of twenty dinner-table conversations, Chafe (1994) establishes that, as conversationalists, people may attend to the proximal context (there that’s a piece of squid, you finish it) or a distal one (When we were in Crete we ate squid). Attending to the proximal context, the speaker’s consciousness is “extroverted”, and in this mode can capture an uninterrupted stream of sensations, perceptions, and actions, and evaluations of these. Attending to the distal context, the speaker’s consciousness is in “introverted” mode: “displaced”, in Chafe’s terminology. Displaced consciousness can represent or imagine only coarse-grain, bulk in-put: “experiential islands, disconnected from their surroundings, rising out of a dark sea of unawareness” (Chafe 1994: 202). Typically, representations in the displaced mode lack “continuity” and “detail” – typically, but not always, as Chafe’s data attest. Some events and states are remembered generically. Experienced more than once, they are later recalled as types rather than tokens. When remembering is aided by rehearsal, events that are repeatedly refreshed can be more richly experienced. Furthermore, it is likely to have been the salience of such events that motivated their rehearsal in the first place, so that when they are remembered they are judged more worthy of telling (Chafe 1994: 203). Chafe (1994: 203) exemplifies this phenomenon of enriched telling with a speaker’s account of a “brush with death while he was diving off the coast of California”. This speaker is “an expert storyteller” (Chafe 1994: 203), able to fill the scene with materials not necessarily vouched for as actually constituting the event being retold, but being credibly associated with the scene. So, the report from underwater of “foot and a half in diameter” anemones (Chafe 1994: 204) not

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only replenishes the story of the close call but is itself replenished with detail not vouched for as occurring on the occasion of the close call: white flowers … With with green thick green stems They Their stems aren’t really green. When you take a picture of them the uh … strobe light shows that they’re a bright red. Anyway … . (Chafe 1994: 204, marking of intonational units has been removed)

Like this “expert” storyteller, fiction writers are moved to seed the scene with telling details, ones from which small contextual effects could be derived, intimating some fresh assumptions, confirming others. And this motive is not unknown in other genres. Drawing on Epstein (1973) and Tuchman (1973), Goffman (1974: 451–452) describes the “documentary” genre of television news as put together from stores of stock imagery, rather than from recording of the reported event. Just as the diver is not saying these anemone stems on this occasion, the news cast is not saying these pedestrians crossing this street on this occasion. Rather, it is to say “in the vein”, or along these lines, sincere in the saying. Goffman (1974) also recognises “replay” of personal experience as possibly amounting to the long, detailed, floor-holding tale of the “practiced raconteur” (504), the latter on the more expert end of the spectrum of “prefabrication” and scripting (509), but still continuous with the informal conversationalist. Recruiting listeners from the “infrastructure of social organization” (552), the conversationalist presenting the “replay” is also speaking “as if” they are not quite themselves, or “as if” they are someone quite other (547), and seeking “appreciation” for the replay as a response. And just as the speaker minimises their responsibility for their utterance, the listener too is involved in this “looseness” (547), under reduced responsibility to come up with meaning intended by the speaker: “If in truth the informal statements of a speaker are appreciably cut off from the environing world” – in other words, Chafe’s “distal” consciousness – “then surely the interpretive activity of the listener is even more free to float” (Goffman 1974: 547). Even everyday speakers, let alone the “practiced raconteur”, can be particularly inventive when they resort to Reported Speech. They are often moved to report others’ speech in both the primary genres of small talk – so she says well I’d never go there again – and in secondary genres: for example, the broadcast report of the foreign correspondent – insiders here are saying the government is watching this development – or, again, the doctor-patient interview – it said on the Internet scratchy throat is caused by strep. And we have been shown by many studies (Tannen 1986; Clark and Gerrig 1990 for early, standout examples) that in reporting people forget, modify, even make up what was “said”: that is, verbatim is only notional. Reporting the speech of others is motivated, adaptive, and inventive, rather than literal. Wherever we find Reported Speech – and we find it in many genres, not just fiction – we find a departure from strict notions of the Maxim of Quality.

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What does fiction do?

The continuities, suggested above, between the inventions of fiction genres and those of other genres take us only to the point of moderating the claim for the “major convention” (Adams 1985), and the special dispensation accorded fiction writers with regard to the Maxim of Quality. The continuities do not get us to a feasible answer to the question, what is the social action of the fiction genres? Turning to histories of literacy, Mey (1999: 324) offers a persuasive proposal for picturing an incipient novelistic, multi-voiced structure in some literate practices of public figures, these practices captured in the instance of Horace’s “epistles”. Mey (1999) points to the pragmatics of the letter: being “long distance” (324), it has an audience at once more indeterminate than would be addressed in assembly or on smaller-scale occasions and at the same time nevertheless sharing a common ground (324–329). Steering across this common ground, the “epistles” are not really to the named addressee (as a vocative in ordinary conversation might identify who an utterance is to) – and accordingly not motivated by an interpersonally situated intention. Rather, they are composed with the “purpose” of “[discoursing] intelligently about the state of the world, current affairs, love, money, and so on” (324). (We could think of Jane Austen 200 years ago, or Jonathan Franzen or Ian McEwan today.) This purpose might bid for status as motive, one evidently recognised by readers, and squaring somehow with some sphere of activity. We might still ask what exigence people experienced then or now in making an effort to hear about world affairs, love, money. But Mey has offered interesting historical evidence, pragmatically situated. If we still have reservations about accepting this as the whole story, we might look to more definitive answers to questions of motive: that is, what do the genres of fiction do that moves people to write and read? Drawing from Dawkins (1993) and Humphrey (1992), and at the same time emphasising the role of affect and like many others crediting the role of weak implicatures, Pilkington (2000: 187) suggests that our readiness for aesthetic sensation supports the biological advantage and evolutionary benefit for beings to be “quickly and accurately aware of their emotional responses to aspects of their environment”, and to understand and respond to others, and to be able to manipulate them with this responsive understanding. Do people experience a social exigence for affective practice and empathetic explorations – and find arenas for this practice in fiction genres? This suggestion is worth keeping on the table, along with some questions. One question is whether readers of literary fiction seem to be especially well practised in these social adaptations, more adapted than the majority, who do not read literary fiction. We might also ask about the many other genres which excite emotional response – crime and disaster in news genres, for example – and the effect they deliver, in comparison to literary fiction. Black (2006) says that we read fiction “to enjoy ourselves”; the literary text

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is “designed to entertain” (23); literature can host “intertexuality”, which gives the reader who recognises it opportunity to “appreciate its effects” (50). These enjoyments – amounting to “pleasure” (Black 2006: 157) – may not be compelling answers to questions about fiction genres’ social action and the exigence experienced by their writers and readers. How do they arrive at feeling that this writing and reading fill the bill, answer the situation? Can the pleasure be staked out? Endorsing Thorne’s (1988: 290) claim for poems’ value in showing the “inexhaustible ambiguity of language” as what Black (2006: 33) sees as “the raison d’être of literary discourse”, Black (2006: 33) says that what novelists do is “manipulate language in interesting ways, and thus teach us something of the potential of language”. It is not clear that Black has used pragmatic methods of analysis to come up with entertainment, enjoyment or pleasure as motives for fiction genres: these terms are commonplaces, at hand for even amateur comment on fiction. There is, however, something pragmatic in proposing intertextuality – the echo of the prior voice can increase contextual effects – but what are the pragmatics of what Black calls appreciation? In the “ambiguity” of language there may be an object of inquiry suited to pragmatics, but it is hard to see demonstration of ambiguity as the “raison d’être” of literary fiction genres. 3.3.

Social action: Overhearing

The claims reported above are not conclusive answers to the questions of fiction genres’ social action. Pleasure and entertainment leave fiction indistinguishable from, say, spectator sports; it seems implausible that exigence is experienced around constructing occasions for some people to recognise in some stories words from other stories (intertextuality); it also seems implausible that a driving exigence would be experienced around demonstrating and experiencing the ambiguity of “language”; there might be something to the practice of empathy and emotion, even though literary fiction is taken up by a much smaller audience than could benefit from evolutionary advantage. The fault, however, is probably with my question rather than with the answers. The question is too bald: literary genres do not respond well to that kind of interrogation. I will back up, to look for the constituents of the social action – the tributary activities – especially as they can be presented in pragmatic profile. I will take first Black’s claim, which she illustrates with the opening of Mrs Dalloway, that “the reader feels her way into a text” (2006: 4). This is the sensation of our not being in the know, and not being addressed in such a way as to bring us within range of presuppositions. And it is the everyday experience of, in Clark’s (1992) terms (developing from Goffman’s onlooker), overhearing and/ or eavesdropping. (See Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume, for a thorough review of the application of the “overhearer” category to the analysis of the communicative setting of telecinematic fiction.) Clark (1992) shows how a speaker’s management

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of Common Ground can locate on this ground an overhearer as ratified or non-ratified. Everyone in everyday life will have taken up these roles: a conversation will be overheard on the bus or in a café or before a meeting is called to order; a conversation in the office will be addressed to A, but engineered for a managed comprehension by a co-worker O or differently managed for a different level of comprehension by a visitor to the office V, with different degrees of accuracy in estimating where O or V stand on the Common Ground. If we were to shut our ears to all utterances but those directly addressed to us, by name and in particular, we would know much less about the world, even very little. So we have inferential strategies for surmising what is assumed or presupposed by the speaker. We know how to “feel our way in”, and go on. Even in hearing a current, local utterance for a mass audience, we can find ourselves just out of focus. We might find that assumptions are presupposed which are not in fact manifest to us. Or that assumptions are made explicit which are to us already manifest, and technically and practically not relevant to us. Yet we find our footing, and we derive contextual effects even from the inferences we can make about the consciousnesses of others, and discrepancies between those and our own. We are experiencing the conditions of overhearing, a rich resource in our everyday experience, and one exploited by fiction. In fiction genres (and in non-fiction genres with novelistic designs) a narrator arranges for us to overhear voices of strangers; the narrator’s arrangements are expression of our perceived subjectivity vis-à-vis that of the narrator. So when “the reader feels her way into” (Black 2006: 4) “Hansel and Gretel”, she finds hospitable arrangements, presuppositions generously managed for easy inference before she comes across the first voice speaking: A poor woodcutter lived with his wife and his two children on the edge of a large forest. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. The woodcutter did not have much food around the house, and when a great famine devastated the entire country, he could no longer provide enough for his family’s daily meals. One night as he was lying in his bed and thinking about his worries, he began tossing and turning. Then he sighed and said to his wife, “what’s to become of us?” (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, trans. Jack Zipes 1992: 58)

The narrator is imagined by the storyteller as thoughtfully estimating the listener’s or reader’s consciousness: indefinite expressions – a poor woodcutter, a large forest, a great famine – establish the scene as new to the addressee, while definite expressions – his wife and his two children, the edge, the entire country – function as “anchored” or “containing inferrables” (Prince 1981), unfolding from the judiciously placed “brand-new” entities. In contrast, the narrator in Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” ([1936] 2013), sometimes cited for pragmatic inspection, is composed as heedless of the reader’s consciousness. The entry to the story is famously inhospitable – and especially inhospitable compared to the address we have just seen in “Hansel and Gretel”. Much is presupposed by definite expressions and other means and little is

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explained by this narrator, brusque in his attitude towards whomever might overhear the voices represented: “The marvellous thing is that it’s painless,” he said. “That’s how you know when it starts.”   “Is it really?”   “Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odour though. That must bother you.”   “Don’t! Please don’t.”   “Look at them,” he said. “Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?”   The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade on to the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed. (Hemingway 2013: Location 35)

These arrangements for overhearing are not made up or invented the way the facts of the stories – the woodcutter and his hungry family; the wounded man and his wife under the circling vultures – are made up. Yet they are nevertheless central to the design of the literary experience, and manipulated by the storyteller as part of the ostensive intention, the intention to mean. Overhearing may be a fundamental condition – both broadly to using language and more narrowly to fiction. In Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown ([1924] 2005), Woolf makes her points about contemporary fiction by staging an overheard conversation in a railway carriage, and then demonstrating the creative activity in inferring from the conversation references, relationships, topics, concerns: “character”, as she says, and “common ground between us” (2005: 30). Importantly, Woolf establishes this scene by first locating an ordinary language user, a passenger on public transportation, overhearing others. From this ordinary location, commonplace to sociality, she develops a claim about fiction writing. Pursuing a different point, Sell (1991) also claims overhearing as a widespread condition in literary texts: the longevity of literary texts – their surviving their original context of production and reception – means that inevitably we are listening in on utterances intended for audiences other than ourselves, different from us. 3.4.

Arrangements for overhearers in the pragmatic tradition: attitude

Pragmatically, the fiction genres are arrangements for readers (a) to overhear interactions between speakers, and (b) to overhear a narrative presentation of the interactions. At level (a), readers infer the unspoken assumptions on which the interactions are based, resolving reference and relevance. As Woolf explained, these inferences are such as would occur on our overhearing a conversation on the train – except that in fiction the overhearing is ostensive. It has been intentionally arranged, and the arrangements include level (b), the narrative presentation, which may supply assumptions rather than leave them to be inferred, as they are on the train.

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Clark’s (1992) elaboration of Goffman’s (1975) analysis of “listener roles” sets out four possible “attitudes towards overhearers” (Clark 1992: 249–250). Two of the four attitudes may not pertain to fiction genres: speakers can conceal their meaning from overhearers, overhearers recognising this ploy; speakers can disguise their meaning to overhearers, overhearers of course not recognising the strategy. The other two attitudes however could establish poles of narrative demeanour in fiction: – Indifference. For any part of what they mean, speakers can be indifferent about whether or not the overhearers can grasp it. – Disclosure. For any part of what they mean, speakers can design their utterances so that the overhearers can grasp it fully. (Clark 1992: 256) Clark is describing conversational exchanges amongst in-person groupings. To locate narrators on the indifference/disclosure spectrum, we need to re-design the scene. Let us imagine that the events and interaction are taking place in a room at the door of which stands the narrator. The narrator can see into the room, while readers cannot: the narrator has arranged for readers to stand in the corridor, in a position from which they can hear the voices in the room but cannot see the speakers or the room. A thoroughly indifferent narrator – say, the narrator Hemingway composes for “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” – might do nothing else. A more disclosing narrator could identify the speakers, their appearances, possibly even their mentalities and histories. The narrator-at-the-door could tell all this according to their estimate of readers’ assumptions, and histories: where they have come from, what they have seen, or known, what might be novel to them and therefore not to be assumed. But these would be only estimates, and the estimates themselves will compose an image of the speaker as much as of the postulated hearer. “Attitude” towards overhearers could account for some effects which Black (2006: 72–79) attributes to pragmatics of politeness. More important, “attitude towards overhearers” is something composed by the author, and shown to readers: that is, it is an ostensive act, intended to mean. These arrangements seem fundamental to genres of fiction, and their measure could account for sub-genres and for socio-historical variations, both synchronic and diachronic. But they may not be exclusive to genres of fiction. The doorway onto the corridor could be a position occupied by narrators in genres of journalism, historiography, or travel – or other spheres. To secure fiction’s priority amongst these genres, we might claim the absolute centrality to fiction of “voices” and their differentials. For Bakhtin, this condition was central to the novel – but he also found “dialogism” in other genres. In other words, this definitive pragmatic circumstance for genres of fiction is distributed across other genres too. A useful perspective for inquiry into the pragmatics of fiction might be one which focuses on arrangements for overhearing, although it is not clear whether

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arrangement for overhearing can be genre-definitive on their own. But if we emphasise the ostensiveness of (b), above – the narrative representation of interactions – we may have in view a fundamental architecture of fiction genres: the writer has estimated that (some) readers will find (technically) relevant this presentation of a narrator-with-“attitude” arranging for the overhearing of voices. That is, readers will experience contextual effects. (See also Hoffmann, Ch. 6, this volume on voice and Landert, Ch. 16, this volume on stance). 3.5.

From double voice to Vološinov and verbal shape

Black (2006) is consistent in claiming a central role in fiction for not simply voices of characters but for the differences amongst them. Like other pragmaticists interested in Reported Speech and its complex manifestations, she demonstrates the overlapping of voices in narrative – that is, beyond the structure of dialogue. For Black (2006: 155), “pragmatically speaking”, the “area of fictional discourse” of the “most interest to readers” is that where the range of “indirect language” leaves readers uncertain as to whose voice and perspective a phrase or passage should be attributed. Means of representing speech and thought – indirect or direct – allow “the dual perspective of narrator and character to co-exist within a sentence”; this duality is “one of the most important aspects of fictional prose” (Black 2006: 70), irony being taken by some to be fundamental to the novel (116). In observations compatible with Bakhtin’s many statements about the importance of the “double-voiced” condition in the novel (e.g., 1981: 361), Black (2006: 99) says that “throughout the novel as a genre there can be varying distances between aspects of the narrator’s language and those of the characters” – distances which may be so finely calibrated as to arouse disturbing uncertainties, or, she says, so boldly measured as to amount to code-switching. Having noted the “weak implicatures” readers might draw from Piggy’s “substandard English” (Black 2006: 90) in Golding’s Lord of the Flies ([1954] 1958), Black (2006: 100) in exploring these variable distances, in contrast disapproves of the mix of “the standard with dialect forms” in the narration of Welsh’s (1994) short story “Park patrol” set in Edinburgh. (See also Planchenault, Ch. 9, this volume, on the indexi­ calities of regional, social and ethnic language variation in fiction). It may be, however, that these “varying distances” cannot be measured by the same yardstick. In his more rigorously Bakhtinian approach to the “voices” of fiction and their potential “clash”, Mey (1999) says that a character’s “difference” – from a narrative voice in particular – is only rarely about the space between the character’s voice and the standard. Rather, it is about the character’s orientation to the world. Utterances tell us about speakers’ position: from what they say, we know what they can see, and where they stand. When Huck Finn is “taken in” by the Grangerfords (the feuding family on the river, its children doomed to violent extinction), he describes the furnishings of their house:

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Huck’s non-standard speech (they wouldn’t took any money) may enable inferences as to his social status. But much more is at stake here, and in other literary fiction too: this is about more than what Black (2006: 90) calls “substandard English”. From Huck’s statement we know that he has been drawn to the mantelpiece, getting so close he can see the painting of the town. His gaze takes in more items: Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy. By one of the parrots was a cat made of crockery, and a crockery dog by the other; and when you pressed down on them they squeaked, but didn’t open their mouth nor look different nor interested. They squeaked through underneath. (Twain 2006: n.p. CHXVII)

Huck has touched these ornaments, even picked them up to discover what is to him a chalkiness under colours which he tells us are “gaudy”. (And what does “gaudy” mean for Huck? Both discreet and eager for spectacle, this boy may prize the bright colours; he may be recommending them to hearers he imagines as sharing his taste.) Leaving a trail of footprints in his speech and putting objects within his reach, Huck’s approach to the mantelpiece suggests the novelty of the objects to him: we can infer that he is not used to seeing décor like this. But there is more: he tells his hearers about the objects and the results of his inspection. He estimates that the information will be relevant to his hearer: it will have contextual effects. Huck’s experience of the world is thereby shown by the author to be such that he imagines a hearer who would, like him, find the figurines and clock novel and attractive, and would find news of them incidental but significant contributions to their knowledge of the world. But it is not Huck’s telling alone that is definitively novelistic; it is Twain’s arranging for readers to overhear this telling, with its estimates of the consciousness of interlocutors, its intention to mean. Just as the differential arrangements to overhear the voices of “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” are crucial to the genre of fiction, so here is Twain’s arrangement for readers to overhear Huck addressing the hearer whose consciousness Huck estimates as finding relevant the features of the mantelpiece objects. Huck’s estimate of others is part of, as Woolf (2005: 30) says, his “character”, and also of Twain’s ostensive action. Language is not simply an expression of identity or even of position. It is more at least in being the expression of an intention to be understood by another language user. In looking into this condition, Mey (1999: 163) reluctantly accepts the term “addressivity” as translating Bakhtin’s conceptualisation, but argues – pragmatically – for the view of Vološinov (1973), Bakhtin’s colleague and co-theorist.

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With Vološinov, Mey draws our view beyond the first leg of “addressivity”: it is a matter of “asking not only: who is addressing whom?, but also: who is addressed by whom?” (Mey 1999: 163). Even then addressivity is more than “bidirectional” (Mey 1999: 237). The word also attending to “for whom it is meant”, in addition, in speech the speaker gives himself “verbal shape from another’s point of view” (Vološinov 1973: 86, emphasis in original): … word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses the “one” in relation to the “other”. I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong. A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee. A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor. (Vološinov 1973: 86, emphasis in original)

In addressing another, I estimate the consciousness of the other, and that estimate shapes what I say, how I say – what I take to be active or accessible assumptions in the mind of the other, what assumptions might be grounds for relevance. Huck is saying to his addressee here is news about this clock and these colours – estimating the listener’s consciousness as receptive to this news, able to make use of it, to draw inferences, find relevance. The fact of our not finding this relevant as Huck intends – these ornaments do not have such significance for us – does not mean that the communication fails: we can still accommodate, find the references, as Woolf says, find character and common ground. While these accommodations are part of our everyday experiences as language users, their manipulation in narrative is definitive of fiction genres. Issuing from his position in front of the Grangerfords’ mantelpiece, that position attained by his fugitive navigation, with Jim, from the socio-economic borderlands of his time and region, Huck’s “word” is cast across to the interlocutor for whom it is “meant”, for whom it is intended to have meaning, and this position – meant, intended by the word – is itself a story about Huck and the scope of his experience and life path. Not only the Grangerfords’ furnishings but also their testament here as to their clock – “They wouldn’t took any money for her” – come to us as experienced by Huck (“the active reception of other speakers’ speech”, Vološinov 1973: 117, emphasis in original) and as estimated as relevant to his hearers, capable of producing contextual effects for those he is pictured as imagining picking up his story. Twain has thus pictured him, for readers; Twain has arranged for readers to witness Huck’s word thrown across to his interlocutor and giving him “verbal shape from another’s point of view” (Vološinov 1973: 86).

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3.6.

Weak implicature

Wilson (2011: 69) is amongst the many who point to Relevance Theory’s “weak implicatures” as core to the literary experience. Weak implicatures are derived from a “range of possibilities” (Wilson 2011: 73): The weaker the communication, the more the responsibility falls on the audience, to a point where weak implicatures shade off into unintended contextual implications derived solely on the audience’s initiative. (Wilson 2011: 74)

Dubbed “poetic effects” by Sperber and Wilson (1995: 217–224), weak implicatures arrive less rapidly and with less certainty than the inferences which spring to mind in estimating a speaker’s ostensive intention. The hearer goes to greater lengths to retrieve contextual assumptions to construct intention. Arguably, the search is governed – both limited and prompted – by genre: the sphere of activity will populate the context with eligible assumptions for implicature, even weak ones, within a feasible range of intention.1 Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Conversational Maxims can explain weak implicature: these contextual effects – small trepidations in the context, uncertain and even unforeseeable – can be accomplished only this way, and in no other way, only in this Manner, in this Quantity. Such effects cannot be delivered by summary statement. Huck’s report from the mantelpiece cannot be replaced by a generalising proposition that, for example, the ante-bellum American dwelling was both genteel and primitive in its ornamentation. While this might be a weak implicature derived by some reader (me), its publication could not replace the publication of the passage in question from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For one thing, it is only one implicature derived from what may be an uncountable number of possible ones; for another, it fails to present the poetic effect of encountering even this one possibility through Huck’s conscious address to an imagined interlocutor, 1





For example, if one is shown a malfunctioning clock by one’s spouse, one might derive the weak implicature that one should get a replacement, or not rely on this clock, or generally be aware. If a malfunctioning clock is shown in a family comedy on TV, one might infer that someone will be late, and in a hurry. But when a literary reader (Adleman 2016: 99–100) finds malfunctioning timepieces in American Psycho (1991), he draws weak but complex implicatures, knowing the genre and the contemporary assumptions circulating in its context, all (by the critic’s estimate) within reach of the writer’s ostensive intention: The a-priori mediality of the dwelling is underlined by [the protagonist’s] inability to directly ascertain the time of day, an ‘immediate’ phenomenon that could be discerned from the location of the sun in the sky, but [the protagonist], who is so completely insulated from the ‘natural’ coordinates of his environs and so mesmerized by the mediasphere that envelopes him that he is propelled from the digital alarm clock to the blinking VCR clock to the phone to ascertain that which should be most immediate about his environment, the time of day. (Adleman 2016: 99–100)

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someone whom he is portrayed as imagining as interested in the squeaking dog and the gaudy colours. And yet even so weakly transmitted, so incomplete and at the same time misleadingly conclusive, this implicature is an output of an ostensive act: arguably attributable to Twain’s intention, and therefore an interpretation. Pilkington (2000: 118) describes the “richest poetic thoughts” as those in which “a wide network of contextual assumptions are activated”, and, one would estimate, the wider the network the less ascertainable (the more indeterminate) the interpretation. Others are more sceptical about Relevance Theory’s contribution to understanding of literary experience. Noting that Pilkington allows for “major searches for weak effects”, Black (2006: 83) also remarks that such searches seem “almost institutionalised in university literature departments … the more meanings a student derives from a text, the better the student”. At the same time, Black doubts whether Relevance Theory says anything new, Pilkington being in her view “like any successful reader” in not being “satisfied until a very long search for weak implicatures has taken place” (Black 2006: 150). One might ask, however, about Black’s perspective on implicature itself. She says that, without the assumptions supporting implicature, “communication would be long-winded and clumsy” (Black 2006: 81). I think Sperber and Wilson (1995) would not see the populating of context with silent assumptions as a matter of avoiding clumsy long-windedness. In fact, they suggest that the pattern of implicitness supporting an utterance amounts to style, and “style is the relationship” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 217). The “relationship” is the one between the speaker and the hearer, the extent and quality of their Mutual Knowledge of the world. The “relationship” in question is the one Vološinov (1973: 86) described as the speaker’s getting “verbal shape from another’s point of view”; as the “bridge”, the “shared territory”. In this domain of long searches by conscientious readers, we might feel that we are secluded in a pure aesthetics of poetic effects. Mey (1999) offers a telling observation to restore the sociality of our extended searches and broad activations. According to Mey, neither Austen nor Pushkin liked Richardson’s History of Sir Charles Grandison ([1753–1754] 1986). They “mock” it in their own writing: Grandison was composed from a perspective, “a world view”, a way of “perceiving and portraying” the hero no longer viable in Austen’s and Pushkin’s generation (Mey 1999: 147) and, we can suppose, arranging for the activation of uncongenial assumptions. Mey’s observation is supported by Moretti’s data and analysis: genres can exhaust themselves in a generation, as the traditions of romances like Richardson’s Grandison seem to have done (even as a few instances may survive, as by some measures Richardson’s own Clarissa has survived). Scholarship from historical pragmatics is an eligible partner for inquiry into fiction genres’ latching to – as Taavitsainen (2011) has said – “thought styles”: historical as well as contemporary configurations of assumptions, values, and perspectives. Latching to thought styles, fiction genres can activate widely shared assumptions of the times, providing grounds for implicature. Congenial to readers in the

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epoch or generation hosting the genre, these implicatures may go on to develop a social life of their own, teaching people useful lessons about their world. Semino’s (2014) analysis of fiction about autism – a genre of fiction for today’s generation of readers – demonstrates that these novels represent “pragmatic failure” in interaction and also suggests that “fictional representations … may contribute to shape readers’ knowledge and perceptions of real-life phenomena and people, and become part of public campaigns and debates” (2014: 143–144). In addition, “readers have the opportunity to reflect on the potential vagueness and ambiguity of frequent and mundane questions such as ‘What are you doing?’ or ‘What’s going on?’” (Semino 2014: 148); readers also see how “routine interactions” can be “social minefields”, and they can “become more aware of how difficult it is to judge what can and cannot be said, and particularly of a potential conflict between sincerity in interaction and the maintenance of social harmony” (Semino 2014: 152). These implicatures seem viable, and also in step with today’s developing attitudes towards the experience of people with conditions like autism. At the same time, however, as these implicatures seem viable, they may also be less an expression of the phenomenology of reading fiction genres than of an epiphenomenon of the social action of literary fiction genres, namely that of telling what the narrative means, or as Black says, seeing that “ends are tied together”: “It is partly the reader’s responsibility to achieve this, by knitting together elements scattered through the text, and bringing them to bear on interpretation” (Black 2006: 133). When Semino states (above) the implications to be derived from autism novels, we get a clear example of a reader gathering scattered elements and “knitting” them into an interpretation. And it may be that the literary fiction genres urge these pronouncements: the tying of “ends” (Black 2006: 133) into statements such as Semino (2014) offers on “social minefields”, “sincerity”, and “social harmony”. But there remains a pressing question, for such pronouncements do not rest easily with the Maxims of Manner and Quality, let alone Quantity. If the meaning can be delivered so compactly and efficiently, with much greater assurances of the speaker’s intention (strong rather than weak implicatures), why write hundreds of pages of narrative? If meaning can be captured in these summative declarations, what is the exigence, the motive for literary narrative and proliferation of weak implicatures? It may be that genres of fiction do include tacit instruction to tie ends and knit elements to produce statements of meaning in summative propositions. Or it may not be so. The proliferation of weak implicatures – poetic effects just caught out of the corner of the eye – does not sit well with the production of statements of meaning, knitted and tied. Without giving up the latching to the social order, we could say that these weak implicatures are tuned to the assumptions (or thought styles) of the times, but are not potentially propositional. If these meanings were in fact accessible by full propositions, they would be delivered that way: so do the Max-

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ims of Quality, Manner, and Quantity dictate. If intentions could be rendered and meanings (about autism; about the dwellings of ante-bellum families) delivered in such statements, they would be. But they can’t. They cannot be stated briefly and explicitly; their only vector is through weak implicatures drawn from the materials of the narrative and the socio-historical context. Without this mandate there is no exigence for the literary fiction genres. 3.7.

The affiliations and estrangements of “engrossment”

In their phenomenology, fiction genres call on readers to accommodate to speakers who don’t know them, don’t even know of their type: the accommodation can be as assuring as that to the narrator of “Hansel and Gretel”, as alienating as that to the narrator of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, or as poignant and fragile as to Huck Finn as a narrator. In literary fiction, a writer composes and points to the circumstances of these accommodations: they are part of the communicative intention. Literary fiction genres also call on readers to be attuned to weak implicatures: nearly ineffable, these contextual effects multiply in their uncertainty – yet can still be attributed to a communicative intention and the ostensive action of a communicating consciousness. These two phenomenological dimensions define fiction genres, although it is not entirely clear that they are not shared to some degree, sometimes, with other genres. A final element in the phenomenology of fiction genres – like a nutrient feeding both the accommodation to speakers and the prompting to weak implicatures – is what Goffman (1974: 347) calls “engrossment”: it urges readers to accommodate; it pushes them to the inferences which obtain the contextual effects. It is the missing piece which provides the exigence motivating the use of the genre and performs its social action: namely, the gathering of timely intelligence of the social order. In Semino’s (2014) example, this includes knowledge of how interests line up for and against the autistic person. In describing the role of proximal deictics in fictional narrative, Black (2006: 6) says they function to “draw the reader into the text, creating a sense of involvement”, and possibly every commentary on the pragmatics of fiction assumes absorption. Goffman (1974: 347) is more substantive than most in his claims for “engrossment”: “being carried away into something”, absorbed in feeling and cognition. Engrossment is experienced in “untransformed” or transformed strips of activity: “a reader’s involvement in a novel is in the relevant sense the same as his involvement in a strip of ‘actual’ experience” (Goffman 1974: 347). Also, to be involved, one need not be actively participating in the strip: “individuals merely observing another – ‘onlooking’ him – follow along in frame terms with some sort of blend of affective sympathy and cognitive set” (Goffman 1974: 380). This affective, sympathetic following along spurs implicature. Semino’s (2014) analyses of autism novels provides a simple but acute insight: we arrive at

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a position on autism – an interest in it, a timely perspective on it – according to our following and responding to characters. We like some of the characters, and commiserate or celebrate with them; we accept or disdain others, according to their effects on the characters with whom we feel “affective sympathy” (Goffman 1974: 380). As Semino (2014: 152) says, the characters who are offended by the impoliteness of autistic speakers’ pragmatic failures are ones that “readers are unlikely to sympathise with”. By implicature – rather than by a narrator specifying that this is a bad character – readers rank negatively the characters who may be standing in the way of a happy ending. In autism novels (and presumably in other novels which can be linked to contemporary issues), however, these differentials in sympathy go beyond just readers’ rating of endings as happy or not. By implicature – rather than by a narrator making explicit statements – a reader would also arrive at the meditations on tensions between sincerity and social harmony which Semino proposes, or at the appreciation of the extent of ambiguity in interaction she also proposes. A reader may in fact or in spirit “become part of public campaigns and debates” on autism (Semino 2014: 144). All of these would be contextual effects, and also poetic effects insofar as their explicit content is not guaranteed by the author, and their actual rendering in consciousness is a matter for readers’ responsibility (Wilson 2011). Moreover, in step with Moretti and his findings on the historically-cued rise and fall of genres such as the genre of these autism novels, we could suggest that these pragmatic performances by writers and readers are timed to the questions of the day, and link them to a complex socio-political and cultural environment by the incremental contextual effects achieved, at once up-dating individual consciousness and enjoining a larger public consciousness. Moretti’s literary accounting of genres, Rhetorical Genre Theory, and Bakhtin’s philosophy of language, as well as historical pragmatics’ tracing of genres’ generations, all point to the pulse of a genre being its responsiveness to its times: over time, genres rise and fall, form and transform in their social action. Long in its development, as Bakhtin has shown, contemporary fiction is noted by many, including Bakhtin, as distinguished by its “voices” and “double voices” (e.g. Bakhtin 1981: 361–362) and the ostensive presentation of the voices for inference by readers. Many scholars, both literary and linguistic, have studied the phenomenon of indirect speech in literary narrative, finding it increasingly concentrated there. At the same time, study of Reported Speech in interaction (e.g. Günthner 1999; Holt 2000; Myers 1999; Tannen 1986) has found that, in conversation, it is an affiliative performance: a ground for identification and orienting to the social order, as well as for distancing and disdaining. With the historical contingency of all genres in mind, and of fiction genres especially, we could at this point ask why fiction has, now, in these generations, gone so deeply into indirect speech (the “double-voiced” quality being, Bakhtin [1981: 361] says, a “trait” of the novel, the novel having in itself no “stylistics”)? If we take the social action of fiction genres as an up-dating on the potentials and

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ramifications of the social order and the consciousness of others, then we might see that this action has become acutely complicated in modern times, and even more complicated in post-modern times. Names for these complications spread across many domains: things are now known to be globalised, post-colonial, transnational, transcultural; societies are estimated for diversity, multi-culturalism, pluralism. Arguably, from early modern times, for readers in the European tradition the context in which contextual effects might be derived has been expanding towards the relativism Bakhtin (1981) sees as distinguishing modern linguistic consciousness. For example, Pettegree (2014: 364) has shown that, at the cusp of the early modern period in Europe, 16th-century readers didn’t know what to do with foreign news when it was printed for them: its relevance had yet to develop; in pragmatic terms, readers could derive no contextual effects. Twentieth-century readers, on the other hand, entertained a wealth of assumptions from which to derive contextual effects from foreign news. As in news fields, so too in literary fields, the space for contextual effects may be constantly expanding. And Reported Speech may be one of the most generative means of delivering materials for weak implicatures as to the consciousnesses of others, in this expanding context and social order. 4.

Conclusions: Meta-genre revisited

As suggested above (Section 2.3), while many genres develop a modest or even substantial meta-genre, the literary genres support a vast one, unevenly distributed across cultural orders, heavily cultivated in some sectors and sparse in others. Like many meta-genres, that of the literary genres expresses value: which instance or type of writing is good, which is bad, as well as celebrating with attention literary production generally and denouncing with alarm forces thought to damage the literary sphere. Amongst the contributions to literary pragmatics considered in this chapter, we find such expressions of value. Pilkington (2000: 158–159), for example, looks into “sentimentality”, which is already pejoratively named, and then labels it “falseness”. Mey (1999: 189) denounces “the pulp that is being poured out on the mass literature markets today” as abandoning the traditions of “real(istic)” fiction. “Pulp” and “mass literature” fiction, he says, force “a standardized voice down the readership’s throat” (Mey 1999: 272). Black (2006: 100) finds a failure in literary decorum when a short story weaves standard English with dialect. In a research programme for inquiry into the pragmatics of fiction genres, it may be important to go ahead without interference from the literary meta-genre, following instead Moretti’s method, which gathers literary data without prejudice, and also going beyond what is on the investigator’s night table. Even then, inquiry may struggle to advance itself beyond the opportunistic focus on passages which have attracted the investigator’s attention as a reader, personally. (I have myself

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focussed thus in this chapter.) The traditions and prestige of close reading combine fatally with pragmatics’ tendency, in some strains, to small-scale inspection of snippets. That scale is not entirely compatible with genre study. The large-scale inquiries of historical pragmatics, mentioned above (Section 2.1), might provide better direction. Unresolved by this chapter is the role of interpretation: the explicit expression of propositions attributed to weak implicature. There is no doubt that such expression occurs with regularity in the area of literary fiction genres. But it is not clear that it belongs to the genre rather than to the meta-genre. While Black (2006: 83) claims that knitting and tying are part of the reader’s work, she herself seems sceptical about such work, attributing “major searches for weak effects” to “institutionalised” conditions in “university literature departments”. At least we might ask about the social actions surrounding literary fiction genres which select and train some readers and not others to be “successful”, as Black describes Pilkington in his long searches for poetic effects, earning in the process the admiration of other good readers. Finally, the pragmatic role of the literary meta-genre itself could be taken into account. Major amongst its activities is canon formation: the construction of value through the choosing of books not only to be read but to be re-read. It is not enough that these chosen texts be read through the systems of publication and publicity mentioned above (Section 2.3), that is, read by their (micro-)generation and in the hour of their appearance. They must also be read again, when that hour has passed, and that generation is gone. This project is advanced by curriculum and pedagogy, and the production of literary sensibility itself: very much a sensibility of literary history, to know Shakespeare and Austen for amateur credentials, to know Dante and Trollope, for semi-pro, or advanced amateur, to know Gawain and Horace for full professional status, and to be in a position to appreciate texts, as Black says, for their intertextuality. The pragmatics of literary Common Ground, both amateur and professional, are features of the meta-genres of fiction, and to be looked into another time. For now, I suggest that the literary meta-genre extends the fundamental pragmatic move of determining the intention of the speaker, for the canon – through the curriculum, through the legend of classics – has a communicative intention. It puts forward again the utterance of the author and does so ostensively, with intention, with implicatures to be derived according to new or renewed assumptions in the context of interpretation. Ostensively, the canon says, Read this.

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Baldrick, Chris 2015 The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 4th Ed. http://www.oxfordreference. com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199208272.001.0001/acref-9780199208272 [accessed May 23, 2016]. Bax, Stephen 2011 Discourse and Genre: Analysing Language in Context. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Biber, Douglas 2006 University Language: A Corpus-Based Study of Spoken and Written Register. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Biber, Douglas and Susan Conrad 2009 Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Biber, Douglas and Edward Finegan 1988 Adverbial stance types in English. Discourse Processes 11(1): 1–34. Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan 1989 Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text & Talk 9(1): 93–124. Bitzer, Lloyd 1968 The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric 1(13): 1–14. Bitzer, Lloyd 1980 Functional communication: A situational perspective. In: Eugene E. White (ed.), Rhetoric in Transition: Studies in the Nature and Uses of Rhetoric, 21–38. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Black, Elizabeth 2006 Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bow, Catherine 2013 ‘Can I ask you something personal?’ Sensitive questioning in intercultural doctor-patient interviews. Focus on Health Professional Education 15(2): 67–77. Burke, Kenneth 1966 Terministic screens. In: Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method, 44–62. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Burke Kenneth 1969 A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. First published [1950]. Busse, Beatrix 2014 Genre. In: Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, 103–116. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chafe, Wallace 1994 Discourse, Consciousness, and Time. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Herbert H. 1992 Dealing with overhearers. In: Herbert H. Clark, Arenas of Language Use, 248– 274. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Herbert H. and Richard J. Gerrig 1990 Quotations as demonstrations. Language 66(4): 764–805.

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Cohen, Ralph 1986 History and genre. New Literary History 17(2): 203–216. Dawkins, Marian Stamp 1993 Through Our Eyes Only. Oxford, UK: W. H. Freeman. Dimock, Wai Chee 2006 Genre as world system: Epic and novel on four continents. Narrative 14(1): 85–101. Epstein, Edward Jay 1973 News from Nowhere. New York: Random House. Frow, John 2014 Genre, 2nd Ed. London: Routledge. Giltrow, Janet 2002 Meta-genre. In: Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard and Tatiana Teslenko (eds.), The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, 187–206. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Giltrow, Janet 2011 “Curious gentlemen”: The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Royal Society, business and science in the eighteenth century. In: Doreen Starke-Meyering, Anthony Paré, Natasha Artemeva, Miriam Horne and Larissa Yousoubova. (eds.), Writing in Knowledge Societies, 53–74. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Goffman, Erving 1974 Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Goffman, Erving 1979 Footing. Semiotica 25(1–2): 1–29. Günthner, Susanne 1999 Polyphony and the ‘layering of voices’ in reported dialogues: An analysis of the use of prosodic devices in everyday reported speech. Journal of Pragmatics 31(5): 685–708. Holt, Elizabeth 2000 Reporting and reacting: Concurrent responses to reported speech. Research on Language and Social Interaction 33(4): 425–454. Humphrey, Nicholas 1992 A History of the Mind. London: Vintage. Hymes, Dell 1974 Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jauss, Hans Robert 1979 The alterity and modernity of medieval literature. In: Hans Robert Jauss and Timothy Bahti (eds.), Medieval Literature and Contemporary Theory. Special Issue, New Literary History 10(2): 181–229. Jucker, Andreas H. and Irma Taavitsainen 2013 English Historical Pragmatics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Levinson, Stephen C. 1979 Activity types and language. Linguistics 17: 365–399. Medway, Peter 2002 Fuzzy genres and community identities: The case of architectural students’ sketchbooks. In: Richard M. Coe, Lorelei Lingard and Tatiana Teslenko (eds.), The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, 123–153. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

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Mey, Jacob L. 1999 When Voices Clash: A Study in Literary Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Miller, Carolyn 1984 Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech 70(2): 151–167. Moretti, Franco 2005 Graphs, Maps, Trees. London: Verso. Myers, Greg 1999 Functions of reported speech in group discussions. Applied Linguistics 20(3): 376–401. Pettegree, Andrew 2014 The Invention of the News: How the World Came to Know about Itself. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pilkington, Adrian 2000 Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Prince, Ellen F. 1981 Towards a taxonomy of given-new information. In: Peter Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, 223–255. Academic Press. Puschmann, Cornelius 2009 Lies at Wal-Mart: Style and the subversion of genre in the Life at Wal-Mart blog. In: Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein (eds.), Genres in the Internet, 49–84. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Puschmann, Cornelius 2010 Thank you for thinking we could: Use and function of interpersonal pronouns in corporate web logs. In: Heidrun Dorgeloh and Anja Wanner (eds.), Syntactic Variation and Genre, 167–194. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sell, Roger 1991 Literary genre and history: Questions from a literary pragmaticist for social semioticians. In: Eija Ventola (ed.), Approaches to the Analysis of Literary Discourse, 1–38. Åbo, FI: Åkademis Förlag. Semino, Elena 2014 Pragmatic failure, mind style, and characterisation in fiction about autism. Language and Literature 23(2): 141–158. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson 1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd Ed. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Swales, John M. 1990 Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taavitsainen, Irma 2001 Middle English recipes: Genre characteristics, text type features, and underlying traditions of writing. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2(1): 85–113. Taavistsainen, Irma 2011 Medical case reports and scientific thought-styles. Revista de Lenguas para Fines Específicos 17: 75–98. Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker 2010 Trends and developments in historical pragmatics. In: Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), Historical Pragmatics, 3–30. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Tannen, Deborah 1986 Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American conversation and literary narrative. In: Florian Coulmas (ed.), Direct and Indirect Speech, 311– 332. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Thorne, James 1988 What is a poem? In: Willie Van Peer (ed.), The Taming of the Text, 280–291. London: Routledge. Tuchman, Gaye 1973 The technology of objectivity: Doing “objective” TV news film. Urban Life and Culture 2(1): 3–26. Vološinov, Valentin 1973 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (trans.). New York: Seminar Press. Wilson, Deirdre 2011 Relevance and the interpretation of literary works. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 23: 69–80. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1999 Philosophical Investigations, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (trans.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. First published [1953].

4.

Fictional characterisation Jonathan Culpeper and Carolina Fernandez-Quintanilla

Abstract: The topic of character construction and interpretation in fiction, or fictional characterisation, seems to spill into a multitude of disciplines and be approachable from a multitude of perspectives. This chapter discusses work in the linguistics-related field of stylistics, especially cognitive stylistics and the stylistics of drama, but also draws on narratology and other fields besides. Having outlined some ontological and interpretative fundamentals, it describes how characters are constructed in the interaction between top-down knowledge from the reader/perceiver’s head and bottom-up information from the text. Focusing on the latter, it argues that three dimensions are key in characterisation: narratorial control, the presentation of self or other, and the explicitness or implicitness of the textual cue. It elaborates on narratorial filters (point of view, mind style and the presentation of speech and thought), character indexing (through, for example, speech acts) and inter-character dynamics (through, for example, the manipulation of social relations). 1. Introduction Within stylistics, a field that overlaps to some extent with narratology, characterisation has been especially important in two areas: cognitive stylistics and the stylistics of drama. Both have pragmatic issues at their heart. Cognitive stylistics, as outlined in Semino and Culpeper (2002), approaches characterisation by combining linguistic analysis with cognitive considerations in order to shed light on the construction and comprehension of fictional characters. Examples of work that has, broadly speaking, taken this path are Gerrig and Allbritton (1990), Culpeper (1994, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2009), Schneider (2001), Bortolussi and Dixon (2003), Snell (2006) and McIntyre and Lugea (2015). The stylistics of drama, as exemplified by works like Culpeper et al. (1998) and Herman (1998), has always considered characterisation a central concern. Plays, screen-plays, films, TV dramas, and soaps, whether read, experienced in the theatre, heard on the radio, or seen and heard on television, are largely constituted by fictional dialogue (see also Bednarek, Ch. 5, this volume). Here the link between character and language is relatively direct: characters are not typically filtered through narrators. Moreover, studies of the language of play-texts have exploited the potential afforded by classic pragmatic concepts and frameworks, including: speech act theory (e.g. Hurst 1987; Lowe 1998), implicature (e.g. Cooper 1998), (im)politeness (e.g. DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-004 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 93–128. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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Leech 1992; Simpson 1989; Bousfield 2007) and Conversation Analysis (e.g. Burton 1980; Herman 1991; Piazza 1999). Studies of TV/film dialogue have also deployed implicature (Desilla 2012) and impoliteness (e.g. Culpeper 1998; Dynel 2012, 2015), but have spread the net wider to include expressive features (Bednarek 2010), point of view and mind style (McIntyre 2006), and more besides (see also Richardson 2010). We will accommodate these broader aspects in this chapter, thereby extending our scope to (more explicitly) narrative genres. In the following section, we introduce some fundamentals of character and characterisation. We start by discussing the ontology of character. This issue is important because what one takes character to be will influence what one says about characterisation. We also outline some features of inferencing that are distinctive of fictional characterisation. Section 3, our most extensive section, examines “inputs” into characterisation. First, it examines top-down inputs, that is, information that feeds into character from prior knowledge. Second, it examines bottom-up inputs, that is, information that feeds into character from linguistic material. In Section 4, we discuss character dynamics in the local contexts of the fictional world, especially interpersonal aspects. Finally, in Section 5, we look at work on the perception of characters.

2.

Fundamentals of character and characterisation

2.1.

The ontology of character

In their introduction to Characters in Fictional Worlds, a substantial, multidisciplinary volume, Eder et al. suggest that there are four major positions with regard to the ontological status of characters: 1. Semiotic theories consider characters to be signs or structures of fictional texts. 2. Cognitive approaches assume that characters are representations of imaginary beings in the minds of the audience. 3. Some philosophers believe that characters are abstract objects beyond material reality. 4. Other philosophers contend that characters do not exist at all. (Eder et al. 2010: 8) Full discussion of each of these can be found in Eder et al. (2010). What will be obvious, however, is that (2) is the only position that accommodates an audience. For this reason, it is the one that is most in tune with pragmatic concerns, concerns which revolve around the communication of meanings. Note that this position involves “imaginary beings” (our emphasis); in other words, they are not actual people or representations of actual people. This is clearly the case for anthropomorphic animal characters (e.g. the rabbits of the novel Watership Down [Adams

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1972]) or characters of science fiction (e.g. Doctor Spock of the Star Trek films). However, some imaginary characters have a closer relationship with actual people than others, and can even be modelled on a specific actual person, as, for example, in the case of the protagonist of the semi-biographical film of Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady (2011, directed by Phyllida Lloyd). Conversely, identities of real people are never an exact representation of that person, but a partial representation constructed in situated communication, shaped by particular goals, cultural and ideological forces, and so on. A safer statement, then, would be that characters vary as to how closely they represent specific actual people, but prototypically they are more imaginary, more distant from specific actual people. A danger in thinking of characters as “imaginary beings” is that it could obscure the role that actual human beings more generally play in all characterisation. As Emmott (1997) puts it: In reading narrative texts, we imagine worlds inhabited by individuals who can be assumed to behave, physically and psychologically, in ways which reflect our real-life experiences of being situated in the real world. (Emmott 1997: 58)

And following from this, we might note Margolin’s (1989) comment on reductive, functionally-oriented structuralist approaches to character (cf. position 1 above): Plainly speaking, I suspect that the scholars who expressed the dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs feel, like Wallace Martin, that ‘our sense that [many] fictional characters are uncannily similar to people is not something to be dismissed or ridiculed, but a crucial feature of narration that requires explanation.’ (Martin 1986: 120). (Margolin 1989: 10)

It is difficult to deny that what we all do when we read a book, or watch a play or film is to attempt to interpret characters, despite their imaginary status, in large part with knowledge about people acquired through our real life experiences (see also Bortolussi and Dixon 2003: 134–141). We generally have a humanising approach to characterisation (Culpeper 2001: 6–7). Gernsbacher et al. (1992) and Graesser et al. (1994) provide empirical evidence that the mental representation of the goals, motives, beliefs, traits and emotions of fictional characters proceeds in much the same way as for real people. One might add here that the reverse is possible too: the interpretation of a character can affect our real life experiences, as, for example when the audience experiences empathy (see Keen’s [2006] discussion of the empathy-altruism hypothesis) or even adapts behaviours to mimic characters (consider the effect of Harry Potter). Thus, our interaction with characters is just that: interaction. For instance, Wodak (2009), in her analysis of the American serial political drama The West Wing, points out aspects of this kind of interaction in the relationship between the political real world and political fictional world, including contrasts made by journalists between the imaginary president Jed Bartlett and George W. Bush. What exactly are we interpreting in the process of characterisation? The key

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focus of our interpretation must be the language. This point is forcefully made by van Peer (1988): […] the category of character is, for its very formation, dependent on linguistic forms. Character, it can hardly be denied, is what readers infer from words, sentences, paragraphs and textual composition depicting, describing or suggesting actions, thoughts, utterances or feelings of a protagonist. Thus the linguistic organisation of a text will predetermine to a certain degree the kind of ‘picture’ one may compose of a protagonist. Therefore the particular forms by which this is achieved need to be studied in detail. (van Peer 1988: 9, emphasis in original)

This is in tune with pragmatics, although the scope of pragmatics is not restricted to linguistic forms but includes semiotic behaviours in all their multimodality. Pragmatics does not focus exclusively on abstract linguistic phenomena or psychological or cognitive functions – something which distinguishes it from a number of syntactic theories and from much cognitive science. It has much more to do with “what readers infer” from the language or behaviours, and the way in which those will “predetermine to a certain degree” interpretations, including that of character. 2.2.

Inferring character

Character inferencing has only been discussed in a few studies, notably Margolin (especially 1983) and Culpeper (1996). Whilst, as noted in Section 2.1, we may draw on our knowledge about real-life people in interpreting characters, we cannot assume that the characteristics of real people are inferred in exactly the same way as those of imaginary, fictional characters. Culpeper (1996: 352–353) suggests that there are two key differences. The first is that fictional character behaviours are complete. Note: the claim here is that behaviours are complete, not the entire conception of a character, which will partly rely on inferences made by the reader/ perceiver triggered by those behaviours. In our face-to-face interactions with real people we meet in the street, at work, at parties, and so on, we never have a complete set of behaviours diagnostic of personality (although usually we have enough information to make predictions about a person’s behaviour that are strong enough for our purposes). Those people continue with their lives – they continue speaking and behaving – after our encounters with them. And, of course, there would have been behaviours before which we were not party to. The lack of knowledge of these ‘extra-encounter’ behaviours means we do not have a complete behavioural record. This is not the case with a fictional character. For example, if an author has a character speak in one dialogue and we never hear that character again, then their contribution to that one dialogue is the character’s entire behavioural set and the complete basis for any inferences. The second is that character behaviours have greater significance. An assumption underlying the process of extracting personality information from the behaviours of real people is that there are occasions when people act in ways consistent

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with their personalities. This idea is the basis of correspondent inference theory (e.g. Jones 1990), one of the foundational attribution theories in social psychology. You make a correspondent inference when you are able to transfer your description of a person’s behaviour to your description of that person’s disposition (e.g. aggressive behaviour results from an aggressive disposition). Inferences do not correspond when something in the context is the cause of the behaviour (e.g. aggressive behaviour could result from a temporary bad mood caused by a headache rather than an aggressive disposition). Much of correspondent inference theory is geared to working out when inferences correspond and when they do not. The same assumption also underlies the interpretation of character behaviours, and indeed attribution theories can be applied (see Culpeper 1996 for elaboration and illustration). The key difference lies in the fact that the particular discourse framework of most fictional works has the effect of lending additional weight to that assumption. Interaction between characters might be described as a discourse embedded within that of the discourse between author and reader (Short 1989; see also Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume). Short (1989) draws the important implication for characterisation: […] the important thing to notice is the general embedded nature of drama, because features which, for example, mark social relations between two people at the character level become messages about the characters at the level of discourse which pertains between author and reader/audience. (Short 1989: 149, emphasis in original)

In the perspective of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), any character behaviour is also part of an ostensive act of communication between the author and the reader, and as such “communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance” (1995: 260). Thus, we can assume that character behaviour has additional significance or relevance, so that our processing efforts will receive sufficient cognitive rewards. These two differences make it likely that more interpretive effort will be spent on behaviours in fictional worlds compared with real. To illustrate briefly, a man was observed by one of the authors of this chapter reversing out of a car parking space and nearly colliding with his partner. The event was attributed to a moment of distraction, a non-correspondent inference. Within a fictional work, the same event might have triggered more interpretative effort and have led to correspondence inferences, such as “he is an evil man with murderous intentions”, especially when the act is deemed consistent with other behaviours and/or there is a supporting context (e.g. it is a work of crime fiction). Of course, not all fictional works consist of just two discourse levels. If we consider narrative genres (e.g. novels, short stories, ‘small stories’), then the number of discourse levels is likely to include a narratorial level, involving a narrator and a narratee, between the two levels mentioned above (cf. Leech and Short 2007: Ch. 8). In fact, a further level is typically added just below author-reader, consisting of discourse between an implied author and an implied reader (see, e.g.,

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Leech and Short 2007: 207–210). The point of this is to accommodate the fact that authors are not actually addressing all the readers who will be reading their books but an assumed readership with particular knowledge, sympathies and so on. Conversely, readers are not actually addressed directly by the author. If this were so, we would have to assume that the views expressed in the work were always and automatically those of the actual author. Leech and Short (2007: 209) give the example of Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), in which, although the seducer of an under-age girl is given sympathetic treatment, we cannot, they argue, infer that the writer is generally sympathetic to such behaviour. Of course, further levels can be easily added to the bottom: a character could always report the conversations of other characters, and so on. The particular relevance of the narratorial level for characterisation is that narrators “filter” how and what we learn about characters. The narrator can provide information about characters, both when it is a participating character in the story (‘intradiegetic narrator’, Genette 1972, cited in Wales 2011: 152) and when it is external to the story (‘extradiegetic narrator’, Genette 1972, cited in Wales 2011: 152). An important consideration influencing the way in which recipients take any information coming from the narrator is to do with reliability. Although it is common for readers to assume that the narrator is reliable (Wales 2011: 287), sometimes we encounter narrators “whose understanding of what he or she relates appears to be limited or deficient” (Miall 2014: 433). When the narrator turns out to be unreliable, readers are unlikely to take the narrator’s comments about characters at face value (for the notion of (un)reliable narrator, see Booth 1961). Examples of unreliable narrators can be found in various genres, including prose fiction (as in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders) and in film (as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, 1950) (Wales 2011: 287). A key question is whether the narrator’s unreliability is a deliberate attempt to portray issues in a distorted way or, on the contrary, whether such unreliability is unintentional. The degree of intentionality that readers ascribe to the unreliable narrator is likely to determine their interpretation of any characterising information provided in the narration. The notion of mind style becomes relevant in cases when such unreliability is considered non-deliberate. We will examine such narratorial filters more closely in Section 3.2.2.

3.

Characterisation inputs

3.1.

Top-down information

3.1.1. Social schemata In Section 2.1, we noted that knowledge about people acquired through our real life experiences is used in characterisation. A widely used theory of knowledge

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is schema theory, often taken to date from Bartlett’s ([1932] 1995) work. The term “schema/schemata” refers to “well integrated chunks of knowledge about the world, events, people, and actions” (Eysenck and Keane 2000: 352). They are abstracted from an accumulation of repeated experiences; usually taken to be relatively complex, or higher-order, clusters of concepts, with a particular network of relationships holding those concepts together; and are assumed to constitute the structure of long-term memory. Other terms, such as “frames”, “scripts” and “scenarios”, have been used in the literature, each within a somewhat different tradition and with a somewhat different emphasis. Schema theory has been a foundational theory in both cognitive stylistics (e.g. Cook 1994 and Semino 1997) and social cognition (it is even anticipated in Asch 1946). In the field of social cognition, it is often related to research on the notion of “cognitive stereotypes”. For example, Andersen et al. (1990: 192) define stereotypes as “highly organised social categories that have the properties of schemata”; and Hamilton and Sherman (1994: 15) suggest that a stereotype is a set of beliefs which is “stored in memory as a cognitive structure and can then influence subsequent perceptions of, and behaviours toward, that group and its members”. We will refer to such knowledge about people as social schemata. Generally, people more easily pay attention to, memorise and recall information that is consistent with expectations derived from their schemata; and, given that schemata are probabilistic, exceptions can be ignored (though if that effort is made, the information may be well remembered) (e.g. Fiske and Taylor 1984: 149; Hamilton and Sherman 1994: 33–37). If people stereotypes are “highly organised social categories that have the properties of schemata” (Andersen et al. 1990: 192), then they “can then influence subsequent perceptions of, and behaviors toward, that group and its members” (Hamilton and Sherman 1994: 15). Clearly, if schemata bias perception toward schema-consistent information, then that factor operates as a self-perpetuating bias for the stereotype, as exceptions tend to be ignored. Not surprisingly, schema theory is sometimes used in Critical Discourse Analysis to help account for aspects of prejudice, an example being van Dijk’s (1987) work on racism. From the point of view of characterisation, the important point is that social schemata explain the basis of knowledge-based inferences about characters, inferences which can ‘fill out’ an impression of character and be manipulated for particular effects. Inferencing based on schemata accounts for what Toolan (1988) refers to as the “iceberg” phenomenon in characterisation: the idea that the words of a text are the observable part of a character impression, and beyond them lies the unobservable but inferable and larger part. One implication of this for writers is that it affords them economy of expression: they can mean more than they say. In play-texts, a case in point is how characters are first introduced in stage directions, which are usually elliptical in style, rapidly indicating to the reader (including the producer and actors) the kind of character who is just about to appear. For example, the

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character Alfieri is introduced in a stage direction at the beginning of Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge ([1955] 1975: 11) in the following way: (1) Enter Alfieri, a lawyer in his fifties turning grey; he is portly, good-humoured, and thoughtful.

In order to analyse and explain particular character inferences, the contents of social schemata can be grouped on the basis of type of knowledge. Culpeper (2001: 75–76) suggests that there are three key groupings: Social role: e.g. kinship roles, occupational roles, relational roles Group membership: e.g. gender, race, class, age, nationality, religion Personal: e.g. preferences, interests, traits, goals, abilities

In Example (1), rich social role information (he belongs to the category of people who work as a lawyer) and group membership information (he belongs to the categories of people who are male, as indicated by the pronouns his and he, and in their fifties) are given early in the text; personal information (he belongs to the categories of people who are good-humoured and thoughtful) comes later. The key point about these groupings is that together they constitute a network – a social schema – with the consequence that activating one part of the network allows inferences about the other parts (Culpeper 2001: 77). For example, knowing that he is a lawyer allows one to infer that he is probably middle-class (group membership). Such inferences can be exploited. For example, the heroine of the film Erin Brockovich (2000, directed by Steven Soderbergh) is refreshingly different because she becomes a lawyer despite not being male, middle-class or having abilities in the law acquired through law school. More extensive illustrations of social schemata at work in characterisation include Snell’s (2006) analysis of Emily Howard and Vicky Pollard in the award-winning UK TV comedy series Little Britain. One particular way in which writers exploit the schema-based processing of characters is by creating a situation where a character is formed according to a particular schema, but then force the reader to abandon that schema entirely and activate another. Culpeper (2001: 96–99) labels this switch “dramatic recategorisation”. An author constructs the text so that it plays “garden path” tricks on the reader. Bianca, Katherina’s sister in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, is a good example. In the first half of the play, Shakespeare leads the reader to think that she is the goodly daughter. In the latter half of the play, we are led to believe that this is all a sham and that she is the truly bad daughter. Note that the fact that her previous behaviour can be thought of as part of her duplicity means that it is not inconsistent with treating her as a bad daughter. If we thought that both her good behaviour and her bad behaviour reflected her character we would have a more complex characterisation – one that suggests piecemeal integration, which we will discuss in Section 3.1.3.

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3.1.2. Dramatic roles, plot and genre The idea of characters as dramatic roles or agents of sets of plot functions associated with different genres is most famously pursued by Vladimir Propp ([1928] 1968), who extended the Russian Formalist approach to narrative structure (see Popova 2016 for a discussion of formalist and structuralist approaches to narrative organisation). He revealed 31 underlying narrative functions performed by 8 character types or dramatis personae in Russian folk tales. Here, as far as characterisation is concerned, the focus is on the kind of “doer” (e.g. hero, villain, victim) as a function of the kind of “deed” (e.g. good deeds, bad deeds), and not on, for example, what might have motivated the doer to do the deed. By way of illustration, we quote Wright’s (1975) characters and functions for the genre of the classic Wild West films:   1. The hero enters a social group.   2. The hero is unknown to the society.   3. The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability.   4. The society recognises the difference between themselves and the hero; the hero is given special status.   5. The society does not completely accept the hero.   6. There is a conflict of interests between the villains and the society.   7. The villains are stronger than the society; the society is weak.   8. There is strong friendship or respect between the hero and a villain.   9. The villains threaten the society. 10. The hero avoids involvement in the conflict. 11. The villains endanger a friend of the hero. 12. The hero fights the villains. 13. The hero defeats the villains. 14. The society is safe. 15. The society accepts the hero. 16. The hero loses or gives up his special status. (Wright 1975: 48–49) Further illustration can be found in Wodak’s (2009) Proppian analysis of The West Wing. An impression of character is shaped not only by schematic knowledge of real people, as discussed in Section 3.1.1, but also by knowledge of types of fictional character, including the dramatic roles of particular genres (see Giltrow, Ch. 3, this volume, on genre). Textual cues may influence the balance of “real people” knowledge versus “fictional character” knowledge. Thus, if we have identified a text as an instance of the “morality play” genre (e.g. Everyman, circa 1500), we are likely to retrieve and use our knowledge about personified vices and virtues such as the fictional Seven Deadly Sins (a more recent example would be the film Seven, 1995,

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directed by David Fincher). In contrast, if we have identified our text as a biography, we are likely to give more weight to our knowledge about real people. However, fictional character-type knowledge is not isolated from the kind of knowledge that is frequently used in the perception of real people. As we noted in Section 2.1, there is an interaction between fictional and real. For example, if a character in a Western does a series of good deeds, one might infer that that character is the “hero”, and, knowing this dramatic role, one may infer such things as “this character is unlikely to die”. The presence of this expectation is made salient when it is violated. For instance, in the film Homesman (2014, directed by Tommy Lee Jones), the resolute, strong and morally-minded heroine takes on the task of rescuing three women who have gone mad by transporting them from the “wild west” back to the east, when all other candidates for the job have shrunk away. Well before the end of the film, she commits suicide, much to the surprise of the audience. As we saw, this is not part of the script of plot functions associated with the hero in Westerns. Furthermore, knowing the genre and relevant dramatic role allows inferences about likely real life person properties. Thus, one might infer that the hero is likely to be “male” and “young adult”, as well as “good” and “brave”. Female heroes in Westerns, as in Homesman, or even more so teenage female heroes, as in True Grit (2010, re-make, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen), are striking precisely because they violate such inferences. Of course, it is worth bearing in mind that schemata are both culturally and ideologically embedded, something which Bartlett’s ([1932] 1995) early work on schema theory was designed to tease out. Clearly, there are schematic associations between fictional character types and real-life social categories. Some interesting empirical work on this issue has been undertaken by Livingstone (2013), who conducted a study of people’s perceptions of TV soap characters (specifically from Coronation Street, EastEnders and Dallas). She revealed ways in which knowledge of structural aspects of the genre took precedence over real-life social knowledge. For example: Viewers are clearly aware that the characters occupy different moral stances and find the moral narratives or messages central to the programme an appropriate way of conceiving of the characters more generally […] One might suggest that viewers focus on what the characters do with their positive attributes (thereby linking representation of character to that of narrative): the “baddies” use them for exploitation and deceit; the “goodies” use them for righting wrongs and helping others. A focus on morality implies judgement of the characters’ actions and also an appreciation of the narrative implications of assigning characters to a moral category. (Livingstone 2013: 142–143)

3.1.3. Mixed models A schema-theoretic approach to characterisation is not enough. Schema theory is a “top-down” theory, applying cognitive concepts to the understanding of something in the world. However, most cognitive scholars take the view that under-

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standing is in some sense constructionist, that is to say, it involves the integration of “bottom-up” information from the stimulus input, in our case the language and behaviours, with the “top-down” information retrieved from schematic knowledge. Schema theory does not account very well for situations in which no obvious schema fits the incoming information or in which a lack of fit develops during the course of a reading/watching. The alternative to a schema-driven or category-based impression is a person-based impression. The latter is made up of the individual attributes of the target person; it is richer and more personalised than a schema-driven impression, and also requires more cognitive effort on the part of the person forming the impression. In social cognition, Fiske and Neuberg (1990) present a model that attempts to include both kinds of impression, one at each end of a continuum. In cognitive stylistics, probably the first paper to bring such work into the domain of stylistics is Gerrig and Allbritton (1990), a work that inspired Culpeper (1994, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2009) and Schneider (2001) to produce mixed models of characterisation, which, though independently produced, are quite similar in their fundamentals. The remainder of this section summarises aspects of Culpeper’s model. We are predisposed, for obvious reasons of cognitive economy, towards trying to fit textual information about people or characters into pre-formed social schemata, rather than trying to combine individual (and possibly unrelated) pieces of information in an ad hoc way. Schema-based impressions entail simplification, since textual information is treated in terms of generic prior knowledge. Schema-based characters are usually the prototypical, unremarkable and forgettable characters of fictional worlds. For instance, as far as historical fictional works are concerned, the numerous servants that appear in fictional works, especially historical, are typically schema-based: they speak and act as servants. Such characters might be described as “flat” (Forster [1927] 1987). If the reader/audience acquires information which does not fit any particular schema, in tune with Fiske and Neuberg (1990), they make progress down a continuum away from schema-fit towards piecemeal integration. Two intermediate stages are possible. One is accessing a sub-schema which is a better fit for the information. In the Victorian period in Britain, governesses, for example, such as Charlotte Brontë’s eponymous character in Jane Eyre ([1847] 2007), occupied an awkward space between being servants (e.g. they were paid) and being part of the ‘gentle’ host family (e.g. they were educated as ‘ladies’). It is possible that a fictional character may first be perceived by the reader/audience as either a servant or a family member, and then later be sub-categorised as a governess. The other is recategorisation, as discussed in Section 3.1.1. Note that the resultant character impression for either of these stages is still consistent with a schema. In contrast, piecemeal integration occurs when no schema can be found to act as a scaffold for the incoming information, and instead individual pieces of information have to be combined. Such characters might be described as “round” (Forster 1987). They are relatively dynamic characters, both

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with respect to their formation, as movement along the continuum is required, and the final piecemeal impression, which lacks the relative fixity of a schema. Why should perceivers bother to move away from schema-driven characterisation towards piecemeal integration with its increasingly heavy cognitive demands? Literacy researchers working on motivation from what is being read, often within an educational context, have identified intrinsic motivational factors such as (1) curiosity or interest, (2) involvement and (3) challenge (see, for example, Guthrie et al. 1999 and references therein). Clearly, if a writer can generate reader curiosity or interest through the text, then that will motivate greater attention and increase the likelihood that a character will be understood in terms of piecemeal integration. (Of course, a writer may wish to do the opposite: in a detective novel, the writer may not wish to motivate attention for the culprit). Brewer (1988) suggested that self-involvement may play a role in determining the kind of processing involved. Self-involvement is when “the perceiver feels closely related to or interdependent with the target person, or feels ego-involved in the judgement task” (Brewer 1988: 9). Hence, one might predict that sympathetic (or antipathetic) characters receive more attention than characters one feels more neutral about (see also our discussion of empathy in Section 5). Regarding challenge, it is obviously the case that characters involving piecemeal integration present a greater cognitive challenge: readers cannot simply fit the incoming information to the schema. One way of thinking about curiosity/interest and challenge is in terms of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995). Characters which seem likely to offer adequate cognitive rewards for the effort spent on comprehending them attract more attention and effort. Authors can, of course, guide our attention by making characters more or less central. For example, it is overwhelmingly the case in fictional works that the characters who speak the most are the protagonists – the characters who are full of contradictions, who change and who push forward the plot – and thus the ones who offer most interest. By making a greater claim on our attention (i.e. by forcing the reader/audience to attend to more dialogue), the reader/audience can expect, according to the principle of relevance, authors to construct characters that provide adequate reward. Self-involvement, however, is not captured by Relevance Theory. Let us conclude this section with an example. If you read in a novel that a respectable, elderly lady entered a tearoom in England, it would involve low-effort to select relevant schemata, fit them to in-coming text information, and form a schema-based character. However, if a gruesome murder occurred in the tearoom and this character, rather than being aghast and retreating from the scene, proceeded to take an active interest in the murder and present a cogent analysis of it, a schema-based impression (fitting textual information to schemata triggered by, for example, “lady”, “elderly” and “respectable”) would be difficult to sustain. Assuming we have not encountered a character like this before and assuming we are interested in or curious about that character, we might abandon a primarily

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schema-based impression and instead expend cognitive effort in combining textbased information in order to create a relatively unique, detailed and personalised impression of the character – a piecemeal impression. The character we have been describing is, of course, Miss Marple of the Agatha Christie murder mystery novels. 3.2.

Bottom-up information

As we discussed in Section 3.1.3, recipients’ impressions of characters result both from top-down and bottom-up processes. Our aim in the rest of this section is to address bottom-up aspects of characterisation; that is, ways in which textual (linguistic or non-linguistic) cues shape characterisation. 3.2.1. Types of characterisation cue Characterisation cues vary according to degree of narratorial control, whether they orient to the self of the character or other characters, and whether they are explicit or implicit. These are not mutually exclusive dimensions. a) Degree of narratorial control Of course, ultimately, all character talk and behaviour choices are under narratorial control, because character discourse is embedded within narratorial discourse (see Section 2.2). However, there are some cues over which a character notionally has control. Free direct speech, for example, especially over extended dialogue as in plays or film, allows the impression that the characters control the choices they make (see Section 3.2.2). And there are other cues over which characters clearly do not have control, being in the orbit of the narrator. An example of such cues is names. Proper names for characters might trigger particular associations about the name-bearer (age, nationality, social class, etc.). Shakespeare’s naming choices for his characters perform three characterising functions: reference to historical figures (e.g. Antony, Cleopatra, Macbeth), nationality markers (e.g. Italian names such as Silvia or Lucetta), and names with conceptual meanings (e.g. Anthony Dull, Shallow or Silence) (Culpeper 2001: 230–231). Of course, the reliability of the narrator is an issue, as mentioned in Section 2.2. Bianca, noted in Section 3.1.1, is an unreliable narratorial name choice for a character who turns out to be bad. b) Self and other Scholars distinguish between self-presentation, which “occurs when a character or person provides explicit information about him or herself,” and other-presentation, which “occurs when a character or person provides explicit information about someone else” (Culpeper 2001: 167). The latter is also called ‘altero-characterisation’ (e.g. Eder at al. 2010). Importantly, other-presentation can be regarded as self-presentation at the same time since the statements which work towards

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characterising others implicitly reveal the characteriser’s own values (Eder et al. 2010: 33). Reliability is again an issue. The way characters present themselves or others can respond to strategic considerations (Culpeper 2001: 168; Eder et al. 2010: 33). For example, characters can make statements about themselves and others both in the presence and in the absence of other characters. When characters are alone, as in soliloquies and asides within drama, they are usually taken to be sincere (Culpeper 2001: 169). When characters are in the company of other characters, a range of scenarios are possible, depending on the context: for example, they might want to present themselves and in-group others in a positive light, while they may seek to present their opponents in negative ways. These and other strategic considerations will determine recipients’ readiness to take any characterising information at face value. c) Explicit and implicit Character information can be provided in varying degrees of explicitness or directness. Explicit or direct characterisation involves the “explicit naming of the traits”, or indeed any kind of character property, whereas implicit or indirect characterisation means that “the traits and the entire personality of the character (…) need to be guessed from words, opinions and actions” (Eder et al. 2010: 32). Since explicit character information is relatively straightforward, we focus on implicit characterisation cues in much more detail in Sections 3.2.3 and 4. The key point to remember about implicit cues is that the information always has to be derived by inference, and contextual factors need to be taken into account (Culpeper 2001: 172). 3.2.2. Narratorial filters As we mentioned in Section 2.2, narrators filter how and what we learn about characters. Indeed, narrators largely shape the fictional world since their role is that of mediators in the presentation of the story (Fludernik 2009: 5; see Popova 2016 for a discussion on narration and narrativity). The narrator’s account of the story world therefore plays a crucial role in character perception. Here we pay attention to three different narratorial filters, namely point of view, mind style, and narratorial report of speech and thought. It is worth noting that these three narratorial filters can operate simultaneously. a) Point of view A distinction needs to be made between the story and the point of view from which the story is told (Fowler 1996: 161). Point of view is a very wide notion that has been studied from a variety of angles. Much of the groundwork in the development of the study of point of view within narratology was done by Genette (1980) and

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Uspensky (1973). Later developments came with Fowler’s (1996) and Simpson’s (1993) work. Here we present Fowler’s (1996) framework for the analysis of point of view, which is the most influential in linguistic stylistics. Spatio-temporal point of view is to do with the viewing position from which events are seen in the fictional world (Fowler 1996: 162), and it is usually analysed by looking at linguistic indicators such as spatial and temporal deictic markers. The opening of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ([1962] 2003: 1) is a good example: (2) They’re out there.

Some group of people (they) are currently located (present tense ‘are’, ’re) in some space away from where the speaker/writer is (out there). These expressions implicitly build the point of view of one particular character. Ideological point of view is to do with “the set of values, or belief system, communicated by the language of a text” (Fowler 1996: 165). This concept captures “those aspects of world views that are social, cultural, religious or political in origin” (Semino 2002: 97). Ideological point of view is important for characterisation, especially when value judgements are found in a particular character’s speech and/or thoughts. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ([1899] 2007) the character-narrator Marlow describes his first experience of Africa as follows: (3) We were wanderers on prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.

The narrator is presenting the viewpoint of Europeans, since “the term ‘prehistoric’ brings with it here a set of assumptions about cultural naïvety which are clearly connected to the Eurocentric attitude” that is explored in Conrad’s novella (Short 1996: 278). Psychological point of view is concerned with the access to characters’ consciousness which is granted by the mode of narration. This is highly relevant to characterisation because “gaining knowledge of a character’s inner life is an important factor in characterisation, and one likely to lead to a ‘rounder impression of character’” (Culpeper 2001: 170). The category of psychological point of view includes internal and external narration, which are basically to do with whether events are narrated from within or without characters’ consciousness (see Ch. 9 in Fowler 1996). We will briefly focus on internal narration (type B) to illustrate such narratorial intervention. Internal narration type B consists of third-person accounts by an omniscient narrator “who claims knowledge of what is going on in the characters’ heads, reporting their motives and feelings” (Fowler 1996: 173). Fowler illustrates this by examining an extract from Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan (1946), where the character, Steerpike, is planning his escape: (4) Again he fastened his gaze upon the first dozen feet of vertical stone, choosing and scrutinizing the grips that he would use. His survey left him uneasy. It would be unpleasant.

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Fowler points out that the verbs ‘choosing’ and ‘scrutinizing’ are the narrator’s own words to describe the character’s internal processes, and that these lexical choices are “part of an extensive lexical system by which Steerpike is characterized throughout the book as a deliberate, calculating entrepreneur” (Fowler 1996: 174, our emphasis). b) Mind style Starting from a basic distinction between what is told in a story and how it is told, the what would be the fictional world itself whereas the how would be concerned with mind style, that is, the ways in which the fictional world is apprehended or conceptualised (Leech and Short 2007: 150). The notion of ‘mind style’ was coined by Fowler (1977: 103) to describe “any distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual mental self”. Some mind styles can “easily strike the reader as natural and uncontrived” (Leech and Short 2007: 151), whereas others may not do so. In fact, the study of mind style in fiction becomes particularly relevant when the fictional mind seems to work in peculiar ways, thus reflecting an “unorthodox conception of the fictional world” (Leech and Short 2007: 151). It is largely the case that the characters whose mind style tends to be analysed more often are those who have nonstandard ways of conceptualizing the fictional world, as Example (5) illustrates (from Leech and Short 2007: 162–166). In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury ([1929] 1959), Benjy, one of the character-narrators, describes the following scene: (5) Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. […] They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit.

What the reader does not know at this point in the story is that Benjy is watching a game of golf. Readers are likely to draw inferences about the ways in which Benjy’s mind works. Benjy is characterised as “mentally subnormal” (Leech and Short 2007: 162), and his cognitive limitations are reflected in his use of language, especially in the simplicity of his lexis and syntax (Leech and Short 2007: 164). Such language use contributes to characterisation implicitly (see Section 3.2.1) in the sense that it triggers inferences about characters. Mind style can be examined by looking at “systematic linguistic and textual patterns” in the narrative (Semino 2007: 153). A wide range of linguistic features have been analysed as contributing to the projection of characters’ mind style. Some of these, as summarised in Semino (2014b: 142), are “patterns in lexis, syntax, transitivity, figurative language, speech presentation and deixis (Fowler 1977, 1986; Leech and Short [1981] 2007; Bockting 1995; Semino and Swindlehurst 1996; Semino 2002, 2011, 2014)”. Several disciplines have made valuable contributions to the study of mind style, most notably, stylistics and narratology. For example, stylisticians Leech

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and Short (2007: Ch. 6) and Semino (2002, 2007, 2014a, 2014b) have widely written on the topic, whilst narratologists Fludernik (1996), Palmer (2004) and Margolin (2003) have contributed to the study of mind and, more generally, consciousness in narrative fiction. Other disciplines, such as cognitive science, corpus linguistics and pragmatics, have become especially relevant to the analysis of mind style. Regarding cognitive science, schema theory (see Section 3.1.1) and cognitive metaphor theory have been used to account for conceptual workings; regarding corpus linguistics, corpus-based methods have been used to examine the linguistic patterns of text to identify items indicative of mind style (see Semino 2007). Not least of all, mind style analysts have drawn on core areas of pragmatics to analyse fictional conversations. Semino (2007: 164) argues that “salient and systematic patterns in a character’s communicative behaviour can often lead to inferences about the peculiar workings of that character’s mind, especially when these behaviours can be interpreted as non-deliberate”. Semino (2014b) analyses the mind style of the protagonists in three novels: Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark (2002), Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Clare Morrall’s The Language of Others (2008). In these narratives the ‘autistic’ protagonists display “problems with informativeness and relevance in conversational contributions; problems with face management resulting in unintentional impolite behaviours; and problems with the interpretation of figurative language” (Semino 2014b: 141). They often breach Grice’s (1975) maxims and principles of politeness. Regarding the latter, “the protagonists’ rather relentless approach to sincerity affects their ability to manage other characters’ ‘faces’ in interaction, and can result in unintentional face damage (Goffman 1967; Brown and Levinson 1987)” (Semino 2014b: 149). Example (6) is from The Language of Others. Jessica, the protagonist and first person narrator, is meeting her boyfriend’s parents for the first time, and they are talking about the run-down house where Jessica grew up: (6) ‘We’ve admired it from the road,’ said Donald. ‘You can’t see it properly,’ I said, ‘unless you go up the drive.’ Miranda leaned forward as if she was going to say something important. ‘We went up the drive – just a little way – to have a peep. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ They had trespassed on our property. I thought of them driving in, going halfway up the drive as if they lived there. How would they like it if my family drove into their garden and peered through the windows? ‘It’s a private drive,’ I said with indignation.

Jessica’s response at the very end of the extract, despite being consistent with the Maxim of Quality, could be said to flout the Maxim of Quantity, since the addressees already know that it is a private drive (Semino 2014b: 150). Therefore “this flout conveys a face-threatening implicature, namely that Miranda and Donald should not have driven up the drive to take a better look at the house” (Semino 2014b: 150). Jessica’s unintentionally impolite conversational behaviour achieves

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characterisation in the sense that it triggers information about the way in which her mind works. However, it is far from being a negative characterisation because such behaviour seems to be non-deliberate (Semino 2014b: 151), and so readers are likely to see the character in a positive light and sympathise with her (Semino 2014b: 155). For further examples of analysis of mind style, see Hoover (2016). c) Narrative report of speech and thought The ways in which characters’ discourse is presented in the narrative may show strong degrees of narratorial interference, which in turn might affect characterisation. We now introduce one of the most influential frameworks for the study of speech and thought presentation in narrative: Leech and Short’s (2007) framework. Leech and Short’s (2007) framework contains a range of discourse presentation categories which involve character speech on the one hand and character thought on the other. These categories sit on a cline of directness depending on how (in) direct the report of characters’ speech and thought is. What distinguishes them are features of grammar, lexis and graphology such as the absence and/or presence of quotation marks and reporting clauses; how full the propositional content of the speech or thought is; whether the tense and the person of the pronouns are more appropriate to the character(s) or to the narrator, etc. (see Ch. 10 in Leech and Short 2007 for a full account). Some of these modes of discourse presentation are taken to be more under the narrator’s control, which may have important implications for characterisation. Let us consider Free Indirect Speech (FIS), where the voice of the narrator seems to interfere with the voice of the character, and as a result there is a distancing effect from what the character says (Leech and Short 2007: 268). This might be used strategically, for instance, to make readers less sympathetic towards a particular set of characters. In A Tale of Two Cities ([1859] 1970), by Charles Dickens, during the courtroom scene “Dickens uses mainly FIS to portray the speeches of those characters hostile to the central characters of the novel”, which allows him to “cast ironic light on what they say” (Leech and Short 2007: 269). In contrast, Direct Speech is used when the friendly witnesses speak. As Leech and Short (2007: 269) conclude, the different choices of modes of speech presentation create contrasts and might contribute to characterisation in the sense that different characters are presented in a different light by the narrator, and this may in turn affect readers’ sympathies for the different characters (see also Section 5). 3.2.3. Character indexing in speech In principle, any character behaviour or absence of behaviour in a context where it is expected could contribute to characterisation. As we elaborated in Section 2.2, the important point is that readers sift textual information for what is meaningful about character and what is not (an example of the latter being grumpy behaviour caused

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by getting soaked by the rain, not a grumpy disposition). A central part of this will involve making correspondent inferences. But what kinds of language behaviour are taken to be indicative of character? In fact, some kinds of language behaviour are regularly produced by some kinds of characters (or people for that matter). In attribution theory, Kelley’s (1973) notion of “a causal schema” accounts for this: a causal schema contains knowledge about the probable cause of a particular effect. Thus, “sifting” for character information can be short-circuited: some language aspects become (semi-)conventionally associated with particular character/person features because they are typically caused by characters/people with those features (of course, this does not mean that it will be reliable on all occasions). One centrally pragmatic way of thinking about this is in terms of “indexicality”. The notion of an index figures in the work of Charles S. Peirce, a scholar philosopher who contributed to the founding of modern pragmatics. In his vision of semiotics (e.g. Peirce [1867] 1982), one kind of sign relation concerns an index, which involves some actual connection between the sign and its object, the classic example being smoke indexing a fire. Silverstein (e.g. 1976) did much to develop Peirce’s work in the fields of pragmatics and linguistic anthropology, where, broadly speaking the emphasis is on how linguistic features “point” to particular social meanings, and the dynamics surrounding this. A paper often cited in pragmatics and linguistic anthropology is Ochs (1992), who makes a useful distinction between a direct index and an indirect index. To use her examples, Japanese ze directly indexes the voice quality of “coarse intensity” and indirectly indexes the social category of male voice, whilst Japanese wa directly indexes the voice quality of “delicate intensity” and indirectly indexes the social category of female voice. From a different perspective, note that one can view an indirect index as a correspondent inference, that is, the description of the behaviour and the social category of the person correspond in some respect (i.e. coarseness and maleness; delicacy and femaleness). This kind of correspondence hardens with regularity and becomes part of the social schema, the cognitive stereotype, relating to gender. Aside from issues of space, we will not discuss all the various types of possible indexes for characters for two main reasons. One is that they are discussed at length elsewhere in this volume, including in the chapters by Landert (16) on stance, Bednarek (5) on the role of dialogue in fiction, Langlotz (17) on language and emotion, Planchenault (9) on regional, social and ethnic language variation, and Kizelbach (14) and Dynel (15) on aspects of impoliteness. The other is that overviews of such items can also be found in the literature (e.g. Culpeper 2001: Ch. 4; Pfister 1988: 124–126, 183–195; Rimmon-Kenan 2003: Ch. 5). We will, however, in Section 4, discuss some aspects of social indexing in the context of studies involving (im)politeness. In addition, here we will briefly focus on one area, namely, speech acts, not least because it is so central to pragmatics. Acts and effects, as well as contexts, lie at the heart of both speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) and attribution theory. A number of studies have

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applied speech act theory to fictional works. We will briefly discuss one of these studies by Hurst (1987), who analyses the characters of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A Family and a Fortune, a fictional novel that contains an unusually high amount of dialogue, in terms of their speech acts. In her conclusion the author remarks: “We can see how certain personalities gravitate toward certain speech acts” (1987: 356). The idea that ‘certain personalities’ correlate with certain ‘acts’ is the basic premise behind attribution theories, especially correspondent inference theory. Moreover, a correlation between certain speech acts and certain kinds of people is semi-conventionalised. Studying actual people, Holtgraves (1994), for example, found that knowing that a speaker was of high status was enough to prime a perceiver to expect a directive of some kind in advance of any remark having been actually made, such is the correlation between directive speech acts (e.g. orders, requests, questions) and high status people. More specifically, from the perspective of indexicality, the correlation is indirect: [W]e can find particular linguistic features directly indexing social acts or social activities, such as the imperative mode indexing the act of ordering in English or respect vocabulary terms in Samoan indexing the activity of oratory. These acts and activities in turn may be associated with speaking like a male or speaking like a female and may display different frequencies of use across the two social categories. (Ochs 1992: 341)

Hurst (1987: 345) comments that in the novel she analyses “[e]arly conversations seem designed so that the reader can pick up the identifying patterns of each individual”. Although she does not provide frequencies, Hurst’s (1987) approach is to quantify types of speech act, and then draw conclusions for character. For example, she comments on Aubrey: Aubrey’s most common forms of speech are summary statements. Here [pp. 8–9], although Justine first responds to Clement’s outburst, Aubrey quickly enters the fray with the summary, ‘Justine understands Clement.’ The summation does more than get in the last word, for the representative borders on an absolute declaration. Often in the novel, characters who are in subordinate positions, like younger brothers or dependent aunts, express their insecurity by overcompensating in their language and making broad, bold statements. (Hurst 1987: 346–347)

Hurst (1987) is sensitive to the fact that speech acts are context-bound, and, as a consequence, can reveal how characters are positioned in social space. Focussing on the relationship between Dudley and Edgar, Hurst (1987: 348) notes Dudley’s preference for directives, and draws the conclusions that “Dudley likes to tell people to tell him to do something, and this constitutes devious manipulation”, whereas “Edgar allows himself to be led along”. Clearly, the directives reflect an asymmetric power relationship. Of course, it needs to be stressed that one cannot take indexical features as a straightforward input for characterisation. Indexical language features are not fully conventional – they do not have a completely stable relationship with social mean-

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ings, which is one of the things that makes them pragmatic. Contextual factors, rather than social or personality ones, can drive patterns of speech acts, thereby working against a correspondent inference being made. 4.

Inter-character dynamics in the text world

Recently, the notion of interpersonal pragmatics has experienced a resurgence and a broadening of scope. This has been driven, notably, by the 2010 volume, Interpersonal Pragmatics (2010), edited by Miriam A. Locher and Sage L. Graham, and the 2013 special issue in the Journal of Pragmatics (Volume 58), edited by Michael Haugh, Dániel Z. Kádár and Sara Mills. We will mainly focus on both politeness and impoliteness, as this is where the weight of research on fictional character has been focussed, but we will also consider interpersonal relations, and briefly interpersonal emotions. Using (im)politeness frameworks to analyse fictional dialogue for character has been a staple of the stylistics of plays for years (e.g. Leech 1992; Simpson 1989), and has occasionally been deployed for prose (e.g. Martínez-Cabeza Lombardo 1994). However, there seems to have been a recent explosion of studies using (im)politeness frameworks to analyse TV or film dialogue, especially with character in mind (e.g. Bednarek 2012; Dynel 2012, 2015; Mandala 2011; Richardson 2010: Ch. 9). The classic work on politeness, Brown and Levinson (1987), saw the potential for treating real life personality: “an understanding of the significant dimensions on which interaction varies should provide insights into the dimensions on which personality is built, as well as social relationships” (1987: 232). Politeness is especially sensitive to context; mismatches with context are characterisation focal points. There is evidence for this with respect to real life interactions. For example, Holtgraves et al.’s (1989) results indicate that subjects are more sensitive to the assertiveness of conversational remarks made by same-status speakers than those made by a higher-status individual; in other words, assertiveness in an equal relationship clashes with assumptions about behaviour and power. Interestingly, there is evidence that, other things being equal, impolite remarks attract more attention than polite remarks (e.g. Wyer et al. 1994). Culpeper (2001: Ch. 5) argues for the particular importance of impoliteness in relation to the analysis of fictional characters. This importance is also reflected in the fact that the bulk of the studies cited at the beginning of this paragraph focus on impoliteness rather than politeness. To briefly illustrate the power of (im)politeness in the analysis of characterisation, we will consider the first exchanges between the protagonists in the film Scent of a Woman (1992, directed by Martin Brest), which is a re-make of the 1974 Italian film Profumo di Donna. We summarize the first part of a full analysis given in Culpeper (1998). Set in the U.S.A., Charlie is a student at a prestigious

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private school, but he is not rich and is supported by student aid. In order to make ends meet, rather than go home for Thanksgiving, he responds to an advertisement asking for somebody to act as a carer for their blind relative – the Colonel. The dialogue below is their first encounter. (7) Charlie: Sir? Colonel: Don’t call me sir. Charlie: I’m sorry, I mean mister, sir. Colonel: Uh, ooh, we’ve got a moron here, is that it?

The Colonel’s conversational behaviour may come as something of a surprise. Not only are he and Charlie complete strangers, but our prior knowledge of the role relationship between Charlie (carer) and the Colonel (cared for) and its power implications may well have given rise to contrary expectations about their behaviour. The Colonel’s first utterance is oddly brusque. Rather than reciprocal greetings and politeness, the Colonel uses an imperative to command Charlie not to use Sir. Then, Charlie’s apology is met by the Colonel impolitely referring to him in the third person and as a moron. A key point about Charlie’s politeness and the Colonel’s impoliteness is the interaction between them: Charlie is polite in spite of the Colonel’s impoliteness, and the Colonel is impolite in spite of Charlie’s politeness. Each type of behaviour is made more salient in the context of the other. Their unexpected behaviour invites interpretation, strong possibilities being to attribute their behaviour to character (a correspondent inference): for example, the Colonel is an embittered man, a man with a warped personality, a misanthropist; Charlie is the prototypical ‘nice guy’, rather shy, perhaps even passive or spineless. These early impressions of the Colonel and Charlie develop as the film proceeds. Since the turn of the century, work on (im)politeness has been gradually re-focussed so that neither politeness nor impoliteness are the superordinate category within which social relations are factored, but relations themselves are the broader framework. Thus we saw the arrival of ‘relational’ frameworks (e.g. Spencer-Oatey 2000; Locher and Watts 2005). Such frameworks have yet to have much impact on the study of fictional character. We do find studies looking at specific kinds of social relationship, such as Bubel (2006), which focus on friendship relations in the TV soap Sex and the City. Perhaps Mills (2014), in a paper entitled The Stylistics of Relationships, is the first to attempt to put social relations at the centre. We agree with her that “In analysis of characters so far, the focus has very much been on individual characters, particularly in relation to the types of actions that they take” (2014: 559). This contrasts with, for example, Bolander and Locher’s (2015) study of identity construction in Facebook. Their approach blends relational work, a post-structural view of identity (e.g. Bucholtz and Hall 2005) and positioning theory (e.g. Davies and Harré 1990). Key ideas include that “identity is emergent and constructed when individuals engage in social behaviour, including communication” (Bolander and Locher 2015: 102); that identity construction in

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interaction involves “performing acts of positioning, and underlining the existence of a particular self which can be observed by others at a particular moment in time” (Bolander and Locher 2015: 102); and that the process is intersubjective – “when individuals interact with one another, they construct their own identities and make assumptions about the identities of others” (Bolander and Locher 2015: 103) (see also Landert, this volume, Section 5, for similar developments in the area of stance). These ideas are not entirely new. The analysis in the previous paragraph is based on an original written nearly 20 years ago, but it is clearly centrally concerned with meanings, including identities, that emerge from the interaction between the two characters. What is new, however, is (1) the application of a new, different, dedicated and developed theoretical apparatus, (2) a central focus on these processes, and (3) greater explicitness about what such analyses are doing. Turning to interpersonal emotions, linguists have claimed that emotion or affect is expressed by a wide range of different linguistic features, including, for example, evaluative lexis, hedges, emphatics, modal verbs, lexical repetition and pronouns (cf. Caffi and Janney 1994), not to mention various non-verbal cues. With respect to fictional texts, work in this area has generally been thin, though one might note Taavitsainen’s (1999) investigation of “surge features” in The Canterbury Tales. However, more recently Bednarek (e.g. 2010, 2011), focussing on television, has established herself as the key scholar. Bednarek focuses on “expressivity”, a term she uses to cover evaluative, emotional and ideological meanings. She introduces the term “expressive character identity” to cover the aspect of identity constructed from such meanings. In her work on the TV drama-comedy Gilmore Girls (Warner Brothers, 2000–2007), she shows not only that certain expressive items (e.g. terms of endearment such as honey; interjections such as wow, and evaluative adjectives such as weird) distinguish characters, but also how groups of characters share expressive resources and how some expressive identities are more stable than others. For more discussion of interpersonal emotions, see Langlotz, Ch. 17, this volume, and also, at a different discourse level, our discussion of empathy in Section 5. 5.

The perception of characters

Now we turn our attention to the other end of the communicative process: the recipients of the text. We need to be reminded of the fact that recipients co-create the narrative through their engagement with the story world and its characters. Therefore, characterisation can be seen as a “process to which both the text and the recipient contribute” (Eder et al. 2010: 34), as we elaborated in Section 3.1.3. In this section we briefly mention some research on how characters can be interpreted and experienced by recipients and then focus on empathy as one possible response towards characters.

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In order to study recipients’ experiences of characters, three possibilities exist for the analyst: (1) we can start from the linguistic analysis of the textual data and form hypotheses about possible reader reactions, (2) we can empirically examine actual readers’ experiences of characters by collecting and analysing extra-textual data, and (3) we can combine both types of analysis in order to test previous hypotheses from the linguistic analyses against recipients’ actual responses. The analyst should however be careful not to assume one-to-one relationships between textual features and effects on all recipients: “we can only say that some of them take effect on some recipients under certain conditions at particular times” (Eder et al. 2010: 56). As far as character reception is concerned, our responses to characters range from the cognitive to the affective (Eder et al. 2010: 47). Regarding cognitive responses, we already mentioned the relevance of impression formation, which can be distinguished into category-based and person-based, piecemeal impressions (see Section 3.1.3). Along these lines, Gerrig (2010) examines readers’ cognitive processes when experiencing characters in an attempt to enrich the narrow treatment of characters within cognitive psychological models (for more discussions on cognitive responses, see Bortolussi and Dixon 2003; Culpeper 2001; Schneider 2001). Concerning both cognitive and affective responses, Dijkstra et al. (1994) explore reader emotions and character emotions in relation to text comprehension and find that reading speed is affected by character emotion and suspense. Finally, as far as affective responses are concerned, Sklar (2009) studies readers’ sympathy towards characters by focusing on the development of sympathetic responses over the course of reading the story, before and after the characters’ racial identity is disclosed. For more on recipients’ responses to characters, see Smith (1995), Bortolussi and Dixon (2003), and Eder et al. (2010). Empathy is one of the possible responses which recipients can experience when engaged with fictional characters. A critical distinction to bear in mind is that empathy should not be conflated with identification even though the two are commonly taken to be synonymous (Coplan 2004: 147). Instead of ‘identification’, which empathy scholars consider to be a rather loose notion, Emmott and Sanford (2012: 211) use the term ‘autobiographical alignment’ to refer to the possibility that “a reader’s ability to empathise is facilitated by sharing the characteristics of the character”. The complex psychological phenomenon of empathy involves: (1) understanding a situation from another person’s point of view, and (2) experiencing emotional states which are somewhat similar to those of the other person, while (3) being aware that the other person is the source of those emotional states (Coplan 2004: 144). These three criteria should suffice to distinguish empathy from other related phenomena such as mindreading, sympathy or emotional contagion (for accounts of empathy and its workings see de Waal 2009; Mellmann 2010; Baron-Cohen 2011; de Vignemont and Jacob 2012; Gallagher 2012; Michael 2014).

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Narrative empathy research is particularly central to the study of empathy with characters. Narratologist Suzanne Keen (2013, paragraph 2) defines narrative empathy as “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition”. Within narrative empathy research, it is suggested that particular textual features may foster readers’ empathy with characters (see Keen’s 2006 theory of narrative empathy). Not surprisingly, characterisation is among the storytelling devices which are supposed to facilitate empathy. Keen (2006: 216) lists a range of characterisation techniques which may lead to empathy with characters. Many of these techniques have already been addressed in this chapter to explain their potential for characterisation – reliance on types and roles in plot trajectories (see 3.1.2); naming and indirect implication of traits (see 3.2.1); quality of attributed speech and mode of representation of consciousness (see 3.2.2). However, Keen (2006: 217) warns that empirical work remains to be done in order to test the hypotheses of narrative theorists regarding the empathy potential of the above characterisation strategies. Up to now, empirical studies of narrative empathy are rather scarce. One study by László and Smogyvári (2008) focuses on the relationship between narrative empathy and both characters’ and readers’ national identity. One of the authors of this chapter, Fernandez-Quintanilla, is currently undertaking an empirical study of readers’ empathy with characters in socially engaged literature (in preparation), which will be relevant to the study of character reception. 6. Conclusion In this chapter, whilst we have surveyed many different contributions to characterisation, we have focused on a socio-cognitive approach. This entailed a particular ontological stance: we discussed representations of characters constructed in the minds of readers or the audience during their interaction with linguistic, paralinguistic and visual communicative phenomena. We argued that sometimes characterisation is weighted towards inferencing based on prior knowledge or schemata, whilst other times it is weighted towards piecemeal integration of character information extracted from communicative phenomena. This process of extraction is far from straightforward. We noted the important role of correspondent inferences (inferences that character behaviours reflect character dispositions), as well as the inferencing assumptions that attend fictional data. The latter are, notably, that character behaviours are (1) complete and finite, and (2) embedded within layers of discourse that ultimately involve the author communicating with the reader or audience. At various points, we articulated the interrelationship between characters and actual people. In particular, we noted the importance of dramatic roles, and how they are involved in characterisation. We devoted significant space to characterisation cues, arguing that three dimensions are of particular importance:

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narratorial control, self and other, and explicit and implicit. We elaborated on narratorial filters, specifically, point of view, mind style and speech and thought presentation, and discussed the role of character indexing, illustrating our discussion with a discussion of characterisation through speech acts. Addressing more recent research, we dwelt on inter-character dynamics, an area that is underpinned by interpersonal pragmatics. Finally, we considered the perception of character, and especially empathy. It goes without saying that we have not presented an exhaustive review of the field. The fact that our chapter has not said much about the multimodal analysis of fictional characters is consistent with its relative rarity in the literature. This deficit may partly be caused by copyright problems with publishing visuals, but could also reflect a general limitation of the stylistics of drama. This field has its focus on the script, and thus primarily word-based features, rather than visual and oral/aural features (see Richardson 2010 on the implications of this, and on how film studies does not offer a ready-made solution). Still, we should remember McIntyre’s (2008) attempt to integrate the stylistics of drama and multimodal analysis, and Kozloff’s (2000) attempt to integrate film studies with elements of the dialogue. As far as characterisation and multimodality are concerned, some frameworks at least offer multimodal potential. Culpeper’s (2001: Ch. 4) list of characterisation indexes goes well beyond word-based features to include a range of prosodic and visual characteristics. Finally, on a positive note, there is evidence that this situation is changing. Bednarek’s (2010: Ch. 7) multimodal analysis of the characters in the TV drama-comedy Gilmore Girls (Warner Brothers, 2000–2007) is a case in point (see also the multimodal analysis in Landert, this volume, Ch. 16, Section 6). Pragmatics, as we have demonstrated, lies at the heart of characterisation. What is also clear is that much research remains to be done. In particular, more empirical work on the perception of characters and the role of emotions, notably empathy, is needed. References Primary sources Adams, Richard 1972 Watership Down. London: Rex Collings. Brontë, Charlotte 2007 Jane Eyre. Richmond: Oneworld Classics. First published London: Smith, Elder & Co. [1847]. Compton-Burnett, Ivy 1983 A Family and a Fortune. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Conrad, Joseph 2007 Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin. First published London/Edinburgh: Blackwood’s Magazine [1899].

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Miall, David 2014 Emotions, feelings and stylistics. In: Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, 424–438. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Michael, John 2014 Towards a consensus about the role of empathy in interpersonal understanding. Topoi 33(1): 157–172. Mills, Sara 2014 The stylistics of relationships. In: Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, 554–572. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ochs, Elinor 1992 Indexing gender. In: Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, 335–358. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Palmer, Alan 2004 Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Peirce, Charles S. 1984 The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Volume 2: 1867– 1871 Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pfister, Manfred 1988 The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Piazza, Roberta 1999 Dramatic discourse approached from a conversational analysis perspective: Catherine Hayes’s Skirmishes and other contemporary plays. Journal of Pragmatics 31(8): 1001–1023. Popova, Yanna 2016 Narrativity. In: Violeta Sotirova (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, 488–506. London: Bloomsbury. Propp, Vladimir 1968 The Morphology of the Folktale, Laurence Scott (trans.), 2nd Ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. Richardson, Kay 2010 Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics.) Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 2003 Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd Ed. London: Routledge. Schneider, Ralf 2001 Toward a cognitive theory of literary character: The dynamics of mental-model construction. Style 35(4): 607–640. Searle, John R. 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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5.

The role of dialogue in fiction Monika Bednarek

Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of the role of dialogue in fiction, using the example of dialogue in contemporary English-language television series. In so doing, it incorporates initial findings from a corpus linguistic research project into language use in American TV series. The chapter introduces the different functions of dialogue before surveying three key trends in pragma-stylistic research: the study of characterization, realism/naturalism, and humour. The chapter also outlines under-researched areas and prospects for future research. 1. Introduction This chapter focuses on the role of dialogue in fiction. It approaches this topic by looking specifically at research on dialogue as used in one globally popular type of fiction, namely fictional television series. I use the label TV series in this chapter as a cover term for fictional television, including both serials and series, but excluding reality television and other non-fictional serialized content. Examples of such TV series are Bones, Breaking Bad, Desperate Housewives, NCIS, Nurse Jackie, Orange is the New Black or The Wire. For reasons of scope I will limit the discussion to English-language television series. Many, but not all, of the points presented in this chapter may also apply to TV series in other languages and to other types of fiction, such as prose fiction or literary drama, but we should not make an a priori assumption that this is indeed the case. Another limitation is that I will primarily focus on pragma-stylistic research (broadly defined), thus excluding research that concerns itself with audio-visual translation (e.g. Baños 2013) or the potential of TV series for learning and teaching (e.g. Grant 1996; Csomay and Petrović 2012; Webb and Rodgers 2009). This is in line with the thematic concerns of this handbook. The chapter starts with an introduction to TV dialogue, including a working definition. It then introduces a typology developed from the film studies scholar Kozloff (2000) that can be used to consider different functions of TV dialogue, before identifying three key trends in contemporary research on the functions of dialogue in televisual fiction. The conclusion draws on this survey to outline prospects for future research.

DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-005 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 129–158. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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Defining dialogue

Before talking about the role of dialogue in TV series, it is worth delineating the term dialogue. I use this here as shorthand for all character speech, whether or not this speech is by one character (monologues, asides, voice-over narration, etc.), between two characters (dyadic interactions) or between several characters (multi-party interactions). As such, dialogue is differentiated from screen directions in TV scripts which may refer to elements such as location and time, angle, special effects, transition, sounds, setting, clothing, name/age, mental state, actions, pauses, and voice source (Figure 1).1 As Richardson (2010a: 151) notes, “[a] lthough the production of dialogue is not a screenwriter’s only concern, it is necessarily a very major part of it”. TV dialogue, or character speech, is represented in the published, (i.e. official) script for the US comedy-drama series Nurse Jackie in Figure 1 by the text enclosed by boxes, here instantiated as a voice-over monologue of the main character, Jackie.

Figure 1. Extract from the published Nurse Jackie script (available for purchase by US customers via amazon kindle)

1



These elements can be conceptualized or theorized in different ways (such as scene vs. dialogue text, diegetic, non-diegetic, etc): Sternberg (1997), Price (2010), Igelström (2013), all on film, distinguish different types of information and narrating voices.

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As audiences (and researchers) we can engage with such dialogue in various forms, for instance by reading official and unofficial scripts, transcripts or subtitles, or by experiencing the audio-visual performance (dubbed or not, on television or via other mediums). Issues around scripts as objects of study and around data collection are discussed in Bednarek (2015a, b) and will not be covered in this chapter. In practice, most linguists have investigated character speech as it occurs in scripts, transcripts or as uttered on screen. The focus of such research is either on a particular TV series (e.g. Bednarek 2010; Quaglio 2009; Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005; Toolan 2011) or on TV dialogue in general (e.g. Bednarek 2012a, 2014). 3.

Functions of TV dialogue

The functions of dialogue in televisual fiction need to be understood in relation to its participation framework. Since Chapter 2 of this handbook is dedicated to participation structure in fictional discourse, I will not say much about this here. In brief, linguists such as Bubel (2006, 2008), Dynel (2011), Piazza (2011) and Brock (2015) draw on Goffman’s (1976, 1979) model of participation structure as well as the notion of ‘double articulation’ as discussed in media studies (e.g. Scannell 1991) and stylistics (e.g. Short 1981) to explore the relationship between dialogue and its audience and the different communicative layers that are involved. In general, we can assume that characters simultaneously talk to each other within the fictional world and to the (target) audience who is entertained by this fictional world. For example, Kozloff argues that film dialogue “is never realistic; it is always designed ‘for us’” (2000: 121; emphasis in original). Interestingly, adherence to realism is nevertheless one of the functions identified by Kozloff for dialogue in narrative film. While it is clear that TV dialogue is similarly designed with the audience in mind (Bubel 2006) and that its characteristics can be associated with this design (Bednarek 2012a), the extent to which TV dialogue can be described as ‘realistic’ is a good question and will be taken up again below. More specifically, Kozloff (2000: 33−34) distinguishes between functions relating to the communication of the narrative and those relating to “aesthetic effect, ideological persuasion, and commercial appeal” (2000: 33).2 The first category contains six functions, while the second category contains three. Table 1 provides a summary of Kozloff’s functions as well as some of my own additions, including a new category which relates to the serial nature of TV narratives.

2



The disciplinary origin of Kozloff’s research is film studies. However, her influence is most apparent in linguistics (Jaeckle 2013a: 14), although Jaeckle (2013b) is a recent contribution from film studies.

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Table 1.

Functions of dialogue in TV series (based on Kozloff 2000)*

Functions relating to the communication of the narrative Anchorage of the diegesis and characters; † anchorage of modality Communication of narrative causality Enactment of narrative events Control of viewer evaluation and emotions Character revelation (including character traits and character relationships) Adherence to the code of realism Functions relating to aesthetic effect, ideological persuasion, commercial appeal Exploitation of the resources of language: poetic use of language, jokes/humour, irony, on-screen verbal storytelling, †linguistic innovation, †intertextuality Thematic messages/authorial commentary/allegory Opportunities for star turns † Functions relating to the serial nature of TV narratives † Creation of continuity * My additions to Kozloff’s typology are marked with †.

Although Kozloff’s typology relates to film, it provides a useful starting point for considering the role and functions of dialogue in TV series, and I will provide examples for each of the ten categories below. Most of these examples come from an unpublished study on who- and what-questions in crime series (Bednarek 2013), while Bednarek (2014) applies Kozloff’s framework to wh-questions in TV dialogue more generally. 3.1.

Anchorage of the diegesis and characters

Kozloff (2000: 34–37) defines this function as the use of dialogue to create and identify aspects of the diegetic world, that is, to orient viewers as regards character movement in space and time and to name characters. In Example (1), from the crime series Bones, the question-answer sequence between the two protagonists – which follows a shot showing a room with caskets – works to locate the narrative in space, identifying the location for the addressee, but also for the audience. (1) BOOTH: What’s this place? BRENNAN: Casket showroom. They’re having a sale. (Bones, season 1, episode 20)

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While Kozloff (2000) primarily talks about anchorage of the diegesis in terms of character identification and anchorage of time and space, we could add to this anchorage of modality – in the sense of the credibility or reliability of messages: “Is what we see or hear true, factual, real, or is it a lie, a fiction, something outside reality?” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 154). In other words, is what we experience on the screen marked as a happening that ‘really’ happened in the diegetic world in the past, present or future, or is it identified as a dream, fantasy, desire, hallucination, etc.? Admittedly, it is often visual cues that identify something as a dream/fantasy, for instance shot sequencing, use of dissolve, distorted images, slow motion, high contrast, and so on (van Leeuwen 1996). But dialogue can contribute to the anchorage of modality, as evidenced through Example (2) from the TV series Desperate Housewives. In this example, the dialogue is in the form of voiceover narration by a (dead) character (VOICE), which is a recurring feature of this TV series and would be known to regular viewers. This narration accompanies shots that show another character, Lynette Skavo (one of the eponymous housewives), and the contents of one of her daydreams: (2) VOICE: Every morning as she went to take out her trash, Lynette Skavo would indulge in a little daydream, the details of which were always the same. [Camera switches from showing Lynette to showing what the voice-over narration describes.] One day, her nasty neighbour Karen McClusky would keel over and die, and her home would be bought by a lovely Swedish family, with two adorable twin daughters. The families would form an everlasting friendship, culminating in their daughters marrying her sons at an elaborate wedding [camera switches back to showing Lynette] the Skavos wouldn’t have to pay for. Yes, Lynette enjoyed her little daydream, but Mrs McClusky always had a way of pulling her back to reality. (Desperate Housewives, season 1, episode 19)

In (2) the voice-over narration explicitly marks the accompanying visuals (which show the Swedish family) as a fantasy (daydream) and therefore ‘non-real’ (pulling her back to reality) as far as the diegetic world is concerned. In this case, the modality of the visuals seems unmarked, and the dialogue – in conjunction with the shot sequencing – clearly contributes to identifying their content as a character’s daydream. 3.2.

Communication of narrative causality

For Kozloff, this function relates to the use of dialogue “to communicate ‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘what next?’” (Kozloff 2000: 38). This includes anticipating a narrative development, creating causal chains, clarifying connections between events, or providing background information, as the following examples indicate:

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(3) FREAMON: Give it to Prez, who’s going to get off his ass and walk on over to the state office buildings on Preston Street. PREZ: Preston Street? FREAMON: Corporate charter office. PREZ: Corporate who? FREAMON: They have the paperwork on every corporation and LLC licensed to do business in the state. You look up D and B Enterprises on the computer. You’re going to get a little reel of microfilm. [more explanation] (The Wire, season 1, episode 9) (4) VIC: What’s the beef between Kern and T-Bonz? RONDELL: Ah man, T-Bonz used to be on Kern’s record label. Then he blew up, started selling a lot of discs. T-Bonz split, started his own outfit. Hey, bad blood ever since. (The Shield, season 1, episode 4)

In Example (3) from the crime drama series The Wire, police detective Freamon explains the process of gathering evidence (both to another detective, Prez, and to the audience), providing information on why the latter needs to go to Preston Street and what he needs to do once there. Example (4) explains why the relationship between two characters in the crime series The Shield – the rappers Kern and T-Bonz – has turned sour, and is an example of how dialogue can provide viewers with information on “events that took place before the time period pictured on screen” (Kozloff 2000: 39). 3.3.

Enactment of narrative events

To explain the use of film dialogue to enact narrative events, Kozloff (2000) draws on speech act theory which treats each utterance as action, but focuses on verbal acts that are pivotal or key to the narrative, which depends largely on genre conventions. Examples of such narrative events from different films and genres include: disclosure of (secret) information, declaration of love, closing arguments, verdicts, witness breakdowns, prayer, absolution, and exorcism (Kozloff 2000: 41–43). It is a matter of interpretation what actions are identified as ‘key’ for a particular narrative/genre, but one could make the assumption that in crime series actions such as ‘questioning’ are key for the plot. Examples (5) and (6) provide examples of this action from the TV series 24 and Bones, respectively – in both cases, agents (Jack Bauer, Booth) question other characters: (5) JACK BAUER: […] So, please, sir, I will ask you one more time. What is happening here at seven-twenty? MARK DESALVO: A prisoner is being delivered by chopper. (24, season 1, episode 20)

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(6) BOOTH: No? Then who did the cutting? Who did the cutting of the grafts, huh? Somebody knew what they were doing. Your phone records show that during the months around Hastings’ death you received dozens of calls from disposable cells. Four different ones, huh? What do you make of that? MARTIN: I don’t recall this. (Bones, season 1, episode 20)

In these two examples, emphasis, repetition and questions are used to perform the agent’s act of questioning witnesses or suspects. Example (6) also shows how the expression of doubt and the invocation of evidence are used by the questioner for the purpose of pressure. In a related but somewhat different vein, Queen (2015: 183–219) discusses how performative words, language shifting (switching between different styles, dialects or language) and taboo words contribute to plot development and how language can be used as a plot device. 3.4.

Control of viewer evaluation and emotions

Dialogue may also function to guide viewers’ responses, for example creating suspense, setting viewers up for a surprise, drawing their attention to a plot element, guiding their interpretation or creating fear or jubilation (Kozloff 2000: 49–51). In (7) the crime-solving protagonists in Bones are trying to identify and find the supplier of a diseased bone, while the NCIS director in Example (8) speculates about the motives behind a poisoning.3 (7) BOOTH: Building manager says BioTech went belly-up two years ago. They couldn’t even pay their last month’s rent. […] BRENNAN: If BioTech doesn’t exist, who sold the diseased bone to the hospital? […] (Bones, season 1, episode 20) (8) DIRECTOR: I’ve passed that baton on to the FBI. This has all the earmarks of Al-Qaeda; unexpected, well planned, brilliantly executed. But to what end? (NCIS, season 1, episode 1)

Examples (7) and (8) show how wh-questions can be used to create suspense. While it is also part of ‘working through’ a crime via discussion among characters that belong to a crime-solving team, the potential effect of characters asking such questions is that audience members also begin to ask themselves these questions and desire an answer to them. As long as these questions remain unanswered, narrative suspense prevails. 3



NCIS stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

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Character revelation

The function of ‘character revelation’ is used by Kozloff to talk about how dialogue distinguishes characters from each other, for example through accent or idiosyncratic linguistic practices (see also Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, Ch. 4, and Planchenault, Ch. 9, this volume), but also to show how dialogue functions “to make characters substantial, to hint at their inner life” (Kozloff 2000: 43). For her, this includes various aspects of character such as class, intelligence, personality, or motive (2000: 43–46). Examples (9) and (10) seem to illustrate the construction of a particular character aspect – what we might call stereotypical ‘masculinity’ – through dialogue: (9) HODGINS: You made a whole guy out of bone chips and lights. You can create the Louvre. ANGELA: Well, what about love? What do you have to say about love? HODGINS: It’s overrated [pause] most of the time. (Bones, season 1, episode 20) (10) GRETCHEN: Sodium, point o four. Phosphorus, point one nine. WALTER: Point one nine, there we go. So the whole thing adds up to nine nine point eight eight eight zero four two per cent. We are point one one one nine five eight per cent shy. [intervening scenes, before a later return to this flashback conversation] I don’t know, it just it just, doesn’t it seem like something’s missing. GRETCHEN: What about the soul? WALTER: Ha. The soul. [leaning towards Gretchen so that their faces are almost touching] There’s nothing but chemistry here. (Breaking Bad, season 1, episode 3)

In both examples, the question-answer sequence between a male and a female character (both scientists/chemistry students) revolve around the ‘non-scientific’ concepts of ‘love’ and ‘the soul’, which are brought up by the women but appearently rejected by the men. On the other hand, both male characters also appear to be flirting with the female characters, and demonstrate affection and care. In (9) for instance, Hodgins seems to make his claim about love partially to console Angela because they will not be able to prevent the death of a young girl who just wants to visit the Louvre and fall in love. There is also a telling pause before he qualifies his claim (most of the time). Example (10) belongs to a flashback to the protagonist’s past and shows Walter and a female character (Gretchen) as students, breaking down the chemical composition of a human being at a blackboard in a classroom. In this exchange, the younger Walter plays with the double entendre of chemistry and shows physical affection towards Gretchen through his body movement. Thus, more is going on than just the construction of stereotypical (unemotional/rational) masculinity. It is nevertheless interesting to note the similarity between these two dialogues from different series, as it shows how TV series can draw on shared

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stereotypes to construct character (see also Bednarek 2012b), but also make use of conventionalised phraseology (what about). Examples (9) and (10) also demonstrate that character revelation is not just about individuals – it also includes dialogue that illustrates relationships between two characters (Kozloff 2000: 46). Relationships can be constructed indirectly as in (9) and (10), but may also be described directly, as in Example (11) from the crime series The Shield: (11) RONDELL: Hey, man. T-Bonz and Kern got this war going on. I’m just backin’ up my boy. VIC: Who’s that? Kern? […] RONDELL: Yeah, look. look, Me and Kern’s been hangin’ since we was kids. We’re still tight. (The Shield, season 1, episode 4)

When being questioned about his involvement in a shooting, drug dealer Rondell explains to the police officer (Vic) that he was simply supporting his friend. When he clarifies who ‘my boy’ refers to and describes their past relationship, he explicitly reveals the relationship between two characters for the benefit of the audience. As noted, such relationship positioning may also be done more indirectly (see Bubel 2006 and Mandala 2007 on the linguistic construction of friendship). 3.6.

Adherence to the code of realism

For Kozloff (2000: 47), to say that dialogue is ‘realistic’ means “saying that it adheres to a complex code of what a culture at a given time agrees to accept as plausible, everyday, authentic”. Although Kozloff (2000) suggests that film dialogue is not ‘realistic’ as noted above, she also states that every mainstream film contains dialogue exchanges, which “primarily function to replicate everyday encounters” (2000: 47), creating realism. One way of doing so is to represent normal conversational activities such as ordering food, greetings, or small talk, which are strictly speaking not necessary for advancing the plot but which provide authenticity. Examples of this are also manifold in TV dialogue: (12) CASTLE: [knocks on door] ELDERLY MAN: Who is it? (Castle, season 1, episode 2) (13) WALTER JR: [answering a phone call] Yeah what’s up? Hey can you call me in like two minutes? Thanks, bye. (Breaking Bad, season 1, episode 3)

Examples (12) and (13) represent such ordinary events as asking who is at the door before opening it (12), and talking on the phone, with the teenager Walter Jr in (13) producing a fairly plausible sequence of answering a call, postponing the call, and

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ending it. The example also includes linguistic devices expected to be in use in ordinary conversation between teenagers (yeah, hey, like). 3.7.

Exploitation of the resources of language

We are now moving on to those functions that Kozloff associates with aesthetic effect, ideological persuasion or commercial appeal, the first being exploitation of the resources of language. Kozloff (2000) explicitly associates this function with Jakobson’s poetic function and divides it into four categories: poetic use of language, jokes/humour, irony, and on-screen verbal storytelling (where characters tell a story). These different categories have in common that the dialogue focuses on the message itself or “revels” in “verbal embroidery” (Kozloff 2000: 52). In TV series humour abounds in sitcoms, but ‘exploitation of the resources of language’ also occurs in other genres: (14) HODGINS: [looking at x-ray image] Whoa. BRENNAN: What? HODGINS: Well, pardon the fromage reference, but what’s with the moldy Gruyere in that leg? BRENNAN: The lighter colour is evidence of demineralization. (Bones, season 1, episode 20) (15) VIC: Now shut up! Here’s the deal Kern. You take tonight and come up with a number. You revise yours down a bit. You bring me the numbers. I’ll decide what’s fair. T-BONZ: And who you supposed to be? Judge Judy? (The Shield, season 1, episode 4)

The humour in (14) is the result of the contrast between Hodgins’s irreverent and Brennan’s scientific description of a body part shown in an x-ray image, and also relies on the audience understanding of both fromage and Gruyere, while the humour in (15) depends on the intertextual reference to the American reality TV show Judge Judy and the contrast between Judge Judy and the police offer Vic. In relation to research on this function of TV dialogue, most linguistic studies have focused on humour (see Section 6), and more studies are needed on the poetic function more generally, including with respect to linguistic differences between more ‘literary’ and more ‘mainstream’ TV series (but see Richardson 2010a: 156–158). In addition to the four sub-categories (of the function ‘Exploitation of the resources of language’) recognized by Kozloff, I propose two additional sub-categories: linguistic innovation and intertextuality (allusions to other texts). For example, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, innovative marked -y suffix adjectives (such as all Hellmouthy) abound (Mandala 2007); the series has been recognized for its inventions and play with language, and Adams (2003) has dedicated a book to Slayer Slang. New words have also been invented in other TV series (e.g. warp

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speed in Star Trek; gorram in Firefly), as well as whole languages (e.g. Klingon in Star Trek or Dothraki and Valyrian in Game of Thrones). Such invention could be seen as the ultimate ‘exploitation of the resources of language’ and has captured linguists’ attention (see Adams, Ch. 11, this volume). Intertextuality, on the other hand, occurs frequently in TV series such as The Big Bang Theory or Gilmore Girls, and exploits the common culture that viewers and the characters share. Such intertextuality may function to reveal the characters and their world to viewers, but also to create pleasure in readers and to bond with them, creating a community (see discussion in Bednarek 2010: 31–33). Language is exploited because of its cultural value here. 3.8.

Thematic messages/authorial commentary/allegory

Kozloff (2000: 56–57) mentions “preachy passages” and “overt moralizing” as examples of this function, when the dialogue expresses a film’s moral. But in addition to such overt thematic messages, she also includes less overt use of allegory to convey a social, moral or political message. Such allegorical dialogue has a subtext, a double-layering (Kozloff 2000: 59–60). With respect to the first category, it is difficult to find examples of overt thematic messages in TV dialogue that can unproblematically be identified as a ‘moral’ for the audience,4 although some TV series might be considered to disseminate religious or moral messages – examples include Highway to Heaven, 7th Heaven, or Call the Midwife. Overt moral messages by characters for other characters are easier to find: (16) HANK (to Walter JR): What do you think it was they were all doing before they graduated to shooting meth in their dicks? Gateway drug. That’s what we call it. Dollars to donuts and I shit you not, that gateway drug was marijuana, every time. You understand? (Breaking Bad, season 1, episode 3) I got my bellybutton pierced on Hollywood Boulevard (17) KIMMY: SALINGER: You did what? Do you know how dangerous that is? Do you know you can catch HIV from that? Hep C! I want the name of the person who did it, I’m shutting them down! (Southland, season 1, episode 2)

Both of these examples involve conversations between police officers and close teenage relatives, with one warning his newphew off smoking marijuana (16) and

4



Kozloff’s (2000: 57–59) examples for films are a speech in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), a witness statement in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and direct audience address in Foreign Correspondent (1940).

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the other berating his daughter for getting a piercing (17). But these are not necessarily messages from the producers to the audience (telling them not to smoke marijuana or get pierced), and are rather used to create humour in the narrative ([16] is based on a misunderstanding, and [17] comes across as an over-reaction). Overt thematic messages may also occur in conversations between adults, as in this passage from Orange is the New Black, where prisoner Boo tries to comfort another prisoner (Pennsatucky) who is mourning her five abortions at a makeshift graveyard on mother’s day: (18) BOO: You know, in the 1990s crime fell spectacularly and this book attributes that to the passing of Roe V. Wade. PENNSATUCKY: Darkness of ‘73. BOO: The exact opposite, actually. I mean, the abortions that occurred after Roe v. Wade, these were children that weren’t wanted. Children who, if their mothers had been forced to have them, would have grown up poor, and neglected and abused. The three most important ingredients when one is making a felon. But they were never born. So, 20 years later, when they would have been a prime crime age, they weren’t there. And the crime rate dropped dramatically. PENNSATUCKY: What’s your point? BOO: Well, my point is that you were a meth-head white trash piece of shit and your children, had they been born, would have been methhead white trash pieces of shit. So by terminating those pregnancies you spared society the scourge of your offspring. When you think about it it’s a blessing. (Orange is the New Black, season 3, episode 1)

Given this programme’s generally rather liberal/progressive storylines (life in prison, including characters’ backstories and inadequacies of the prison system in the USA), we may assume that this is also a message or ‘moral’ about abortion to the audience (i.e. that they should support the right to abortion, rather than condemn it), but without actually asking the creators, this must remain a hypothesis. In other words, viewers may be presented with different morals and asked to reflect on them, but are not necessarily directed to take sides (with exceptions, as mentioned above). In general, it is possible to argue that overtly moral TV series would presumably put off some audiences and representations that can be interpreted in different ways, depending on the viewer, are more interesting and appealing to audiences (Bednarek 2015c; Raymond 2013). More implicit authorial commentary, thematic messages or allegory can be seen in TV series such as Our Friends in the North or The Wire, which explore socio-cultural and political issues by way of fictional narratives, offering implicit critiques. Thus, the British Our Friends in the North critically portrays life in North East England from the 1960s to the 1990s, incorporating real historical events. The Wire, according to creator David Simon, addresses “what the drug war has become

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in America and what it was costing us as a society” (The White House 2015: n.p.) and Simon has stated elsewhere that “I am not particularly interested in making the most entertaining stories unless they are actually contending with an argument that matters” (Chotiner 2015: n.p.).5 The storylines in the above-mentioned Orange is the New Black can also be interpreted as criticisms of the American prison system and the way contemporary society views and treats prisoners. Certain TV series, then, do make an argument, do have a thematic message, and do comment on human realities, and may do so in sophisticated ways. 3.9.

Opportunities for star turns

Kozloff’s final function concerns dialogue which showcases a star, and functions “to keep our attention focused upon that star, and to give the star a chance to ‘show off’” (Kozloff 2000: 60). She argues that such dialogue can be identified because it is longer, requires above-average variety of emotional expression, and provides a platform for vocal skill. She also says that this category is “primarily pertinent to a certain category of films, those designed as showcases for stars with unique histrionic talents” (Kozloff 2000: 60). There are at least two aspects to be questioned here – first, whether or not this function is limited to such films, and second, whether length is a necessary criterion. In relation to contemporary TV series, much dialogue seems to allow actors a chance to ‘show off’. It is too difficult to choose one dialogue extract that would illustrate this perfectly, and it would be very hard to demonstrate this without a video of the actor’s performance. However, actors from TV series such as House of Cards, Breaking Bad, or Homeland are regularly nominated for awards, and become known for their performance as a particular character. A web search for videos from these series will find many examples of particularly successful acting performances in contemporary TV series. But perhaps these tend to occur in particular kinds of TV series which might be considered as vehicles for stars such as Kevin Spacey, Bryan Cranston, Claire Danes. In relation to length, certain types of dialogue arguably provide a platform for a star turn regardless of length. For example, dialogue by other actors may elicit a star performance, as when characters are given a bleak medical diagnosis by another character or someone declares their love for them. Even a story premise or plotline may provide a platform for showcasing performing skills as in The United States of Tara, The Americans or Orphan Black, where the same actor has to play multiple personalities or persons and makes use of linguistic and other cues to distinguish the characters.

5

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/08/david_simon_interview_the_ wire_creator_on_his_new_series_freddie_gray_ta.html

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3.10. Continuity as additional function of TV dialogue In addition to the nine functions that Kozloff proposes, I put forward a tenth function which is especially important for TV dialogue: the creation of continuity. One of the key differences between TV series and films is the serial or serialized nature of the former, with only some films belonging to series (e.g. Harry Potter, Twilight, James Bond). It is crucial for dialogue in TV series to create continuity across episodes and seasons. This includes characters, plot, and the general style of a show. As a TV series progresses, its dialogue should remain in line with what audiences have come to expect of the series (e.g. in terms of humour, wittiness, literary and aesthetic qualities) and of the characters (the way each character speaks and how they interact). For instance, a corpus linguistic analysis of dialogue produced by one of the protagonists in Gilmore Girls across all its seasons suggests that her style does remain fairly consistent and that a stable character “adds to serial stability” (Bednarek 2011b: 194). An obvious way of creating continuity is through catchphrases (e.g. Homer Simpson’s D’oh) and salient “signature interjections” (Bednarek 2010: 137).6 But continuity does not mean that change is not possible, even in relation to catchphrases. For instance, bazinga is a catchphrase (and signature interjection) for the character Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory, but is not used in all seasons. However, when characters diverge too much from the way they usually speak this can become a source of meta-linguistic commentary and can be used stylistically for foregrounding (Bednarek 2010: 110–111, 133). In Example (19), from the dramedy Gilmore Girls, the character Luke comments explicitly on his unusual use of the interjection yay, which is associated mainly with mother and daughter Lorelai and Rory in the series. In this case, it appears to show his strong emotional reaction to their reconciliation, which comes after the two had been estranged for several months. (19) LORELAI: Ladies and gentlemen, Rory Gilmore! [opens door, Rory enters] RORY: Hi Luke! LUKE: Hey, Rory, you’re back! [They hug.] RORY: I’m back! LUKE: Good! You look good. Healthy, happy. Huh, here with your mom, both of you here. It’s great, you know! Yay! I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘yay’ before. Sounded weird. LORELAI: A little. LUKE: Come, sit, sit. (Gilmore Girls, season 6, episode 10)

6



Catchphrases may also create continuity in film series – such as James Bond’s shaken, not stirred.

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Evidence for the importance of dialogue to create continuity also comes from what we know about the TV production process. Thus, show ‘bibles’ may be given to new writers who join a TV series’ scriptwriting team to give them detailed information about the series and its characters. This bible, which can be 100 pages long, contains “a log line, franchise, an overview of springboards, tone, style, and the quest of the series, followed by character sketches and story guidelines” (Douglas 2011: 71). Handbooks on scriptwriting also advise novice writers that it is not about protecting their own voice but rather that they write “in service to the show” (Douglas 2011: 263). In order to do so writers need to be familiar with a show’s pace, style and “hear the characters’ voices in [their] head” (Douglas 2011: 157). 3.11. Multifunctionality and variation In introducing Kozloff’s framework above, each example was used to illustrate only one function of dialogue. However, dialogue in film and TV series is multifunctional, and a particular stretch of dialogue often fulfils several functions at the same time (Bednarek 2014: 63; Kozloff 2000: 34). If we consider Example (14) above, the exchange between Hodgins and Brennan is not only humorous but also functions to characterize the two protagonists. This multifunctionality is in line with scriptwriting advice, which states that scenes should fulfil several functions at the same time: no scene should merely explore character or only be used for exposition (Douglas 2011: 112, 114). In general, it appears as if there is no one-to-one relation between a particular type of dialogue cue and its function. For example, while one might expect whatand who-questions in TV crime dramas to be used by detectives/agents to question others and thereby to work towards solving the case and progressing the narrative, such questions are multifunctional and can be used for many of Kozloff’s functions (Bednarek 2013). Similarly, while catchphrases and signature interjections create continuity, they are also important for characterization and may create humour through repetition. Dialogue features representing a particular variety of English (such as Irish) may create realism as well as humour, serving “a dual function” (Walshe 2011: 144). To give a final example, swearing and taboo language can be used for characterization both in terms of social variation (gender, ethnicity, profession, etc.) and in terms of personality, but can also be used for humour, as a plot device, to create realism or to control viewer evaluation/emotion (Bednarek 2015c; Price 2015; Queen 2015; Walshe 2011). In addition to multifunctionality, we also need to pay attention to variation between different (types of) TV series. Again, swearing and taboo language are a good example: There are vast differences across TV series in how swearing and taboo language are used, both in terms of quantity and in terms of the particular words or phrases that are used. In an analysis of dialogue from over 60 different TV series (Price 2015), only four of 13 ‘bad language’ word families occurred in

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at least half of all series, and word families such as FUCK and SHIT had very high standard deviations – that is, a large amount of variation within the examined dataset. These differences are only partially the result of regulation (Bednarek 2015c; Queen 2015: 208–212), such that word families like FUCK or SHIT are predominantly used in cable rather than broadcast series, but even within cable series, there is variation in terms of frequency (Price 2015). If we consider linguistic studies that have been undertaken on functions of TV dialogue, three key trends emerge: the areas that have attracted most research are characterization, realism and humour. The next three sections will each be dedicated to one of these trends. 4.

TV dialogue and characterization

The first key trend concerns the study of televisual characterization – how dialogue creates characters and relationships between them (see also Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, Ch. 4, this volume). This can include the construction of social types and personae, the traits and stances of characters, and their personality (Queen 2015: 154–181). Much of this research relies on Culpeper’s (2001) ideas about character impression formation in drama (see Ch. 4). This is a cognitive model where explicit or implicit dialogue cues give rise to the formation of impressions of characters in the minds of the audience (Culpeper 2001: 2, 163). Some linguists have also made use of concepts from sociolinguistics (Queen 2012, 2015), narratology (Wodak 2009) or cultural studies (Bednarek 2010; Paltridge et al. 2011). With respect to the special nature of tele­visual characterization, Bednarek (2011c) suggests that aspects of expressivity (emotion, attitude, ideology) are particularly important and introduces the notion of ‘expressive character identity’ (a cover term for those character traits that concern emotions, attitudes, values and ideologies). For instance, Joel Fleischman’s negative attitude towards Cicely (Alaska) and the way he expresses this are a crucial part of his character in the 1990s TV series Northern Exposure. Another stylistic hypothesis is that “linguistic stability is the norm for many contemporary television characters” (Bednarek 2011b: 203), i.e. that televisual characters tend to be stable in their linguistic repertoire, although some characters may undergo transformations with respect to certain linguistic practices (Mandala 2011). It must be noted that there is little linguistic research on stability and change in televisual characters and its interaction with genre and series. Most of the research reviewed in this section takes a more synchronic perspective. The linguistic features that researchers have explored in their study of televisual characterization include code-switching (Mandala 2008; see also Locher, Ch. 10, this volume), impoliteness (Bednarek 2012b; Dynel 2012; Mandala 2011; Richardson 2010a; see also Kizelbach, Ch. 14, and Dynel, Ch. 15, this volume),

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the use of linguistic creativity (e.g. unusual -y adjectives, Mandala 2007), formal language (Bednarek 2012b), and taboo language/swearing (Bednarek 2015c). Several studies focus on a set of different linguistic features, for example interactive/ involved versus informational language (Rey 2001), alignment patterns, terms of address and question-response sequences (Bubel 2006, 2011), various semantic and grammatical categories (Baker 2005), a range of linguistic practices (stereo­ typically) associated with gender (Queen 2012), or grammatical, lexical and discourse features of Irish English (Walshe 2011). Queen (2015) discusses more generally how language variation is tied to characterization. From her examples, pronunciation but also the clustering of linguistic features emerge as important. As far as aspects of character are concerned, gender and sexuality have attracted most attention (Baker 2005; Bednarek 2008, 2015c; Bubel 2006, 2011; Bubel and Spitz 2006; Gregori Signes 2007; Paltridge et al. 2011; Queen 2012; Raymond 2013; Rey 2001), but there is also research on friendship and other relations between characters (Bednarek 2008, 2010; Bubel 2006, 2011; Mandala 2007, 2008) as well as rudeness (Bednarek 2012b; Dynel 2012; Mandala 2011; Richardson 2010a), nerdiness (Bednarek 2012b), national identity (Walshe 2011), affluence (Queen 2012), attitudes towards food (Bednarek 2010) and several other social and personality traits (Queen 2015). This research suggests that televisual characterization is both about the construction of social identities (more or less general, e.g. ‘women’, ‘nerds’, ‘vegetarians’) and personalities (individuals) such that we can find similar language patterns between characters of the same age or gender, while we will also find that characters are constructed as unique and that there is the possibility to diverge from such patterns of social variation (Bednarek 2008, 2010, 2015c). For instance, in Gilmore Girls, the parents (Richard and Emily) are contrasted with daughter and granddaughter (Lorelai and Rory) in terms of shared attitudes and expressive resources, but individual characters also exhibit unique expressive identities (Bednarek 2010). In Queen’s (2015) words, the two facets of characterization (individual distinctiveness; social similarity/difference) explain why “a given character might be simultaneously stereotypical and uniquely individual” (2015: 155), or both “singular and generalizable” (2015: 163). Often, the study of characters is used to explore the relationship between TV series and society, for instance with respect to ideology. Thus, Wodak (2009) concludes that The West Wing promotes an ideological discourse about politics, which reassures the public by allowing them to feel protected by “wise men [who] make adequate decisions” (Wodak 2009: 26, emphasis in original). In relation to his analysis of gender and sexuality in animated sitcoms, Raymond (2013: 214–215) argues that the “fluidity […] of authentic gendered and sexual identity and speech is lost in the polarized representations of onscreen interaction” (Raymond 2013: 214, emphasis in original), which can support hegemonic stereotypes, bias and social inequality (Raymond 2013: 215). In terms of critical research on characterization, linguists could go beyond gender and sexuality to ask further questions

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about the extent to which diversity is represented on television: are minorities visible and how are they represented through dialogue? 5.

TV dialogue and realism

The second key trend concerns the study of ‘realism’ – the extent to which televisual dialogue is ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’. This includes analysis of ‘orality’ (see Bublitz, Ch. 8, this volume) – the extent to which oral features typical of faceto-face communication appear in TV dialogue. Thus, we can use Conversation Analysis to compare the turn-taking features of naturally occurring conversation with those of televisual conversation, for example with respect to speaker overlap, interruptions, hesitation phenomena, and so on. Fictional dialogue draws on such conversational structures “to produce realistic scenarios” (Lambrou 2014: 144). At the same time, dramatic dialogue (in general) has been considered a “‘pure’, ‘concentrated’, ‘condensed’, or ‘tidied up’ version of social intercourse” (Spitz 2005: 25), although we may expect to find differences between written and performed dramatic dialogue.7 From a sociolinguistic perspective, Queen (2015) discusses both realness and authenticity in the context of characterization, noting that planned character speech makes characters ‘both recognizable and believable for the audience’ (Queen 2015: 105) and that the concept of authenticity is more useful than the concept of realness or accuracy when examining characters in the narrative mass media (Queen 2015: 160–163). Corpus linguists approach the question of realism by comparing a corpus of TV dialogue with a corpus/corpora of unscripted conversation (Bednarek 2010, 2011a, 2012a; Mittmann 2006; Quaglio 2008, 2009).8 For example, Quaglio (2009) found that dialogue in Friends is more informal/colloquial and more emotional than ‘natural’ conversation. Bednarek’s (2012a: 60) analysis of dialogue from seven TV series suggests that informality depends on the genre/series, concluding that television dialogue “might be less narrative and vague – and sometimes more informal, sometimes less informal – than unscripted language, but is best characterized by its high degree of emotionality”. Routine formulae such as sorry or thanks also seem to be frequent in TV series because they are structured around frequent changes of different communicative situations (Bednarek 2012a; Mittmann 2006; Quaglio 2009). In general, linguists have tied specific characteristics of TV dialogue to com-

7



8



The extent to which oral features are introduced by scriptwriters and by actors in their performance needs further exploration (see Taylor 2004 for a case study on film). Comparing the frequency and use of specific linguistic features in TV dialogue with unscripted language is not just a method used in corpus linguistics – see for example Tagliamonte and Robert’s (2005) sociolinguistic study of intensifiers.

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prehensibility and entertainment on the part of audiences (Quaglio 2009; Walshe 2011) or to the participation framework of TV dialogue (Bednarek 2011a, 2012a). All this does not mean that TV dialogue is completely ‘unrealistic’ – there is general agreement that TV dialogue has to be realistic enough not to alienate viewers or prevent suspension of disbelief, and Quaglio’s (2009) analysis of Friends shows that conversation between the ‘friends’ shares many language features with natural conversation. Walshe (2011: 144) talks about an “underlying layer of authenticity, which can then be subverted for humorous purposes”. Drawing on Davis (2008), Richardson (2010a: 71) argues that “selective naturalism is the default choice for television drama”. Similarly, Toolan (2011) shows that TV dialogue is skilfully constructed to selectively imitate naturalistic speech. It is also important to be aware of differences between TV series and between genres, in terms of less naturalistic devices which may or may not be present, including: – Voiceover narration (e.g. Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives); – Musical interludes or special musical episodes (e.g. Glee; Buffy the Vampire Slayer); – Metafictional comments (e.g. ‘Oh. I thought I was doing a voice-over’, Glee); – Direct audience address (e.g. House of Cards); – Extent of intertextuality and allusion (e.g. Gilmore Girls); – Extent of witty exchanges/jokes, with or without audible laugh track (e.g. sitcoms). Even though such devices may break the invisible wall between characters and audience members and foreground the constructed, artificial or fictional nature of TV dialogue, audiences in the 21st century do not seem to be prevented from immersing themselves in narratives with such devices and from caring about their characters. Another way in which we might approach realism in TV dialogue is through the study of linguistic variation. That is, we can ask the question whether and how regional, dialectal and social variation (see Planchenault, Ch. 9, this volume) are represented in TV dialogue, for instance non-standard varieties such as Italian American (e.g. in Lilyhammer), Latino/Hispanic English (e.g. in Orange is the New Black) or African American Vernacular (e.g. in The Wire). In his analysis of Irish English in Father Ted, Walshe (2011) shows that it is the most salient grammatical and discourse features of Irish English that occur most frequently, tailored to the initial British target audience. In fact, the writers “employ quite a small number of dialect features, preferring those which already have connotations of Irishness for their British target audience, and allowing the Irish actors’ natural accents to convey the rest” (Walshe 2011: 144). Queen (2012: 166) points out that most of the characters in the US daytime television drama Days of our Lives converse in unmarked standard American

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English with little phonological or grammatical variation and that “highly stigmatized or regionally marked linguistic forms are generally absent”. However, there are regular characters with non-English accents or other varieties of English, and the non-standard, informal variant /-ɪn/ (instead of the written standard in participial verb morphology) occurs relatively regularly (Queen 2012: 166). To explore if this is the case more generally, Table 2 shows results for selected non-standard variants from an ongoing project on a corpus of dialogue from 66 different contemporary American TV series. The table shows in how many TV series in the corpus the variants occur. It does not show how frequent their use is nor which characters use them. Note that while the majority of /-ɪn/ variants occur in participial verb forms, this number includes all instances of this variant (e.g. the feelin’ or somethin’). These results show that gonna is the most distributed, while gotta, /-ɪn/, wanna and ‘cause are also present in many TV series – in contrast to the more stigmatized ain’t, which is in line with Queen’s assumptions. Table 2.

Non-standard variants in US TV series

Non-standard variant

No of TV series

% of TV series

gonna gotta /-ɪn/ wanna ‘cause ain’t

64/66 56/66 55/66 53/66 53/66 21/66

97 84.8 83.3 80.3 80.3 31.8

Queen (2015: 170) cites a trade manual on using dialect in voice animation, which suggests that what is most important is that dialects appear authentic to audiences and can be clearly understood by them. It does seem as if the participation framework of TV dialogue favours the representation of non-standard language only if it is easily understood and recognizable. In other cases, scriptwriters may use techniques that mean that non-standard language use does not result in too great a loss of comprehensibility (see Toolan 2011 on The Wire). The study of linguistic variation would also cover technical language, slang and in-group languages. We can expect instances of such non-standard language in particular TV genres (e.g. sci-fi, crime, law, medical), but this also depends on the plot. For instance, the sitcom The Big Bang Theory centres around nerds and hence features frequent references to nerd culture (sci-fi, comic books) and physics, and Sheldon’s hyper-formal way of speaking (Bednarek 2012b). For an extensive discussion of linguistic variation in the narrative mass media (film and TV series), see Queen (2015), who argues that this variation fulfils two major functions, namely characterization and plot development (Queen 2015: 11), while she also discusses

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how “language variation connects the media product to its audience in various ways” (Queen 2015: 154). 6.

TV dialogue and humour

The third key trend concerns the study of humour in TV dialogue, which has primarily focused on sitcoms (e.g. Dynel 2011; Stokoe 2008), although comedy-dramas/dramedies have also been examined (see Bubel and Spitz 2006; Urios-Aparisi and Wagner 2011). Such research examines how language can be used or manipulated to create humour, for instance in terms of incongruity at the levels of phonetics/phonology, morphology/lexicon, syntax, semantics, linguistic varieties and text/discourse (Brock 2011). Urios-Aparisi and Wagner (2011) analyse prosody (pitch and pauses), while Stokoe (2008) is interested in breaches of conversational organization (turn-taking, preference organization) and Walshe (2011) notes that incongruous or unexpected swearing can create humour. Lambrou (2014) further points out that the flouting of conversational maxims can create humour, although her example is drawn from film. In terms of pragma-stylistic studies on humour, many researchers draw on the two communicative layers or participation framework of fictional television (e.g. Bubel and Spitz 2006; Brock 2011, 2015; Dynel 2011). In such research, it is shown that humour is best explained in relation to the fact that it both includes inter-character interaction (with its own participation framework operating at that level, which may cause humour) as well as being devised for the benefit of the audience (see Section 3 above and Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume). Different types of humour can accordingly be differentiated, depending on what aspect of the participation framework they rely on. 7. Summary/conclusion This chapter has provided a definition of TV dialogue and an outline of its functions, starting with Kozloff’s nine functions of film dialogue and adding a tenth function – the creation of continuity. It has also posed questions about some aspects of Kozloff’s framework, and elaborated on others. A key issue concerns how many different functions should be posited and which sub-catgories should be distinguished. As mentioned, this chapter focused on the role of dialogue in one type of fiction, namely fictional television series. It is clear that the functions of dialogue that I discussed in this chapter for TV series also apply to film – indeed, the typology was adapted from Kozloff’s (2000) work on film dialogue, and her book provides manifold examples that illustrate these functions. One difference between the two

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types of mass media narrative may lie in the serial nature of TV series, as opposed to most films (with exceptions, as noted above). That is, the creation of continuity may be less important in films than in TV series which have many seasons and many episodes within these seasons. Further, some of the outlined functions of dialogue will be important in all types of fictional narratives, including in novels and plays. This is the case for the role of dialogue to create characters and character relations (Ch. 4, 6, 9. this volume): For example, Short (2014) has developed a checksheet for analyzing characters and character relations in novels and plays, which includes analysis of turn-taking, speech-act and politeness patterns and which could also partially be applied to televisual dialogue (cf. also Lambrou 2014 on turn-taking patterns and conversational maxims). The same is true for Culpeper’s (2001) inventory of textual cues for characterization. However, each type of fiction will also have unique features: thus, dialogue tends to be embedded in other text in prose fiction which makes for complex speech and thought representation (Short 2014; Hoffmann, Ch. 6, this volume), and dialogue in literary drama may be accessed as part of a published play or as a live or recorded performance or film adaptation. Thus, it would be an interesting area for future research to investigate the similarities and differences between different types of fictional dialogue. In addition to discussing the functions of dialogue in fictional TV series, this chapter identified three key trends that have emerged from research on functions of televisual dialogue: the study of characterization, realism/naturalism, and humour. These correspond to three important issues in pragma-stylistic research: how does characterization work and what is ‘special’ about televisual characterization; how ‘naturalistic’ is TV dialogue and how can we approach the study of ‘naturalism’; and how does humour work in the particular communicative setting of fictional television? While these trends and issues are going to inspire more research in the future, one other direction in which the field is currently heading is the sociolinguistic study of television dialogue, drawing on concepts such as mediatisation and indexicality. The chapter also identified a number of under-researched areas which can also be conceptualized as prospects for future research: – The poetic function of TV dialogue; – Similarities and differences between dialogue in more ‘literary’ and more ‘mainstream’ TV series; – Stability and change in televisual character dialogue; – Diversity in TV dialogue, including the representation of minorities. To this list we might add the study of plot development, the study of televisual dialogue in its multimodal context (but see Bednarek 2010, 2015b; Richardson 2010b) and the study of genre variation (cf. Forchini 2012 and McIntyre 2012 on film). To conclude, televisual dialogue is used to create a world that audience members care about and that they want to encounter again and again – across many episodes and seasons. It thus needs to be (selectively) naturalistic, comprehensible,

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entertaining, and consistent. For a medium where “writers rule” (Lavery and Burkhead 2011: vii), a discipline that focuses on language is uniquely suited to provide answers on “how the writers pulled it off” (Mittell 2006: 35) and “a linguistics of screenwriting” (Bednarek 2015a) is therefore both desirable and feasible. Acknowledgments The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under REA grant agreement no [609305]. I am grateful to the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), University of Freiburg, Germany, for awarding me an FCFP External Senior Fellowship. References Primary sources 24 2001–2010, 2014  Dir. Stephen Hopkins et al. Screenplay by Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran. Imagine Entertainment et al. 7th Heaven 1996–2007  Dir. Sam Wiseman et al. Screenplay by Brenda Hampton. Spelling Television et al. Bones 2005–present Dir. Greg Yaitanes et al. Screenplay by Hart Hanson. Josephon Entertainment et al. Breaking Bad 2008–2013  Dir. Vince Gilligan et al. Screenplay by Vince Gilligan. High Bridge Entertainment et al. Buffy The Vampire Slayer 1997–2003  Dir. Joss Whedon et al. Screenplay by Joss Whedon. Mutant Enemy Productions et al. Call the Midwife 2012–present  Dir. Philippa Lowthorpe et al. Screenplay by Heidi Thomas. Neal Street Productions. Days of our Lives 1965–present  Dir. Joseph Behar et al. Screenplay by Ted Corday and Betty Corday. Corday Productions et al. Desperate Housewives 2004–2012  Dir. Charles McDougall et al. Screenplay by Mark Cherry. Cherry Alley Productions et al. Father Ted 1995–1998 Dir. Declan Lowney et al. Screenplay by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews. Hat Trick Productions.

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Firefly 2002–2002  Dir. Joss Whedon et al. Screenplay by Joss Whedon. Mutant Enemy Productions and 20th Century Fox. Friends 1994–2004  Dir. James Burrows et al. Screenplay by David Crane and Marta Kauffman. Bright/Kauffmann/Crane Productions and Warner Bros. Game of Thrones 2011–present  Dir. Tim Van Patten et al. Screenplay by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Home Box Office (HBO) et al. Gilmore Girls 2000–2007, 2016  Dir. Lesli Linka Glatter et al. Screenplay by Amy Sherman-Palladino. Dorothy Parker Drank Here Productions et al. Glee 2009–2015  Dir. Ryan Murphy et al. Screenplay by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. 20th Century Fox et al. Grey’s Anatomy 2005–present  Dir. Peter Horton et al. Screenplay by Shonda Rhimes. ShondaLand et al. Highway to Heaven 1984–1989  Dir. Michael Landon et al. Screenplay by Michael Landon. Michael Landon Productions. Homeland 2011–present  Dir. Michael Cuesta et al. Screenplay by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa. Teakwood Lane Productions et al. House of Cards 2013–present  Dir. David Fincher et al. Screenplay by Beau Willimon. Trigger Street Productions et al. Lilyhammer 2012–2014  Dir. Simen Alsvik et al. Screenplay by Anne Bjørnstad and Eilif Skodvin. Rubicon TV and Renegade TV. NCIS 2003–present  Dir. Donald P. Bellisario et al. Screenplay by Donald P. Bellisario and Don McGill. Belisarius Productions et al. Northern Exposure 1990–1995  Dir. Joshua Brand et al. Screenplay by Joshua Brand and John Falsey. Cine-Nevada Productions et al. Nurse Jackie 2009–2015  Dir. Allen Coulter et al. Screenplay by Liz Brixius, Evan Dunsky and Linda Wallem. Caryn Mandabach Productions et al. Orange is the New Black 2013–present  Dir. Michael Trim et al. Screenplay by Jenji Kohan. Lionsgate Television and Tilted Productions. Orphan Black 2013–present  Dir. John Fawcett et al. Screenplay by Graeme Manson and John Fawcett. Temple Street Productions et al. Our Friends in the North 1996–1996  Dir. Pedr James et al. Screenplay by Peter Flannery. BBC Two.

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Southland 2009–2013  Dir. Christopher Chulack et al. Screenplay by Ann Biderman. John Wells Productions and Warner Bros. Television. Star Trek Next Generation 1987–1994  Dir. Corey Allen et al. Screenplay by Gene Roddenberry. Paramount Domestic Television. The Americans 2013–present  Dir. Gavin O’Connor et al. Screenplay by Joe Weisberg. Nemo Films et al. The Big Bang Theory 2007–present  Dir. James Burrows et al. Screenplay by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady. Chuck Lorre Productions and Warner Bros. The Shield 2002–2008  Dir. Clark Johnson et al. Screenplay by Shawn Ryan. The Barn Productions et al. The United States of Tara 2009–2011  Dir. Craig Gillespie et al. Screenplay by Diablo Cody. Dreamworks Television and Showtime Networks. The West Wing 1999–2006  Dir. Thomas Schlamme et al. Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. John Wells Productions and Warner Bros. The Wire 2002–2008  Dir. Clark Johnson et al. Screenplay by David Simon. Blown Deadline Productions and Home Box Office Television (HBO Television). Secondary sources Adams, Michael 2003 Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon. New York: Oxford University Press. Baker, Paul 2005 Public Discourses of Gay Men. London: Routledge. Baños, Rocío 2013 ‘That is so cool’: Investigating the translation of adverbial intensifiers in English-Spanish dubbing through a parallel corpus of sitcoms. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 21(4): 526–542. Bednarek, Monika 2008 ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ A corpus perspective on evaluation and emotion in contemporary American pop culture. In: Ahmar Mahboob and Naomi Knight (eds.), Questioning Linguistics, 95–126. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press. Bednarek, Monika 2010 The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London/New York: Continuum. Bednarek, Monika 2011a The language of fictional television: A case study of the ‘dramedy’ ‘Gilmore Girls’. English Text Construction 4(1): 54–83.

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Bednarek, Monika 2011b The stability of the televisual character: A corpus stylistic case study. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 185–204. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bednarek, Monika 2011c Expressivity and televisual characterisation. Language and Literature 20(1): 3–21. Bednarek, Monika 2012a ‘Get us the hell out of here’: Key words and trigrams in fictional television series. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17(1): 35–63. Bednarek, Monika 2012b Construing ‘nerdiness’: Characterisation in The Big Bang Theory. Multilingua 31: 199–229. Bednarek, Monika 2013 What happened and who dunnit? Exploring questions in contemporary US crime drama: from Breaking Bad to The Wire. Paper presented at the symposium on Crime in a Post-CSI Mediascape, Oxford, UK, September14. Bednarek, Monika 2014 ‘Who are you and why are you following us?’ Wh-questions and communicative context in television dialogue. In: John Flowerdew (ed.), Discourse in Context, 49–70. (Contemporary Applied Linguistics 3.) London/New York: Bloomsbury. Bednarek, Monika 2015a An overview of the linguistics of screenwriting and its interdisciplinary connections, with special focus on dialogue in episodic television. Journal of Screenwriting 6(2) 221–238. Bednarek, Monika 2015b Corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis of television and film narratives. In: Paul Baker and Tony McEnery (eds.), Corpora and Discourse Studies, 63–87. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bednarek, Monika 2015c ‘Wicked’ women in contemporary pop culture: ‘Bad’ language and gender in Weeds, Nurse Jackie and Saving Grace. Text & Talk 35(4): 431–451. Brock, Alexander 2011 Bumcivilian: Systemic aspects of humorous communication in comedies. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 263–280. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Brock, Alexander 2015 Participation frameworks and participation in televised sitcom, candid camera and stand-up comedy. In: Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 27–47. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bubel, Claudia M. 2006 The linguistic construction of character relations in TV drama: Doing friendship in Sex and the City. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of English, Universität des Saarlandes (Saarland University).

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Bubel, Claudia M. 2008 Film audiences as overhearers. Journal of Pragmatics 40: 55–71. Bubel, Claudia M. 2011 Relationship impression formation: How viewers know people on the screen are friends. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 225–248. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bubel, Claudia M. and Alice Spitz 2006 “One of the last vestiges of gender bias”: The characterization of women through the telling of dirty jokes in Ally McBeal. Humor 19(1): 71–104. Chotiner, Isaac 2015 “Everything Is Not The Wire”. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/08/david_simon_interview_the_wire_creator_on_his_new_series_ freddie_gray_ta.html Csomay, Eniko and Marija Petrović 2012 “Yes, your Honor!”: A corpus-based study of technical vocabulary in discipline-related movies and TV shows. System 40(2): 305–315. Culpeper, Jonathan 2001 Language and Characterisation. People in Plays and Other Texts. Harlow, UK: Longman. Davis, Rib 2008 Writing Dialogue for Scripts: Effective Dialogue for Film, TV, Radio and Stage. London: A & C Black. Douglas, Pamela 2011 Writing the TV Drama Series: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV, 3rd Ed. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Dynel, Marta 2011 “I’ll Be There for You!”: On participation-based sitcom humour. In: Marta Dynel (ed.), The Pragmatics of Humour Across Discourse Domains, 311–333. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Dynel, Marta 2012 Setting our house in order: The workings of impoliteness in multi-party film discourse. Journal of Politeness Research 8: 161–194. Forchini, Pierfranca 2012 Movie Language Revisited: Evidence from Multi-Dimensional Analysis and Corpora. Bern: Peter Lang. Goffman, Erving 1976 Replies and responses. Language in Society 5: 257–313. Goffman, Erving 1979 Footing. Semiotica 25: 1–29. Grant, Lynn E. 1996 Teaching conversation using a television soap. Prospect 11(3): 60–71. Gregori Signes, Carmen 2007 What do we laugh at? Gender representations in 3rd Rock from the Sun. In: José Santaemilia, Patricia Bou, Sergio Maruenda and Gora Zaragoza (eds.), International Perspectives on Gender and Language, 726–750. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia (University of Valencia).

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Igelström, Ann 2013 Communication and the various voices of the screenplay text. Journal of Screenwriting 4(1): 43–56. Jaeckle, Jeff 2013a Introduction: A brief primer for film dialogue study. In: Jeff Jaeckle (ed.), Film Dialogue, 1–16. New York: Columbia University Press. Jaeckle, Jeff (ed.) 2013b Film Dialogue. New York: Columbia University Press. Kozloff, Sarah 2000 Overhearing Film Dialogue. Ewing, NJ: University of California Press. Kress, Günther and Theo van Leeuwen 2006 Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd Ed. London/New York: Routledge. Lambrou, Marina 2014 Stylistics, conversation analysis and the cooperative principle. In: Michael Burke (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, 136–154. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Lavery, David and Cynthia Burkhead (eds.) 2011 Joss Whedon: Conversations. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Mandala, Susan 2007 Solidarity and the scoobies: An analysis of the –y suffix in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Language and Literature 16(1): 53–73. Mandala, Susan 2008 Representing the future: Chinese and codeswitching in Firefly. In: Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran (eds.), Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier, 31–40. London/New York: I. B. Tauris. Mandala, Susan 2011 Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven of Nine: A case study of language and character in a televisual text. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 205–223. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. McIntyre, Dan 2012 Prototypical characteristics of blockbuster movie dialogue: A corpus stylistic analysis. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 54(3): 402–425. Mittell, Jason 2006 Narrative complexity in contemporary American television. The Velvet Light Trap 58: 29–40. Mittmann, Brigitta 2006 With a little help from Friends (and others): Lexico-pragmatic characteristics of original and dubbed film dialogue. In: Christoph Houswitschka, Gabriele Knappe and Anja Müller (eds.), Anglistentag 2005, Bamberg – Proceedings, 573–585. Trier: WVT. Paltridge, Brian, Angela Thomas and Jianxin Liu 2011 Genre, performance and Sex and the City. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 249–262. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Piazza, Roberta 2011 The Discourse of Italian Cinema and Beyond. London/New York: Continuum. Price, Steven 2010 The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Price, Jack 2015 ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’ The use of bad language in contemporary American television series. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney, Australia. Quaglio, Paulo 2008 Television dialogue and natural conversation: Linguistic similarities and functional differences. In: Annelie Ädel and Randi Reppen (eds.), Corpora and Discourse: The Challenges of Different Settings, 189–210. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Quaglio, Paulo 2009 Television Dialogue: The Sitcom Friends vs. Natural Conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Queen, Robin 2012 The days of our lives: Language, gender and affluence on a daytime television drama. Gender and Language 6(1): 153–180. Queen, Robin 2015 Vox Popular: The Surprising Life of Language in the Media. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Raymond, Chase W. 2013 Gender and sexuality in animated television sitcom interaction. Discourse & Communication 7(2): 199–220. Rey, Jennifer M. 2001 Changing gender roles in popular culture: Dialogue in Star Trek episodes from 1966 to 1993. In: Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad (eds.), Variation in English: Multi-Dimensional Studies, 138–156. London: Longman. Richardson, Kay 2010a Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richardson, Kay 2010b Multimodality and the study of popular drama. Language and Literature 19(4): 378–395. Scannell, Paddy (ed.) 1991 Broadcast Talk. London: Sage. Short, Mick 1981 Discourse analysis and the analysis of drama. Applied Linguistics 2(2): 180– 201. Short, Mick 2014 Analyzing dialogue. In: Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, 344–359. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Spitz, Alice 2005 Power plays: The representation of mother-daughter disputes in contemporary

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6.

Narrative perspectives on voice in fiction Christian R. Hoffmann

Abstract: This chapter critically reviews some of the most influential linguistic and literary approaches to the concept of “voice”. The latter will be understood in a broad sense as the narrative strategies authors employ to delineate a narrator’s thoughts or vision in literary fiction. More specifically, the chapter surveys interdisciplinary research on the two main subsidiary concepts of “perspective” and “mind style”. While research on perspective focusses on the particular spatio-temporal or reflective viewpoint from which narrators tell their stories, “mind style” centres on the linguistic features which reveal the narrator’s individual emotional or psychological state of mind. While the chapter is principally concerned with research on voice in stylistics, narratology and film theory relevant for a pragmatics of fiction, it specifically highlights more recent multimodal and cognitive approaches to the study of voice in telecinematic discourse. 1. Introduction Arguably one of the most alluring qualities of fiction is its capacity to let readers enter the minds or see the fictional world through the eyes of story characters (cf. Gregoriou 2007; Palmer 2004).1 This phenomenon, better known as “voice” (Gregoriou 2014: 165), is a prime concern of narrative studies and has been gaining momentum in linguistics, literature and film studies over the last thirty years. The various interdisciplinary approaches to voice have continually coalesced and diverged but generally uncover how the choice of narrators (and their language) can influence the way readers judge and determine the nature of stories, story narrators and characters in fiction. In light of the growing body of research on voice, this chapter can only discuss research on voice which proves to be particularly amenable to a pragmatic investigation of voice in fiction. In addition, the chapter draws on research from different neighbouring scientific disciplines of linguistics, which are naturally

1



To improve the readability of the chapter, I have decided to use the terms “author” and “reader” generically to stand for all related “producers” and “recipients” of fictional content in all audio-visual forms of communication, unless indicated otherwise. Please see Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume, for a discussion of the participation framework of fictional discourse.

DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-006 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 159–195. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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equipped with different research objectives, making use of diverging methods and approaches. As a result, there generally is considerable latitude in defining the concept of “voice”. For the sake of clarity, I have thus decided to use voice as an umbrella term, covering all theories and frameworks which portray the narrative strategies or the use of semiotic resources which authors employ to let readers experience the fictional world through the eyes or mind of a narrator. To such a notion of voice, one can then subsume (at least) four main subsidiary approaches, of which I will explore three in more detail in the course of this chapter: (1) Perspective2 Authors can choose to exchange their narrators in the course of telling their stories. These narrators, in turn, describe the fictional worlds from their own, individual spatio-temporal or reflexive point of view. If an author changes the narrator in a story, she simultaneously changes the way the narrator (and, to a degree also the reader) sees or thinks about the fictional world, i.e the narrative perspective. Such changes can have a great impact on how readers understand stories, events and characters. Perspective can confirm, distort, revise or enhance the reader’s beliefs of what has occurred, what is happening and who (or what) a narrator or character is seeing or thinking about. They can also modify the reader’s conjectures about the different narrators themselves, their individual insights and ideas about the story and its characters. For instance, some authors select omniscient narrators, drawing on different “angle[s] of telling” (Neary 2014: 175). They enhance the reader’s knowledge about the plot and its characters, showing the reader a wide spectrum of different viewing angles, thoughts or character motivations, which an individual character-narrator could never have. Instead, other authors wish to restrict the reader’s narrative insight into the story world, revealing the plot from the limited perspective of an individual story character and her subjective point of view. Each narratological choice induces specific narrative effects in the reader such as surprise, suspense, etc., and it is this change of perspective in fiction which narratology and stylistics have explored for decades. However, despite considerable conceptual overlap and mutual influence, both of these fields of study have approached the phenomenon in quite different ways. On the one hand, narratological accounts of voice primarily propose frameworks which capture different (proto-)types of narrators operating on different narrative levels (“Who tells?”, “Who sees?”, “Who thinks?”). On the other hand, stylistic studies on voice are more likely to focus on the classification of recurring (linguistic) features which yield the narrative effects of perspective on a formal plane.

2



In narrative studies, the concept of “perspective” is also known as “point of view” (Bray 2016), “orientation” (Toolan 2001) or “focalisation” (Genette 1972).

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Note that narrative perspective cannot only be expressed through the way narrators see the fictional world but also through the way they reflect about it. As a result, most narratologists have traditionally subsumed the analysis of narrators’ thoughts under the concept of perspective (cf. Chatman 1978). However, stylistics has often distinguished between the visual experience which narrators impart and their reflections. In what Boris Uspensky called the “psychological perspective” (Uspensky 1973), stylisticians have devised a second concept to complement the concept of perspective and to focus more specifically on narrators’ mental state (Fowler 1971; Leech and Short 1981; Semino 2007). (2) Mind style In 1977, Roger Fowler famously coined the concept of “mind style”, describing it as “any distinctive linguistic representation of an individual mental self” (Fowler 1977: 103). More precisely, Leech and Short (1981: 150) explain that the narrator’s mind style does not become pertinent “when readers find out what the story world is but rather how that world is apprehended, or conceptualised”. As we can see, mind style is not concerned with the general choice, arrangement and orchestration of (types of) narrators but with the ways the language of narrators builds up and mirrors their psychological (and often deviant or unusual) state of mind. (3) Multimodal and cognitive approaches to voice In recent years, a growing body of research in pragmatics, stylistics and film theory has sought to adapt the notion of mind style to the analysis of theatre plays, cinematic films and television, all of which typically make use of more semiotic resources than (just) verbal language. For instance, research in stylistics on “multimodal mind style” has tried to account for the audio-visual, theatrical or cinematographic techniques which get co-deployed to reflect the film narrator’s mind style (Montoro 2010, 2011). Along the same lines, film theory has explored how traditional cinematographic techniques and conventions, e.g. voice-over, camera position, movement, can be exploited to envision the workings of a character’s mind (Chion 2009; Kozloff 1989). By analogy, recent cognitive studies on multimodal metaphors aim to retrace the film director’s audio-visual staging of sound and image to illuminate their narrators’ respective mind styles (Forceville 2007; Forceville and Urious-Aparisi 2009). These cognitive studies largely draw on “conceptual metaphor theory” or “blending theory” to elicit conceptual metaphors hidden in the multimodal texture of film (Fauconnier and Turner 2008; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). To illustrate this, let us assume a film director makes use of one semiotic channel, e.g. spoken language, to evoke one cognitive frame in the minds of the audience. At the same time, she simultaneously draws on a second semiotic channel, e.g. the pictorial image of a story character, to trigger another related cognitive frame in the minds of the film audience. When both channels are fused through the

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audio-visual track of the film, the audience is invited to align and interpret both modes, mapping features of one cognitive frame onto the other. This brings to the fore the underlying conceptual metaphor, an additional layer of narrative meaning. In light of our phenomenon of mind style, at least some of these conceptual metaphors can reveal valuable insights into the mental architecture of a story character, narrator, or even director of a film. (4) Implicit characterisation cues The notion of voice, as defined in this chapter, is probably inclusive to most studies on characterisation although some may not explicitly refer to the concept as such. Culpeper’s (2001) work on characterisation is perhaps most outspoken about the inherent bond between the linguistic strategies of characterisation on the one hand and character vision and thought on the other. As McIntyre (2014) explains, Culpeper’s cognitive model of characterisation assumes that “what you already know about the character types will influence how you perceive characters when you read” (McIntyre 2014: 152) and vice-versa. Through this reciprocal top-down and bottom-up process of interpretation, readers can find various linguistic means of characterisation, which Culpeper (2001) subcategorises into three main groups, called “explicit cues”, “implicit cues” and “authorial cues”. Most pertinent for our purpose is, the category of implicit cues. It involves the linguistic categories of “lexis, syntax, accent, dialect, paralinguistic features, visual features and, pragmatic cues such as conversational implicature and politeness strategies” (McIntyre 2014: 155). Readers (or film audiences) use implicit cues as a narrative gateway into the minds of characters. In many respects, this category strikes a chord with our previous notion of mind style. It is in this sense that the study of characterisation relates to the concept of voice. Nevertheless, I have decided to refrain from exploring this line of research any further in this chapter, not least since this handbook features an entire chapter which will do just that (see Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, Ch. 4, this volume). Instead, what this chapter will focus on are the first three approaches to voice, i.e. perspective, mind style and multimodal and cognitive approaches to voice. In Sections 2 and 3, I will review and discuss two widely influential frameworks on perspective by proxy, one from narratology and one from stylistics. I shall start with Gérard Genette’s (1972, 1980, 1988) classification scheme of “focalisation”, and then move on to Leech and Short’s (1981) “typology of speech and thought presentation”. Genette’s theory can be readily applied to ascertain the relative proximity or distance which holds between story narrators and characters. Leech and Short’s model, in turn, allows us to define which bundle of linguistic markers of speech or thought actually induces this effect. Section 4 will then centre on the second subconcept of mind style. I will first acknowledge the conceptual evolution of mind style from studies by Halliday (1971), Fowler (1977) and Leech and Short (1981) to more recent work by Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) and Semino

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(2007). Toward the end of the section, I will take an in-depth look at Paul Simpson’s study on mind style and modality (Simpson 1993). Sections 5 and 6 will then cover more recent multimodal and cognitive approaches to voice. While Section 5 explains Montoro’s (2010, 2011) multimodal extension of Fowler’s framework, Section 6 reviews Forceville’s (2002, 2007) studies on multimodal metaphors in telecinematic discourse. Before concluding in Section 8, the chapter closes in Section 7 with a final look at how some of the more conventional cinematographic techniques have been used by filmmakers to stage mind style in television and cinema. 2.

Perspective in narratology

Narratology, defined as the “ensemble of theories of narratives, narrative texts, images, spectacles, events; cultural artifacts that ‘tell a story’” (Bal 2009: 3), has had a profound impact on both literary theory and stylistics in the second half of the 20th century.3 Equipped with a valuable range of analytical frameworks, it quickly won general acceptance among literary circles, who acclaimed its “systematic study of narrative […] inspired by structuralism” (Shen 2014: 191). Before we explore the linguistic techniques which realise narrators’ perspectives, we arguably first need a more general theory of which narrators can be employed by authors to bring about specific narrative effects. Narratology is known to have devised many different theories of this kind. One of the most renowned theories was proposed by Gérard Genette (1972), who accentuates a fundamental difference between two principle narrative agents: One (the narrator) tells the story (“Who tells?”), while the other (the focaliser) perceives it (“Who sees?”). Interestingly, for Genette (1972), the focaliser does not merely see what is going on but can equally feel, think or reflect on what is happening (or was happening). So, for Genette, the focaliser is a perceptual and a (cognitive) mental narrative agent. Indeed, Genette coined the term focaliser to “shake off the optical-photographic connotations of its Anglo-American equivalent, point of view” (Toolan 2001: 60). Accordingly, Genette does not only see narrative perspective as a perceptual but also as a cognitive, reflective concept, which connects Genette’s theory of focalisation to our notion of mind style. In this vein, Toolan (2001: 60) argues that the term “focalisation” could be replaced by “orientation” since the latter is a “less visual term” than the former.

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Such a theory helps to understand, analyse, and evaluate narratives. The notion was originally coined by Todorov, who described it as “la science du récit” (Todorov 1969: 10).

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Genette (1972) identifies three general levels of focalisation: “zero focalisation”, “internal focalisation” and “external focalisation”. In zero focalisation, an omniscient narrator is capable of showing events from all possible spatio-temporal and cognitive vantage points. The narrator can slip into the minds and eyes of many different story characters and describe events at different times and in different places. Instead, in internal focalisation, the narrator adopts the restricted, subjective viewpoint of one of the story characters (the character-as-focaliser). In this configuration, the narrator’s perspective is constrained by the character’s personal, spatio-temporal and emotional point of view. The third category, external focalisation describes a (character-)external narrative viewpoint on the story world and its events. In contrast to internal focalisation, external narrators are unable to elicit the internal, mental state and thoughts of story characters. Martínez and Scheffel (2009: 67) provide a useful descriptive scheme for Genette’s three narrative levels, based on the knowledge shared between narrator and focaliser, as shown in Table 1. Table 1.

Levels of focalisation (based on Martínez and Scheffel 2009: 67)

Type of focalisation

Narrator-character relation

zero-focalisation internal focalisation external focalisation

narrator tells more than character knows narrator does not tell more than character knows narrator tells less than character knows

Genette (1980) also distinguishes two types of relations between narrator and story, i.e. the “heterodiegetic level” and the “homodiegetic level”. Heterodiegetic narrators remain outside the story world. “[If] the story [the narrator] tells is not about herself, she is a heterodiegetic narrator” (Genette 1988: 84). Homodiegetic narrators, in comparison, are firmly placed inside the story world they are describing (Genette 1988: 84). The opposition between these two narrative relations (inside the story vs outside the story) is not complementary but gradual, allowing for fuzzy boundaries (Martínez and Scheffel 2009: 85; see also Labov 1973; Rosch 1978). A story can be told on different narrative levels, which vary in regard to their relative distance to the actual core story (see Table 2). If there is more than one framing narrative, it makes sense to identify different narrative positions, which Genette (1980: 85) concurrently labels “extradiegetic” and “intradiegetic”. Extradiegetic narrators are noticeably distanced from the story world they present. They operate on a different (spatio-temporal) level, aligned with the projected reader. In contrast to extradiegetic (framing) narrators, intradiegetic (core story) narrators are closer to the stories they tell.

Narrative perspectives on voice in fiction  Table 2.

165

Different configurations of narrative levels (based on Genette 1980: 85; Martínez and Scheffel 2009: 84)

Narrative position

Narrative relation

Description*

Extradiegetic

Heterodiegetic

Extradiegetic

Homodiegetic

Intradiegetic

Heterodiegetic

Intradiegetic

Homodiegetic

Framing narrator (A), telling a core story (B) in which she does not take part. Framing narrator (A), telling a core story (B) in which she does take part Narrator of core story (B) does not take part in the story she tells Narrator of core story (B) does take part in the story she tells

* (A) refers to the narrative position and (B) to the narrative relation.

Let us illustrate how these narrative classifications can be applied to assess narrative perspective in literary prose: (1) Call me Ishmael. Some years ago, never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. (Melville [1851] 1920: 7)

We can see that Melville’s novel Moby Dick begins by explicitly introducing the extradiegetic narrator of his novel Moby Dick, with the direct request “Call me Ishmael”. By use of various lexical means (temporal adverbials, past tense verbs, etc.), the narrator clearly indicates his spatio-temporal distance from the actual story action (“some years ago”, “never mind how long precisely”). Meanwhile, the reader is informed that the framing narrator is homodiegetic, since he also takes part in the story (“I thought I would sail about a little …”).4 In the course of the story, we find out that Melville makes use of internal focalisation, revealing the story action from the cognitive and spatio-temporal perspective of his young character-focaliser. In many scenes, then, the narrator reveals the inner reflections and emotions of his character-focaliser: (2) As I walked away I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness, concerning him. And somehow at the time, I felt a sympathy and a sorry for him […] (Melville 1920: 81)

4



This is what narratologists often call an “I-I-narrative”, relating to the first person pronoun of the framing extradiegetic narrator and the first person pronoun of the character-focaliser.

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The excerpt grants us explicit access to the character’s internal thoughts, which underscores the internal focalisation of the novel. However, in many passages (see Example 3), character emotions are not explicitly named but rather surface implicitly through skillful descriptions of the ongoing story action. For instance, the narrator’s poetic use of similes, e.g. “as if sucked into a morass”, the reification of emotions, e.g. “darted […] his far fiercer curse into the hated whale” and evaluative adjectives and adverbs, e.g. “far fiercer curse”, “hated whale”, “spasmodically rolled” indicate the focaliser’s emotional involvement as well as his own interpretation of other characters’ feelings. Example (3) can serve as a paradigmatic example for the novel’s action sequences depicting the relentless fight between the whaling crew and Moby Dick: (3) [Ahab] was even thus close to [Moby Dick]; when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed, spasmodically rolled his nigh flank against the bow; and without staving a hole in it, so suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed into the sea. (Melville 1920: 34)

Throughout the story, the action is reported from the stable perspective of Melville’s character-focaliser. In fact, the story action is only portrayed through the eyes of this character. While the narrative level in Moby Dick sometimes oscillates between the descriptive account of the homodiegetic narrator in the core narrative and the reflective comments of the extradiegetic narrator, the focalisation in the core narrative never actually changes but stays constant throughout the novel. With a view to the narrative construction of voice, this difference between narrator and focaliser seems essential because the two narrative agents are likely to speak, feel and think differently about the story events. It is often important to identify the language of the extradiegetic narrator to see if it differs or coincides with the language of the character-focaliser.5 This subtle layering of narrative portrayals is sometimes missed in stylistics or literary pragmatics. For instance, third-person narratives have often been considered to be more objective than their first-person counterparts (Leech and Short 1981: 300). However, if we apply Genette’s division of narration and focalisation to third-person narratives, we may come to a different conclusion: If the narrator of a third-person narrative “adopt[s] the [focaliser’s] experiencing viewpoint”, then

5



Rimmon-Kenan (1983) explains that the first-person retrospective narrative in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations also involves an older narrator and a very young focaliser. Accordingly, she claims “[a]lthough this is a record of things as the child saw, felt, understood them, words like ‘accessories’ and ‘appendages’ are clearly not within the child’s vocabulary” (1983: 74).

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the resulting narrative is likely to be as subjective as first-person narrators (Shen 2014: 197). Despite its many virtues, Genette’s theory of focalisation is not without shortcomings. Neary (2014: 179), for instance, has argued that Genette’s approach “fails to comment meaningfully upon how point of view effects are produced in a narrative”, and some categorical relations remain strangely neglected, e.g. external focalisation and hetero-/homodiegetic narration (Simpson 1993: 34).6 Another point of criticism is the fact that Genette does not provide any insight into the linguistic tool box with which narrative focalisation may be realised. This is what we are going to peruse in the next section. We will take a look at the phenomenon of speech and thought presentation; an object of study shared by narratology and stylistics. 3.

Perspective in stylistics

Once we detect the focalisation of a given story, we can turn our attention to the linguistic techniques which trigger effects of narrative perspective. In narratology, the investigation of such narrative techniques traditionally centres on the (re-) presentation of character speech or thought. Toolan (2001: 133) addresses the difference between focalisation and speech representation. He argues that with focalisation, the crucial question is “[f]rom whose spatio-temporal [or cognitive] orientation is [the story] conveyed”, whereas in speech and thought presentation, we wonder “[to] whom […] we attribute these spoken words or articulated thoughts” (Toolan 2001: 133). Despite a difference in focus, focalisation and speech or thought presentation are intertwined, and this section attempts to make this relationship more tangible. The presentation of character speech and thought is especially relevant for focalisation because it reifies (perhaps more than any other narrative technique) the conceptual relationship which holds between narrator (who tells?) and focaliser (who sees?). Consider my own variations of the following sentence I selected randomly from Katherine Mansfield’s short story “At the bay”: “I believe in pretty girls having a good time,” said Mrs. Kember: (4a) I believe in pretty girls having a good time. (free direct speech, FDS) (4b) “I believe in pretty girls having a good time,” said Mrs Kember. (direct speech, DS)

6



Genette’s overt disregard of linguistic and narrative strategies, designed to shed light on point of view effects, might possibly be explained by his own decision to separate the aspect of focalisation from the one he calls mood, defined as the “questions that pertain to the various techniques for ‘regulation of narrative information’” (Genette 1988: 41).

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(4c) She would believe in pretty girls having a good time. (free indirect speech, FIS) (4d) Mrs Kember said that she believed in pretty girls having a good time. (indirect speech, IS) (4e) Mrs Kember advised Beryl to enjoy herself. (narrative report of speech act, NRSA) (4f) Mrs Kember watched Beryl swim. (narrative report of action, NRA)

Note that the interference of the narrator on the report of these sentences seems to increase from (4a) to (4  f). The first type (4a) is frequently called “free direct speech” (Leech and Short 1981: 322). It lacks some of the most conventional features of direct speech, i.e. the quotation marks and the reporting clause. Hence, narratorial imposition is minimal. Nevertheless, we can consider (4a) a natural, authentic repetition of an original source, very similar to direct speech (4b). Direct speech (4b) provides more evidence of the narrator’s presence than free direct speech (4a). It is typically considered as the default (verbatim) reproduction of an original source. (4c) is an example of “free indirect speech” by Leech and Short (1988: 325). Just as free direct speech (4a), it does not feature a reporting clause but shifts the verb tense and pronouns of the sentence. It “is marked by frequent use of modal verbs (must, should, had to, could, might, would) and sentence adverbials (certainly, perhaps, maybe, surely, of course, etc.) […], disclosing the character’s needs or wants” (Toolan 2001: 131, my emphasis). This particular use of modality moves free indirect speech into an intermediary position between direct and indirect speech (4d), e.g. “she would believe […]”. This position can become a powerful storytelling tool when the reader is “presented with a form which has indications of an intervening narrator but also some flavor of the original speech” (Leech and Short 1981: 326). This double layer allows readers to relive the experience of characters while being distanced from their subjective reflections. Upon closer inspection, we can see that (4e) and (4  f) depart even further from the character’s subjective point of view. Leech and Short (1981: 324) call these speech presentation types “narrative report of speech act” and “narrative report of action” respectively (Leech and Short 1981: 324).7 The narrative report of speech act merely identifies the speech act (or speech acts) of a given speaker-charac-

7

Narratological approaches to the study of speech presentation have come up with a plethora of different terms for the two phenomena under discussion. For instance, Bal (1985: 55) conflates both categories into one, the so-called “narrator’s text”. Moreover, Toolan (2001) adopts Leech and Short’s (1981) concept of narrative report of speech act (NRSA) but replaces the term narrative report of action (NRA) with “pure narrative sentence”. In a different approach, Martínez and Scheffler (2009: 65) call the two categories in question “Gesprächsbericht” (~NRA) and “Erwähnung des sprachlichen Akts” (NRSA).

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ter. It neither reproduces faithfully the speaker’s original contribution nor does it “commit to giving a sense of what was said” (Leech and Short 1981: 323). The narrative report of action simply “shows” observable story activities or events from an omniscient narrator’s point of view, deliberately excluding speech acts. This implies that the reported happenings and reflections do not reflect the (constrained) spatio-temporal or cognitive perspective of one of the story characters. The different types of speech presentation can be arranged systematically along a cline of (a) increasing or decreasing reader psychological involvement (or distance) and (b) increasing or decreasing narratorial imposition (see Figure 1). We can see how the individual linguistic make-up of the different presentation types is conducive to different types (and levels) of narrator (see focalisation). This explains why it is actually worthwhile considering different classes of speech and thought presentation. They do not only characterise how narrators report what characters are saying but, as we shall see, also how narrators report what characters are thinking. Narrator apparently in total control of report

Narrator apparently under partial control or report

Narrator apparently not in control of of report at all

Varieties of speech presentation NRA

NRSA

IS

FIS

DS

FDS

Figure 1. Cline of ‘interference’ in report (Leech and Short 1981: 324)

Let us now consider the various possible modes of thought presentation, by using another sample sentence of my own choosing: (5a) I can make him an omelette everyday. (Free direct thought, FDT) (5b) “I can make him an omelette everyday”, she thought. (Direct thought, DT) (5c) She could make him an omlette everyday. (Free indirect thought, FIT) (5d) She thought (that) she could make him an omelette everyday. (Indirect thought, IT) (5e) She thought about his happiness. (Narrative Report of Thought Act, NRTA)

When we compare the formal characteristics of thought presentation with those of speech presentation, we see that they are very similar. For instance, “indirect thought” mirrors indirect speech. It uses a reporting clause, avoids quotation marks and shifts the tense of the verb form backward. Such formal analogies may also be elicited for the other presentational modes. Identical in form, both speech

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and thought presentation can be expected to yield comparable narrative effects. In line with our dimensional view of speech presentation (cf. Figure 2), the modes of thought presentation provide a more or less direct, “authentic” presentation of character thoughts. Inversely, the modes also align relative to their degree of narratorial imposition on the presentation of character thought. Narrator apparently in total control of report

Narrator apparently under partial control or report

Narrator apparently not in control of report at all

Varieties of thought presentation NRTA

IT

FIT

DT

FDT

Figure 2. Cline of ‘narrator interference’ in thought presentation (based on Leech and Short 1981: 344)

Again, as in speech presentation (cf. free indirect speech), “free indirect thought” represents an intriguing narratorial choice for authors, who can overlap the narrator’s and the character’s psychological perspective. In fact, on the basis of formal criteria only, free indirect thought makes it impossible for readers to discriminate between the narrator’s and character’s reflections. The missing reporting clause in free indirect speech and thought leaves the reader guessing if the attributed proposition was actually voiced by the narrator or the character (or both). Authors can use this blurring effect to their advantage, keeping the interpretation of storylines in the vague, switching back and forth between indirect thought and free indirect thought. An important final distinction in Leech and Short’s (1981) classification regards the different normative value which readers typically accord to free indirect speech and free indirect thought. Note that casual face-to-face communication is usually grounded on our mutual expectation that (under normal circumstances) we provide a (more or less) authentic and reliable record of what we have experienced. Direct speech can thereby be expected to be the norm of speech presentation.8 In contrast to spoken language, we do not expect anyone to have direct access to the minds of others. As a result, most of us are inclined to define indirect thought as the standard for presenting thought in fiction.

8



Tannen (1989) reminds us that most of us know that human recollections are necessarily constructed. In fact, we can expect most of direct speech to exceed verbatim renditions of what actually happened.

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In line with Leech and Short’s (1981) argumentation, the choice of free indirect speech constitutes a move away from the default mode of speech presentation mode (direct speech), towards greater narratorial intervention. In contrast, the choice of free indirect thought implies a move toward the standard mode of thought presentation (indirect thought), and thus toward a more “accurate” description of the character’s mind. As we have seen, narratology has much to offer in light of a pragmatic approach to voice in fiction. Its frameworks for the description of narrative perspective as well as its refined models for speech and thought presentation offer great insights into the complex techniques which enable authors to filter their stories through the eyes and minds of narrators and characters. They also constitute veritable points of departure and welcome additions to the research literature in stylistics and literary pragmatics, more of which will be discussed presently. 4.

Mind style

Over the last four decades, both stylistics and pragmatics have grown rapidly into burgeoning linguistic disciplines, constantly expanding their theoretical outreach and readjusting their analytical frameworks to ever new objects of study. It is exactly this joint, parallel development of literary pragmatics and stylistics which makes it often difficult to distinguish stylistic from pragmatic research. So, it makes sense to qualify research at the intersection of literary pragmatics and stylistics as pragmastylistic research (Black 2006; Chapman and Clark 2014; Clark 2009a; Watson 2012).9 Warner (2014: 364), for instance, makes a case for a gradual division of stylistic and pragmatic research into more text-focussed (stylistic) and more world-focussed (pragmatic) studies. To this end, stylistic studies would concentrate more on the linguistic features of literary styles, whereas pragmatic studies would embrace the context of use and the reader-reception of fiction. However, it appears that this differentiation is too idealised and is hardly tenable when applied to specific stylistic or pragmatic approaches to fiction. Most influential works in stylistics have gone beyond the mere positivist enumeration of linguistic features, and instead attempted to bridge language choice and (fictional) context. In fact, any critical reading of both narratological and stylistic research is bound to unearth the inherent, complementary nature of these research traditions, seeking to relate narrative (linguistic) strategies to their underlying narrative functions and effects. Moving forward, I will assemble the most important studies on mind style in pragmastylistics, starting with an overview 9



Black (2006: 3) proposed the concept “pragmatic stylistics” for this strand of research.

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of seminal work conducted by Halliday (1971), Fowler (1977), Leech and Short (1981) and Semino (2002, 2009). I will then focus on Simpson’s (1993) influential account of a modal grammar of point of view to show how mind style can be connected to our previous notion of perspective. 4.1.

The evolution of mind style

The concept of mind style (see Section 1) was originally coined by Fowler (1977) and further refined in subsequent years (Leech and Short 1981; Fowler 1996; Semino 2002, 2009). Fowler (1977: 76) himself originally defined the term as “[c]umulatively, consistent structural options, agreeing in cutting the presented world to one pattern or another, give rise to an impression of a world-view […]”. This reading of the concept clearly relates to the author’s specific choice of language patterns, which have the potential to transport us into narrators’ minds. Although one can only speculate as to how much data is necessary to eke out the mind style of a fictional persona, more “recent work incorporating corpus linguistic methods has proven that the presence of recurring patterns over a larger amount of data becomes a more efficient way of projecting mind styles” (Nørgaard, Busse and Montoro 2010: 112). Semino (2002) questions Fowler’s varying use of the term in many of his writings.10 To resolve this issue, Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) introduce a new terminology devised to extend the notion of mind style. To this end, the authors separate two interrelated concepts called “world view” and “mind style”. The term “world view” designates a narrator’s “relatively permanent mental representations of the “reality” [she] inhabit[s]” (Semino 2007: 169). These representations may either be solely confined to the mind of the individual narrator or they may be shared with other members of a fictional group or society. In contrast, the term “mind style” (in Semino and Swindlehurst’s sense) is meant to “capture […] a fictional individual’s mental processes, including thoughts, memories, intentions, desires, evaluations, feelings, emotions, and so on” (Semino 2007: 169). This way, Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) restrict Fowler’s original broad reading of the term to the linguistic representation of the narrator’s psychological, mental functioning. The subtle distinction between world view and mind style is an effective classificatory tool in stylistic analyses. Nevertheless, it is not always easy to determine which narrative passages should be classified as mind style and which ones as

10

Sometimes, Fowler (1996: 159) seems to use mind style as an umbrella term, subsuming similar concepts, e.g. world view or ideological point of view, but he also takes recourse to various other definitions of the term which “appear to convey different slants” (Semino 2002: 96).

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world view since the (dysfunctional) psychological state of a narrator usually has a direct influence on her individual world view (and vice-versa). In a similar vein, Leech and Short (1981) contend that all language use (even non-fictional ones) contains traces of the author’s affective, interpersonal, emotional stance (see also Landert, Ch. 16, this volume). Yet, there are more neutral narrative representations that we perceive as “natural and uncontrived”, so we usually disregard them in favour of the more salient, marked styles, which “clearly impose an unorthodox conception of the fictional world” (Leech and Short 1981: 189). This position strikes a chord with the traditional principles from “foregrounding theory” (Jakobson 1960; Mukarovský 1970). In formalist literary theory, it is argued that in texts “foregrounded elements achieve salience through deviation from the norm […]. The characteristics of such foregrounded elements includes ‘unexpectedness, unusualness, and uniqueness’ […]” (Culpeper 2001: 129). To be sure, most studies on mind style in fiction have been largely influenced by the principles of foregrounding, considering only conspicuous, distorted mind styles (and their respective linguistic representations). This explains why the story characters whose mental lives have been subject to stylistic investigation turn out to suffer from mental deficiencies or psychological delusions.11 Similarly, more recent narratological research, which explores the relationship between narrative perspective and character’s minds, endorses the foregrounding principle (Bernaerts et al. 2013; Fludernik 2003; Herman 2003, 2009; Palmer 2004). Margolin’s work on cognitive style, for instance, is compatible to stylistic studies of mind style (Margolin 1983, 1986, 1990). She even remarks that within literature there is a “preference […] for nonstandard forms of cognitive functioning, be they rare or marginal, deviant, or involving a failure, breakdown, or lack of standard patterns” (Margolin 2003: 278). Concurrently, Halliday (1971) explored the mentally-deprived cognitive state of the Neanderthal “Lok” in William Golding’s novel The Inheritors, while Fowler (1977) investigated the peculiar mental style of Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) analysed the estranged minds of “Chief Bromden” in Kesey’s One Flew over the Cockoo’s Nest (Semino and Swindlehurst 1996). Each one of these studies has drawn on different analytical frameworks. Halliday (1971) and Fowler (1977), for example, spot salient syntactic transitivity patterns, restrictive or selective vocabulary choices or unconventional, recurring metaphors, personifications or other figures of speech. Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) apply more recent models from cognitive linguistics to probe the psyche of story characters (Fauconnier and Turner 2008; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Turner and Fauconnier 2003). They manage to reveal

11

See Semino (2002: 154) for a comprehensive overview of studies on mind style and Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla (Ch. 4, this volume).

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how “consistent and nonconventional metaphorical patterns within a particular text reflect the conceptual system of [story characters]” (Semino and Swindlehurst 1996: 188).12 In principle, cognitive linguistics suggests that conventional metaphorical expressions mirror the underlying patterns of thought entrenched in the minds of speakers. However, Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) do not only search literary texts for conventional but also search for nonconventional metaphors, and in so doing again follow the basic principles of foregrounding theory. What cognitive stylistics has achieved is to open up stylistics to more contemporary approaches to the study of language in context, both in pragmatics and discourse analysis. However, all of these approaches have paved the way for the practical application of mind style in a range of different novels, plays and films. 4.2.

Mind style and modality

Simpson’s (1993) study on modality and voice has the simple but convincing premise that the modality of a fictional text characterises the mind style of different types of narrators. His work is largely based on Uspensky’s (1973) and Fowler’s (1986) studies on narrative style. Against this conceptual backdrop, Simpson sets out to build what he calls a modal grammar of point of view. One of Simpson’s main arguments is that the author’s distinct choice of modal expressions gives rise to different points of view. Note that Simpson explicitly acknowledges that the term “point of view” is defined by narrators’ particular spatio-temporal orientation in the story world (perspective) as well as their mental and emotional stance (mind style). In this way, Simpson’s framework successfully bridges the two concepts of perspective and mind style discussed beforehand. Simpson’s framework proves helpful in working around some of the problematic cross-classifications which severely limited Fowler’s framework. In his framework, he defines three systems of modality, i.e. the “deontic system”, the “boulomaic system”, and the “epistemic system” (which includes the subordinate category of “perception”). Deontic modality is chiefly concerned with lexical constructions (e.g. modal auxiliaries, adjectival and participal combinations), expressing the speaker’s attitude toward the degree of obligation, permission or requirement connected to the fulfilment of a particular action. Boulomaic modality refers to the speaker’s wishes and desires while epistemic modality, relates to the degree of certainty with which speakers qualify the truth of their propositions.

12

For more detail on cognitive linguistic approaches to mind style, see Section 6 of this Chapter.

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Simpson (1993: 51) claims that, for English, modality is “distributed evenly across the point of view categories and that certain modalities are specific to, or at least dominant in, particular categories”. He distinguishes between two narrative perspectives: “category A” and “category B”. Category A consists of first person homodiegetic narrators, who participate in the story action. In contrast, category B contains third person heterodiegetic narrators, who are not part of the story action. If a category B narrative presents the thoughts of story characters, Simpson (1993: 249) calls the resulting subtype the “reflective mode”. The character whose mental position is adopted or reflected then becomes the “reflector” of the story. If a category B narrative prevents readers to partake in the mental world of characters, Simpson calls the effect, the “narratorial mode” (Simpson 1993: 56). In addition, he subclassifies narrative category A and B with respect to a story’s particular use of modality, i.e. its “positive”, “neutral” or “negative modal shading” (Simpson 1993: 56). A positive modal shading of narratives involves the frequent use of deontic and boulomaic modal constructions. The salience of these two categories of modality draw readers closer to characters’ subjective desires, beliefs, commitments and obligations, making their actions and motivations more believable and plausible. Neutral shading can be defined by a lack of modality throughout the entire narrative. This technique renders stories more “objective”, fact-oriented, assertive, reporting only on what is happening, rather than what narrators (or characters) think or belief. Finally, negative shading becomes manifest in “the appropriate use of (typically lower values of) epistemic and perception modality” (Neary 2014: 183). A pervasive narrative effect of negative shading is the uncertainty of narrators towards his (or his character’s) perceptions or reflections. Negative shading could also provide important (linguistic) symptomatic clues for the unreliability of the narrative account. Linking perspective and mind style, Simpson’s framework connects narratological models of perspective and mind style on at least three counts: (a) Its exact description of narrative modality helps to spot and describe different types of focalisation, and (b) it shows how narrative perspective and narrator’s mind style can be defined by the effective choice of modal expressions and (c) it shows how (a) and (b) are intrinsically related factors in the linguistic construction of narrative action. As convincing as Simpson’s approach may be, we should not assume that readers, equipped with his framework, can use it to simply read the mindset of narrators off the page. Here, different levels of narration come into play (see Section 2). For instance, authors can trick their readers into believing that an extradiegetic narrator is in a normal, reliable psychological state only to override these effects at a later stage in the story. At other times, homodiegetic narrators participating as characters in the story action may deliberately stage their verbal behaviour in a particular fashion so as to misguide other story characters into believing that they are shocked, mesmerised, overjoyed or excited when, in fact, they are not. From

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a pragmatic point of view, the modal interpretation of both perspective and mind style without further consideration of the respective narrative context remains futile. Readers need to activate their background knowledge to grasp the cognitive world of a story character, not only the language she displays. In addition, Simpson’s framework on modality could be fruitfully related to current pragmatic research on the language of evaluation and emotion (Cortazzi and Jin 2000; see also Langlotz, Ch. 17, this volume). The constantly growing body of research on evaluation seems particularly suited to enrich and enhance Simpson’s model, further closing the gap between corpus-driven research on evaluation, identity research in sociolinguistics and narratological and pragmastylistic studies on fiction (Bednarek 2006; Hunston and Thompson 2000; Martin and White 2007; Thompson and Alba-Juez 2014). Joining research traditions in these three fields of research may provide new research opportunities, especially concerning research on mind style. 5.

Multimodality and mind style

If mind style represents “the world-view of an author, or a narrator, or a character, constituted by the ideational structure of the text” (Fowler 1996: 214), then such “texts” can ˗ by logical necessity ˗ contain all types of semiotic modes (Montoro 2011: 71; Bockting 1994: 160). The multimodal approach to language description lends itself well to Fowler’s conception of mind style, since both approaches (mind style and multimodal discourse analysis) are essentially derived from the same functional theory of language, i.e. systemic functional linguistics. Montoro (2011) was one of the first researchers to realise the methodological benefits which follow from this theoretical tie, exploring the multimodal dimension of mind style in both novels and films. She critically comments on the overt delimitation of most mind style research, which focusses only on “psychologically unconventional mind[s]” (Montoro 2011: 72). In contrast, she claims that the mind style of a story character need not necessarily be deviant from the norm or consistently exceptional throughout an entire novel or play. In contrast, she argues it is worthwhile exploring the mind style changes as the novel, play or film unfolds. In her exemplary study on Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love and its subsequent film adaptation by Roger Michell (2004), Montoro (2011: 72) effectively manages to “reveal [the main character’s] transition from being initially unaffected by cognitive, mental or psychological idiosyncrasies to eventually becoming a disturbed individual”. The plot of novel and film revolves around the developing relation between the two main characters, Joe Rose and Jed Parry. In the course of the novel (or film), Joe Rose’s mind style is transformed from a comparably “normal” to a seriously confused mental state. In contrast, the second main character,

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Jed Perry, who suffers from the Clérambault syndrome,13 is a psychologically troubled individual but his mind style remains more or less consistent throughout the story. Montoro (2011) works out the linguistic strategies through which McEwan exposes the two different mind styles of both characters. For instance, Joe Rose’s slow change of mental health is mirrored by the increasing number of epistemic modals, revealing the speaker’s growing uncertainty about what he perceives. In addition, Montoro (2011: 72) mentions other linguistic constructions which ­McEwan frequently employs to shift Joe Rose’s mind style, e.g. “modal lexical verbs […], adjectival constructions of the type to be sure and it’s certain that, epistemic modal adverbs […], nominal expressions, if-clauses and questions […]”. As opposed to Joe Rose’s linguistic repertoire, the mind style of Jed Parry is marked by a conspicuous absence of epistemic modals. In their place, we can find large numbers of verba sentiendi, evaluative adjectives, overlexicalisations and cognitive verbs, characterising Parry’s emotional, subjective stance as well as his personal conviction that Rose must be in love with him. Following the analysis of the novel, Montoro (2011) then proceeds to the film adaptation of the novel. She explains how the same mind style effects are realised through the skillful use of gestures and camera techniques. For example, Michell’s film portrays the mind style of the Jed Parry character, using recurring shots of deictic and iconic gestures as well as suggestive camera movements and framing techniques, e.g. close-ups. The purpose of these techniques is to let the film audience see how Parry experiences his world while he is affected by his erotomanic disposition: Cinema spectators are encouraged to focus on the specific part of Parry’s body that is apparently communicating the version of events he believes in. His point of view, consequently, is expressed via his voice, his linguistic choices and his hands. (Montoro 2011: 77–78)

In a similar vein, the director gears the film audience towards a specific psychological interpretation of the story, using deictic gestures, both in a literal and metaphorical way (referring to the persons he longs for, i.e. Joe Rose. Parry’s rhythmic use of gestural beats underscores the speaker’s emotional involvement in the love he claims to have for Joe Rose.14 We can see that beats can be employed in films to reinforce Parry’s epistemic certitude towards what he is thinking (and saying) (Montoro 2011: 78). In Semple and Smyth (2013: 90), the Clérambault syndrome is defined as “a form of delusion of love. The patient […] believes that another, higher status individual is in love with them”. 14 McNeill (2005: 40) defines beats as “[…] mere flicks of the hand(s) up and down or back and forth that seem to ‘beat’ time along with the rhythm of the speech”. 13

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Montoro (2011) then continues to show how the directors make use of other types of gestures in an effort to co-construct the visual mind style of fictional characters, but also investigates what she calls cinematic mind style indicators. Among these indicators, we can find the frequent close up shots of Parry’s hands which clearly enforce the figurative, mental interpretation of gestures in the film. Another filmic device, which Montoro (2011) addresses, is the particular camera position, which visually suggests the absorbing presence of Jed Parry onto Joe Rose throughout the entire film: The angle of the medium shot in which the scene is filmed gives us a frontal image of Rose and eventually an indication of what appears to be Parry’s hair. This technique […] signal[s] to the audience the presence of an individual whose identity is not made explicit. (Montoro 2011: 81)

In contrast, Rose’s growing confusion and mental bewilderment is cinematically rendered by a number of swiftly changing, unusual camera angles. The marked use of cinematic pacing (speed and slow-motion shots) contributes to the subjective presentation of events as if they were projected through Rose’s eyes. Other filmic style indicators include the “shaky” effect of steady cam(era)s as well as the constant blurring and re-focussing of the film shots (Montoro 2011: 82–83). 6.

Cognitive approaches to mind style

The studies of Forceville (2002) and Montoro (2010) are largely based on the notion of multimodal conceptual metaphors (Feng and O’Halloran 2013; Forceville 1996; O’Halloran 2003, 2006), which Forceville (2007) defines as: a metaphor whose target and source are not, or not exclusively, rendered in the same mode […] Monomodal metaphors will here be defined as metaphors whose two terms are predominantly or exclusively rendered in the same mode. (Forceville 2007: 21, 24)

The concept of a multimodal metaphor works on two levels: the cognitive and the semiotic level. On the cognitive level, we can identify a concrete, well-structured domain, i.e. the “source domain” and a commonly more abstract, less-structured domain, i.e. the “target domain”. Both are conceptual bundles of structured knowledge, also called frames, deeply entrenched in the reader’s brain. Cognitive linguists commonly assume that readers project source domain features to the target domain. The result of this “mapping” process is what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) call a “conceptual metaphor”, e.g. anger (target domain) is a natural force (source domain).15

15

For more comprehensive overviews of other studies on multimodal metaphors in gen-

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On the semiotic level, these cognitive metaphors are realised or instantiated by different semiotic resources. If conceptual metaphors are represented by one semiotic mode only, they are called monomodal metaphors (Forceville 2002); if source and target domain are represented by two different semiotic modes, Forceville (2002) speaks of multimodal metaphors. While, in principle, multimodal metaphors might take on all semiotic shapes and sizes, verbo-pictorial bonds seem to be particularly frequent in cinematic discourse: Verbo-pictorial metaphor[ical expressions], of course, are also possible cinematographically: a significant juxtaposition of a line of dialogue, or a word on a screen signpost, with a close up of a character; can result in a verbo-pictoral metaphor. (Forceville 2002: 10)

Alongside Semino and Swindlehurst’s original work (1996), Forceville (2002) and Montoro (2011) look for conceptual metaphors in novels and their related film adaptations. Their aim is to show how these conceptual metaphors have been transformed or retained in the film medium. More specifically, they are interested in the particular ways in which these underlying conceptual metaphors are realised by different audio-visual resources in film.16 Forceville (1999), for instance, successfully probes Paul Schrader’s film adaptation of McEwan’s (1981) book The Comfort of Strangers. He identifies various cinematographic strategies through which Schrader realises only few, recurring conceptual metaphors. One of these conceptual metaphors is colin is a child . In the film, this conceptual metaphor is realised in different ways: For instance, the camera shows Colin, one of the lead characters of both novel and film, repeatedly in a specific pose, his hands in his pockets, wearing white garments (pointing symbolically to his ignorance and innocence). Colin’s entire body language (pose, mimics, gesture, moves) indicate that he is subdued, especially in the presence of other characters, resulting in a purely visual (monomodal) realisation of the conceptual metaphor. However, Forceville (1999) also mentions various scenes in Schrader’s film, in which the colin is a child metaphor is expressed by different semiotic means. In the first scene, for instance, Colin’s wife Mary is on the phone, evidently talking about her children. At the same time, the camera pans over to Colin, drawing a subtle multimodal connection between the visual image of Colin’s child-like body language and Mary’s telephone conversation about her

eral or pictorial metaphors in particular, consult McIntyre (2008), Carroll (1996) and Tredell (1998). 16 To a certain degree, these text-to-screen adaptations provide a suitable background for studies on multimodal metaphor since the latter presents itself “not as an isolated specimen, but in a structural fashion [, with a] verbal metaphor [being] in turn adapted, in wholly or partly visual terms, in the filmed version of his or her novel” (Forceville 2002: 180).

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children. At a later stage in the story, when Mary is shown talking to Colin about her childhood experiences, the camera again frequently stays on Colin for longer stretches of time although Mary is the talking party. Again, the same multimodal metaphor is evoked.17 Forceville (2002) devises a categorisation scheme to account for the different surface realisations of the conceptual metaphors in fiction across different media, including both monomodal and multimodal instantiations. From a multimodal perspective, the categories “explicit mixed medial signalling” and “implicit mixed medial signalling” are most valuable. Forceville (1999: 192) explains that explicit mixed medial signalling occurs when a film explicitly “cues two domains via different channels and link[s] them in such a way that a metaphorical identification is highly probable” (my emphasis). As one such “strong indicator” (Forceville 1999: 192) he gives the example of a close-up shot on a character’s grimacing face which is accompanied by a voice-over commentary on the nature of clowns. On the one hand, the visual depiction of the face cues the conceptual domain of the individual story character (it metonymically stands for him). On the other hand, the voice-over talk of clowns (which need not include the exact lexical expression “clown”) evokes the conceptual domain of clown . When combined, both auditive and visual resources trigger the underlying conceptual metaphor character x is a clown ; the grimacing being a feature which both conceptual domains share (character is grimacing and clowns are typically grimacing). The grimacing feature thus boosts and facilitates the metaphorical linkage between the conceptual domains even further; in other words, it makes it more obvious, explicit. Another example of explicit mixed medial signalling can be found in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). At the night of Marion Crane’s late arrival at Bates’ motel, Marion Crane and Norman Bates have a talk while Crane is having dinner in Norman Bate’s living room. During the first part of this conversation, both characters are intermittently shown by the camera, using a shot-reverse-shot routine. As both characters are visually staged from a perspective only slightly inferior to the characters, the topic of the conversation suddenly abruptly shifts to the nature and character of Norman’s mother. In this instant, the viewing angle swiftly changes, now showing Norman from an extremely oblique camera angle and radically inferior to the character in focus (see Figure 3, which first shows Norman Bates before (shot 1) and after the change of topic). While the camera locates the main character at the forefront of the action, it vividly places a padded, attacking owl, strapped to the wall behind Norman, in the left upper part of the frame. This obvious change both in topic (verbal channel) and visual composition (camera angle) can be seen as an

17

Forceville (2002: 190) calls this “a metonymic juxtaposition of inviting their metaphorical identification”.

colin

and

children ,

Narrative perspectives on voice in fiction  Shot No Screenplay (Excerpts) S hot 1

N orman : No. People never run away from anything. (pause) The rain didn’t last very long. (Turning suddenly) You know what I think? I think we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever climb out. We scratch and claw … but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch […]

S hot 2

N orman : She had to raise me all by herself after my dad died … I was only five … and it must have been a strain. Oh, she didn’t have to go out to work or anything, Dad left us with a little something … anyway, a few years ago … Mother met a man. He talked her into building this motel … We could have talked her into anything … and when […]

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Shot

Figure 3. Multimodal metaphor in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); ©1960 Shamley ­Productions, Inc.; Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC

explicit mixed signalling of the underlying conceptual metaphor: bate ’ s mother is a predator / bird of prey . In contrast to explicit mixed medial signalling, in implicit mixed medial signalling the audio-visual juxtaposition of metaphorical cues is merely suggested implicitly to the film audience, yet this connection is not as obvious and “not obligatory” (Forceville 1999: 194). To be precise, a mixed medial signalling of conceptual metaphors becomes implicit, once its individual multimodal cues are temporally displaced from each other. Note that in the two aforementioned examples, the audiovisual cues co-occurred at the same time on screen. Crane and Bates’ talk about the motel owner’s mother, for instance, coincides with the change in camera position and the visual presentation of the owl at the same (screen) time. In contrast, Forceville (1999) exemplifies implicit mixed medial signalling by referring to a musical theme which is recurrently played in association with children at the beginning of a film. If an adult character is then accompanied by the same musical piece toward the end of the same film, the conceptual metaphor: character is a child becomes possible. However, we can see that this metaphorical link is merely suggested in a vague fashion. Forceville (1999: 194) argues

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convincingly that the music, in the scene with the adult character, might possibly emanate from a merry-go round at which the character glances. While a child-like musical theme can be expected to be played at merry-go rounds, the film audience might not even be aware of the underlying conceptual metaphor, which presents itself. One may even determine there is not one. In line with Forceville’s approach to multimodal metaphors, Montoro (2010: 38–40) uncovers multifarious multimodal constructions in Harron’s filmic version of American Psycho (2000), which allow conceptual metaphors, e.g. anger is a substance in a container , anger is a natural force , to come to life on the silver screen. In addition to the visual mode, she also includes the “sonic effects” (Montoro 2010: 38) of film sounds, which often serve the purpose of source domains in filmic constructions of multimodal metaphors. So far, we have seen how multimodal mind styles are formed in feature films. We have also explored how our notion of multimodal metaphors can broaden our perspective of mind style in film. Finally, we shall now take a look at the ways film studies have discussed the conventional use of cinematic techniques to stage narrative effects of voice in film and television. 7.

Voice as cinematic practice

Arguably one of the most influential approaches to the linguistic analysis of interpersonal meaning of pictures is Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) systemic functional approach to multimodality. Van Leeuwen (1996: 66) describes how interpersonal relations in pictures are constituted between “the viewer and those depicted”. Analogously, the style of showing characters in films is instrumental to how film audiences interpret how characters feel, think and perceive the cinematic world. To this end, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996: 146) distinguish two main analytical planes which impose on the interpersonal meaning of visual representations, i.e. distance and power. As far as distance is concerned, the framing of a shot can have a crucial impact on how the film audience interprets the characters, while wide angle, long shots usually convey a feeling of social and interpersonal distance between the depicted characters and the audience. A close up, alongside possible zoom effects, tends to have the opposite effect of forcing the film audience into a close social relation with characters. Confronting the viewer with the close-up image of the character’s face commonly invites the audience to contemplate the character’s emotional state of mind. By metaphorical extension, spatial distance runs parallel to social distance. Spatial proximity then equates with the viewer’s social involvement with the film’s characters and story action. In the same vein, the choice of horizontal camera position can create viewer involvement. A straight positioning of the camera, in which an actor faces the audience in the middle of the screen (demand) is perceived to be more involving

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than a camera shot from a more oblique angle (offer) (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996: 147). In contrast, the vertical camera angle frequently constitutes the (subconscious) power relations between actors (if the camera adopts their point of view) or between a character and the film audience. Although filmmakers can deliberately flout and undercut the aforementioned interpersonal film techniques and their symbolic meanings, they nevertheless provide a suitable point of departure for any social (and psychological) characterisation of film characters. If the camera (and therefore the film audience) looks down on the actor, then the film audience often feels empowered, superior. In contrast, when the camera is positioned such that the audience looks up towards the actor, then the film audience often feels inferior, less dominant compared to the actor in focus. Surely, these compositional strategies may be exploited by film directors so that the aforementioned link between camera angle and social power is severed. However, the deliberate violation or suspension of the convention does not mean it does not exist. Since film as an art form draws on (the illusion of) moving images, film directors can manipulate the unfolding series of images in the following three ways: (a) the actors move their bodies vis-à-vis a stable camera setup, (b) the camera moves to, around or away from a stable actor and (c) the camera and the actor both move either in the same direction or in different, opposing directions. In such dynamic settings, the audience has to reflect, in each shot, if the respective camera position conveys interpersonal meanings or if the camera set up is conditioned by more profane contextual (technological, physical, economical) exigencies. Another film technique which can have an impact on the filmic construction of voice is the number and length of shots. The French film critic Bazin was fascinated with long film shots, involving close-ups of characters. When analysing Erich von Strohheim’s films, he argued that these long shots “gradually ‘revealed’ the filmed character’s inner ‘cruelty of being’” (Ben-Shaul 2007: 11). So, in many ways, the lengthening of a shot (or the absence of cuts) can induce sequences of the character’s contemplation, in which the film audience begins to reflect on the story character’s mental complexion (cf. van Leeuwen 1996: 68).18 In this vein, it seems relevant to point to the staging of mind style in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless (1960) as studied by Bordwell (1984). In this film, French actor JeanPaul Belmondo plays small-time criminal Michel, who the audience sees fleeing from the local French authorities. The documentary-like shots of the lead character, driving his car, are characteristically disjointed by clusters of jump cuts, which

18

This fact also explains the particular relevance of so called glance shots (Bach 1997: 36) for the construction of voice in films. In glance shots, characters are shown to be looking at objects either on screen or off-screen. Combined with long shot lengths, glance shots can trigger sequences of interior monologues.

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“leave[e] a gap in an otherwise continuous shot” (Jahn 2003: n.p.). The film’s subjective camera angle, alongside its hectic deployment of jump cuts, lets the film audience glimpse into the disconnected, hectic mental state of the criminal, on the run: […] the film is to be read as expressing psychological states of the characters -- [sic!] through their behavior or through explicit assignment of subjective point of view […]. Into this diegetic world of objective events and character subjectivity, the author steps, emphasising some aspect by a symbolic framing, a bit of cutting, a significant camera movement. (Bordwell 1984: 9)

With a view to filmic perspective, van Leeuwen (1996) argues that character thoughts, in film, are often visualised, to the extent that characters are shown staring directly past the camera, into the void. If the film shot is cut at this moment, the next shot then conventionally reveals the content of the character’s thought (possibly an object, person or sequence of events). However, it may be necessary for the director to change the visual appeal of this “causative shot”, indicating its mental nature. For this purpose, various technical means have been proposed, ranging from changes of the sound track, e.g. sound reverberation, noises, loudness, clarity, etc.), to visual techniques, e.g. blurred vision, sepia reproductions, colour filters, etc. or conventional editing techniques, fade-outs, and dissolves (Giannetti 1993). Furthermore, thoughts can also be revealed through subtitles, as in a scene from Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall. The subtitles show the thoughts of the main characters who are engaged in small talk. The humor is created through the meta-comments on the chit-chat that reveal a different layer of information to which we do not usually have access. At the same time, some researchers have designed narratological frameworks which relate camera perspective to narrative focalisations (Branigan 1975; Chatman 1990; Hickethier 2007; Lohmeier 1996). It is important to stress, however, that such accounts of filmic perspective run the risk of focussing only on the visual dimension of film, dispensing with all other cinematographic modes (Bach 1997: 22; Bordwell 1985: 9). These modes may contribute to the construction of voice in film, reinforce each other, but can also contradict each other, yielding conflicting and ambiguous filmic effects. More specifically, film is an audio-visual medium which allows filmmakers to exploit not only the visual but also the auditive mode of communication (see also Chatman 1999). This notably includes score music and ambient sound in addition to the spoken language of monologues and dialogues. Kozloff (1988: 12–14) explains in great detail why film theory has for a long time overlooked the auditive dimension of cinema. One of the arguments, she holds, is the film director’s objective to excel in “showing” a story, rather than just “telling” it, thereby legitimising cinema as an art form apart from other types of narrations. However, from a multimodal (and pragmatic) point of view, it seems worthwhile, taking this sphere of cinematic storytelling into consideration. An audi-

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tive resource, which has frequently been discussed in narratological approaches to film studies, is voice-over narration. In line with Chatman (1990), Jahn (2003: n.p.) distinguishes two different types of sounds we commonly encounter in feature films, i.e diegetic and nondiegetic sound. The former relates to sounds which clearly emanate from “a source located in the current scene” (Jahn 2003: n.p.), while the latter comes from outside of the film picture, thereby creating “mood and atmosphere [and] can also have a commentary function” (Jahn 2003: n.p.). The source (or originator) of a sound might not always be visible on screen. Accordingly, Jahn (2003) proposes a classification of four different source types: voice-over, off screen sound, filter sound and ambient sound. Voice-over can have two main functions: (a) to reveal the commentary words of an off-screen narrator, and (b) to represent a character’s interior monologue.19 Off screen sound can represent the voice of a character who partakes in the film action but is currently not seen on screen. Filtered sounds are distorted sounds which may have been transformed by technical manipulation or some sort of noise (telephone voices, inaudible noises, etc.). Finally ambient sound fills the soundscape of a filmic scene, the “natural sounds” of a garden (birds cheeping, people chatting, cars honking, etc.). A similar scheme of categorisation can be found in Chion (1994, 2009). He introduces the helpful notion of acousmatic and visualised sound. While the former refers to “sounds one hears without seeing their originating cause” (Chion 1994: 71), the latter refers to the opposite sounds “accompanied by the sight of its source or cause” (Chion 1994: 72). In addition to these two notions, Chion (1994: 73) further distinguishes three types of sound: (a) onscreen sound (whose originator is visualised on screen), (b) offscreen sound (which is acousmatic) and (c) non-diegetic sound whose source is not only “absent from the image but is also external to the story” (Chion 1994: 73). Important for our discussion on voice, is Chion’s notion of internal sound (1994: 76), which he locates both in on-screen (visualised) sound and off-screen (acousmatic) sound: Internal sound is sound which, although situated in the present action, corresponds to the physical sounds of breathing, moans or heartbeats, of which could be named objective-internal sounds. Also in this category of internal sounds are mental voices, memories, and so on, which I call subjective internal sounds. (Chion 1994: 76)

While each one of Jahn’s sound types (to different degrees) is capable of gearing the audience’s interpretation of the voice of story characters, Chion’s internal sounds seem to be particularly useful for the auditive staging of voice in fiction. The contrasting uses of visual and auditive modes can effectuate narrative suspense but also lead to (dramatic) irony, when the way a voice-over narrator describes the fictional world is in disaccord with the visual representation of the same world on 19

For various narrative functions of voice-over, see Kozloff (1988) and Pfister (1991: 25–27).

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screen. At the same time, if the ambient music does not align with the staged mood of scene, it can become a running ironic commentary on the ongoing action, and even of the character’s mental composition. 8. Conclusion This chapter has provided a critical review of some of the (pragmatically) most important research on voice to this day. We have looked at various different frameworks which seek to describe the conceptual, linguistic, cognitive and multimodal contour of perspective and mind style in fiction, and we have seen that a combined reading of narratological and stylistic frameworks on voice shows much promise. Genette’s classification of narratological focalisation can be connected to various narratological frameworks of speech and thought presentation. Both macro-and micro level approaches to the study of narrative perspective can then be fruitfully related to concurrent stylistic research on mind styles. Stylistic mind style research needs to be distinguished from mind style research in cognitive stylistics, which adapts cognitive frameworks (cognitive grammar, conceptual metaphor theory, and blending theory) to describe a character’s mental state and perspective. Finally, the concept of multimodal metaphor can be effectively used as a heuristic to explore the staging of mind styles across semiotic boundaries in film and television. I have pointed out several times that many classic concepts and methods of analysis still await further specification and adjustment. Improvements seem especially desirable in view of current developments in evaluation and appraisal theory (see modality and narrativity, Cortazzi and Jin 2000), inferential pragmatics (see implicit characterisation cues, Clark 2009a; Culpeper 2001) and multimodal discourse analysis (see cinematic techniques of voice, Chion 2009; Kozloff 1988; Montoro 2010, 2011; O’Halloran 2006). All of these academic challenges notwithstanding, the narrative phenomenon of voice is a very promising and still underresearched object of study, which invites further pragmatics and interdisciplinary work. Only if we explore the narrative mechanism by which authors transport us into the minds of people, can we hope to understand the enchanting power it exerts on us. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the two editors of this volume, Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker, for their constructive criticism and perceptive comments on an earlier version of this paper. I’m also grateful to Wolfram Bublitz for comments and discussion.

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7.

Pragmatics of style in fiction Beatrix Busse

Abstract: Conceptualising fiction as one type of cultural performance with intricate linguistic and multimodal characteristics that have stylistic value, I outline the major points of intersection between stylistics and pragmatics and illustrate classic recent trends of how the pragmatics of style in fiction have been investigated in both disciplines, pragmatics and stylistics. One focus is on the analysis of voices in fiction, the other is on the analysis of both the interplay between fictional and non-fictional discourse and that of different semiotic modes to explain how meaning is made as well as style and (social) styling are reflected and construed in various contexts of production and reception. 1. Introduction While a definition of pragmatics is fairly straightforward – for example, it can be defined as the contextual analysis of language in use (e.g. Bach 1999; Chapman 2011; Klauk and Köppe 2014; Nerlich 2006; see also the introduction to this handbook) – fiction is probably easier to recognise than to explain. (More or less loose) attempts at answering what fiction is and how it can be understood have differed widely (Culler 2000; Currie 1985; Farner 2014). The following quote represents one of the many definitions and descriptions illustrating the relationship between pragmatics and fiction to show how a number of core pragmatic concepts with a language philosophical base of the Searlean kind – e.g. intentionality, genre, discourse as communication, the relationship between context, truth, reality and the role of language – feature prominently when conceptualising fiction: “Fiction is one of the kind of intendedly but non-deceptively untrue discourse” (Gorman 2005: 163). Indeed, this definition reverberates one of the most sophisticated treatises of fiction by John Searle (1979), who considers the author of a fictional text to be suspending and pretending the illocutionary act, that is, the fiction-writer never actually performs the illocutionary act of stating and therefore cannot be held accountable for the possible falsehood of what he or she says: “The pretended illocutions that constitute a work of fiction are made possible by the existence of a set of conventions which suspend the normal operation of the rules relating illocutionary acts to the world” (Searle 1979: 67). In the Searlean sense, which was also taken up by Ohmann (1971), it is the suspension of rules (such as Grice’s Cooperative Principle, or the commitment to truth, the obligation to provide eviDOI 10.1515/9783110431094-007 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 197–231. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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dence for the truth and the intention to be recognised as conforming to rules) that is also among the criteria of defining fiction in relation to the factual. What is characteristic of fiction is the special relationship between the fact that the utterance is fictitious and that the events, characters, or circumstances described may be potentially both factual and imaginary. And yet, because for Searle (and for Austin, too) intentionality is the decisive criterion for a speech act to function, that is, to be successful and to distinguish fictional from what is often called “serious” speech (Vandenabeele 2007: 63; cf. also Culpeper and Kytö 2010), literary critics and others have criticised what they call “the intentional fallacy”, that is, the implicit Searlean assumption that the intention of an author must be available for a literary product to be successful (Warner 2014: 367). This debate – most prominently conducted between Derrida and Searle (cf. Moati 2014) – caused many literary critics to have doubts about the usefulness of pragmatic theories to literature. Other approaches similar to Prince’s (1990), for example, have criticised classical narratological analyses as too text-driven and have demanded to reconsider truth values using, for example, the possible-worlds model (Ryan 1991; Werth 1999). Cohn (1990) considers both linguistic features and the linguistic style of a text to be determining criteria of its fictionality, with, for example, presenting a character’s thoughts as diagnostic of fictionality. Others have stressed that points of production and reception (Currie 1990; Walton 1990) and an audience must be included in accounting for what fiction and fictional language is. The role of the reader or receiver and readerly aspects in contextual interpretations are also the focus of Iser’s (1993) work: The literary text is a mixture of reality and fictions, and as such it brings about an interaction between the given and the imagined. Because this interaction produces far more than just a contrast between the two, we might do better to discard the old opposition of fiction and reality altogether, and to replace this duality with a triad: the real, the fictive, and what we henceforth call the imaginary. It is out of this triad that the text arises […]. (Iser 1993: 1)

Iser’s (1993: 4) three varieties of “fictionalising acts”: selection, combination, and self-disclosure precede contemporary accounts of fictionality, for example, in textworld theory (Gavins 2007; Gibbons 2016; Ryan 1998; Werth 1999) and open up a path to address the interplay between fictional, actual and reader-centric as well as imaginary aspects. It also includes the impact of imagined worlds on the reader or receiver. Roger Sell (1985: 498) claimed that the aim of a literary pragmaticist was to “demythologise the concept of literature” as an agentless conveyor of truth and ideas and to reveal the process of discourse between writer and recipient. Klauk and Köppe (2014) take up the hot debate over the status and definition of what fictionality is and how it can be defined. They outline four different strands of theories of fictionality and introduce a somewhat bulky though useful terminological distinction in order to set apart intratextual fictitious processes and events in text

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and discourse and to be able to refer to characters, objects, incidences or processes that have no existence in the real world. Their terminological pairs are: a) fictional and fictionality describing fictional utterances, discourses that occur in fictional texts; as well as b) fictitious and fictivity taking up the classic terminological criterion of characters, entities and so on having no referent in the real word (see Jucker and Locher, this introduction for a more detailed discussion). In this paper, it is not my intention to discuss further the status of the realworld referent in fictional texts, i.e. whether a fictional text possesses a referent or whether it is exclusively imaginary. This would include another paper, as it is equally open to debate to what extent realities are constructed or are empirically real or somewhere inbetween as outlined by New Realism (Sparrow 2014). Instead, it is my view that any work of fiction, which is actually often oversimplified by an equation with literature, literariness or narrative, or any form of cultural or historical performance – be it literary or not, verbal or non-verbal or both – is a product of culture and historically situated in its context and responded to by readers. Therefore, the theories, methods and approaches to analyse and interpret cultural and social processes feature prominently and may be used to investigate how and why meanings are made in a relationship between the text and its recipient. It is my aim – to show that any fiction or instance of fictional language has a communicative agenda, which is at least also functional, hence pragmatic, if not constructive of realities and experiences and reader projections; – to give a state-of-the-art overview of how fiction has been analysed pragmatically, that is, how research has experimented with applying different areas of pragmatic theory to the analysis of literary texts, which are, similarly to narratives, often equated with the concept of fiction. This will include summaries of intersections between pragmatics and stylistics as well as the underlying tenets that characterise the interface between pragmatics, stylistics and literary pragmatics; and – to show how fiction and literary texts can enlarge pragmatic theories. Conceptualising fiction, like literary language, as a type of discourse that is socially, culturally and historically situated and defined (Semino and Culpeper 2011: 298) and that explicitly includes reader-user projections and interpretative questions, allows us to give up the long-existent conception that fictional and literary language are a special kind of language varieties or isolated linguistic categories to be studied independently. For literature, Pratt (1977, 1988) has argued since as early as 1977 that literature should be defined as a particular speech context, characterised by a specific set of conventions and expectations concerning the relationship between author and audience, the preparation and reception of texts, or the application of Grice’s cooperative principle:

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there is much to be gained […] from an analysis of linguistic representation which decentres the question of truth versus falsehood, fiction versus nonfiction, literary genre versus non-literary genre, and focuses instead on generalised strategies of representation. (Pratt 1988: 22)

Similar to Carter’s (2012: 128) “cline of literariness”, with literariness including both “poetic effects” and affective states created by literary texts, this approach re-positions fictional language as one type of discourse proper that deserves full comparative linguistic/pragmatic attention and that is not deficient or unworthy of pragmatic investigation because it is written, less spontaneous or constructed – characteristics that might seem and for a long time have been regarded as inconvenient and unworthy of pragmatic as well as linguistic analysis. All of this also allows me to outline the broad range of theories, approaches and linguistic features in the field of stylistics – which have probably been the most dominantly analysed pragmatic features of style in fiction – and those, which on various levels, both conceptually and analytically feature at the interface between pragmatics and fiction. 2.

The core: Stylistics, pragmatics and fiction

Stylistics is the study of style in language – including fictional language – or other semiotic modes (cf. Nørgaard, Montoro and Busse 2010). Pragmatics is “the area of linguistic study that investigates relationships between language, its users, and its context of use” (Warner 2014: 362). Two straightforward tasks, it might seem. And yet, experts in both disciplines would describe their investigations as complex, diverse, intricate and sophisticated enterprises. Let us look in more detail at the steps these disciplines actually take in their attempts to analyse discourse while including fictional and literary language. Stylistics uses the theories and methods developed within linguistics and beyond to try to analyse and explain how a text means, how language variation occurs and is constructed according to context, purpose, author or period, how effects are achieved in (fictional and non-fictional) language, how readers arrive at their meanings and how interpretations are constructed. The strength of the approach – or its idea of how to methodologically proceed (Montoro 2015: 355) – is often described to be informed by the three “Rs” (Simpson 2004: 4; see also Simpson 2014): Rigour, retrievability and replicability. For Simpson (2004: 4), rigorous refers to the methodological demands for stylistic research undertakings which “should be based on an explicit framework of analysis” as should they be replicable: “sufficiently transparent as to allow other stylisticians to verify them, either by testing them on the same text or by applying them beyond that text”. Furthermore, stylistic analyses should be “organized through explicit terms and

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criteria, the meanings of which are agreed upond by other students of stylistics” (retrievable). As an interdisciplinary enterprise stylistics has many branches, such as corpus stylistics, multimodal stylistics, or new historical stylistics, and shares points of intersections with, for example, narratology, both “because of the wide range of genres, modes and purposes of the texts that are the object of study of stylistics, and because of the variety of frameworks from linguistics within which they can be analysed” (Chapman and Clark 2014: 1). For a long time now, the discipline has focused on literary texts. Burke (2014: 3) defines stylistics as “a kind of linguistic-forensic, literary discourse criticism”. However, stylistics does not exclusively analyse literary texts, despite the fact that it has long been accused of doing just exactly that: It also comprises the analysis of non-literary discourse drawing, for example, on advertising, newspaper reports or politics (Semino and Culpeper 2011: 300). Thus, the emphasis has shifted to the analysis of linguistic features to identify and to characterise different generic styles and to determine the role of context(s) in construing or reflecting styles. Crystal and Davy (1969) as well as Enkvist (1973; Enkvist, Spencer and Gregory 1964) were the first researchers to theoretically and practically come to terms with the concept of style in non-literary language since they saw style as “varieties of language that correlate with particular contexts” (Semino and Culpeper 2011: 300). For them, linguistic features constituting style are characteristic, if not restricted, to particular contexts. Enkvist (1973) is even interested both in the process and outcome of what makes a linguistic feature stylistic or “a style-marker”. He also focuses on the particular frequency and density of particular linguistic configurations in context. Even though both Crystal and Davy’s (1969) and Enkvist’s (1973; Enkvist, Spencer and Gregory 1964) work show points of intersections with the theory of foregrounding and prospectively point to the potential of measuring style, their work is only taken up much later (Carter and Nash 1990). In 1988, Enkvist enlarged his view by including style as part of the dynamics of text-processing and, in 1993, Leo Hickey claimed that pragmatics is inherent in stylistic research – especially in the ways the information is selected by the speaker and in how other factors drive stylistic choices. The name and the field of pragmatics can be traced back to Charles Morris’ (1938) work, who defined signs to be governed by three types of relations: the syntactic, the semantic and the pragmatic. Language users communicate not only through the words they use in social, cultural contexts, but implicate and perform particular acts and effects. To find systematic explanations for observable differences between literal and linguistic meaning and to establish the processes in which words deviate from what speakers may use them for are core aspects of pragmatics, which go hand in hand with identifying norms and principles of language usage, which might explain these differences. At the same time, these differences frequently, if not typically, occur in a variety of communicative situations or different text and discourse types. This broad conceptualisation of pragmatics

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follows the European branch of linguistic pragmatics that is also the basis for the definition used in this handbook (see Jucker and Locher, this volume). Stylistics and pragmatics share a number of points of intersections, as reflected by labels such as “pragmatic stylistics” (Black 2006), “pragmastylistics” (Hickey 1993) or “literary pragmatics” (Warner 2014: 364) or “pragma-literary stylistics” (Chapman and Clark 2014), which mark the prolific and vibrant amount of work that has been done at the interface between pragmatics and stylistics: Pragmatic approaches share in common an understanding of language, including literary language, as most importantly a form of symbolic social action. From a pragmatic viewpoint, considerations of literary style are inextricable from questions of context, including speakers’ and readers’ identities, intentions, beliefs and frames of relevance. (Warner 2014: 362–363)

Stylistics and pragmatics, then, address the interplay between the production and reception of discourse – including fictional discourse. Furthermore, they reflect the norms and conventions of language usage, as well as deviations from them, and they share a focus on pragmatic functions and effects of language usage, contextual factors and configurations that drive and reflect stylistic choices, linguistic and pragmatic markers that reflect and construe style, how speakers interact discursively, and conduct investigations of what/how a speaker tries to infer and what is, in turn, inferred by the addressee. In other words, these points of intersections permeate between a broader emphasis on linguistic features that are pragmatic and investigations that are more reader-oriented and may even go as far as cognitive stylistics as well. As such, “[o]ne possible way of understanding the relationship between pragmatic stylistics and other areas of literary pragmatic scholarship is along a continuum from relatively more ‘text-focused’ to more ‘world-focused’ emphases” (Warner 2014: 364). Let us now turn to the historical development of the interplay between stylistics, literary and fictional language, fiction and pragmatics. As early as the 1960s, proponents of Russian Formalism – the onset of stylistics – analysed language usage in texts in correlation with pragmatic, social, ideological and cognitive dimensions of literary production and reception. In literary stylistics, which has its roots in Europe in the work by Leo Spitzer (1948) and the French stylistician Charles Bally (1909) as well as in currents of Practical and New Criticism in Great Britain and in the United States (Wales 2001), the following statement by Roman Jakobson (1960: 377) still counts as a seminal conceptualisation: “a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms”. Within this vein, the formalist notions of foregrounding, deviation and parallelism still feature as the theoretical and analytical foundation of stylistic analyses. Importantly, they have a pragmatic base: formalist theorists have always seen literature as functionally and formally distinct from non-literary lan-

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guage; Mukařovský (1964), for example, claimed that literary language systematically deviates from the norms of the standard, to the effect of foregrounding the linguistic properties of the text and of defamiliarising the readers’ customised perceptions. Jakobson (1960) also stressed the self-referentiality of literature, but identified its defining formal properties in linguistic patterning or parallelism. And Leech (1969), then, elaborated on the concept of foregrounding and suggested that foregrounding can derive both from deviation (unexpected irregularity) and parallelism (unexpected regularity), and that foregrounded features are particularly central to the interpretation and appreciation of literature. Today, the notion of foregrounding is, for example, either analysed as a linguistic device (Gregoriou 2014) or discussed as a psychological or linguistic interpretation (Alexander and Emmott 2014). The main perspectives from pragmatics that have influenced the study of fiction, fictional language and style in literature as well as in other types of language are the theories and principles developed by John L. Austin, John R. Searle and Herbert Paul Grice. Speech act theory aims to explain how utterances or the use of certain styles under specific as well as appropriate contexts and conditions (which must be recognised by both speaker and hearer) may perform specific types of actions, that is, acts of communication, that may or may not be successful. In Austin’s (1962) speech act theory, a discrepancy between what words mean (their form) and what they may be used to achieve (their function) is recognised. Austin distinguishes between linguistic meaning (the locutionary act), the function of an utterance intended by the speaker (the illocutionary act) and the outcome, result or effect on the hearer of the utterance (the perlocutionary effect). Searle (1969), then, elaborated on Austin’s model and distinguished between five categories of speech acts [assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations]. Speech act theory and the notion of existing speech acts have had a lasting influence on the study of language and literature, which rings true especially for Mary Louise Pratt’s (1977) Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse and Judith Butler’s (1997) Excitable Speech. It is still referred to in discussions about the role of style in the performance of literature and the acts involved and having to be accomplished in its production (cf., e.g., English 2007; Miller 2001, 2005; Ryan 1981; van Oort 1998; cf. Bousfield 2014 for an overview). Leech and Short (1981, 2007) and Semino and Short (2004) introduce and further develop their model of speech presentation, which is partly based on speech act theory. Grice (1975), on the other hand, distinguished “what is said” on any particular occasion of utterance from “what is implicated” – introducing the technical term implicature to describe the very specific type of non-literal meaning with which he was concerned. Implicatures arise as a result of a mutual expectation of cooperation between speaker and hearer; the hearer can justifiably assume that the speaker is abiding by a general principle of cooperation which is further elabo-

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rated in terms of specific maxims relating to the quantity, quality and relation of information and the manner in which said information is expressed; these can be flouted or broken (Clark 2014a). The concept of conversational implicature is now generally used in literary linguistics and stylistics to describe how writers/narrators manipulate language to various literary effects with the underlying idea that literary language conveys meanings that go beyond what is actually said. Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle is thus seen as a useful tool in analysing and evaluating particular literary effects against a number of discursive norms, which, in turn, are resources for meaning-making. And yet, it is still problematic to infer a relationship between narrator, author and reader through the analysis of conversational maxims. In addition, despite the fact that its focus on the interactional function of language is a clear asset for the analysis of fictional language and literature, linguistic norms, conventions or what is often called discursive “(un-)markedness” is context-dependent and may vary both intra- and intertextually. As Sell (2001: 52) has argued, it is often the linguistically deviant – the foregrounded – that is central to determining literary effects (see also Sell 2000). In this context, van Dijk (1976: 44) has suggested that the Gricean maxims “partly concern the structure of the utterance itself, and might therefore be called ‘stylistic’”; thus arguing in favour of exploring the potential of a Gricean style approach to the analysis of the interaction between writers and readers of literary texts. In his “Pragmatics of literary communication”, van Dijk (1980) furthermore identifies some core questions that centre on aspects such as that the text – rather than the sentence – should be seen as the unit of (pragmatic) analysis, and that language functioning as discourse is contextually and situationally embedded. The following showcase some of the important questions that are crucial both to the development of stylistics and linguistics in general: 1. What kind(s) of actions are accomplished by the production of literary text? 2. What are the appropriateness conditions of these actions? 3. What is the structure of the context in terms of which the appropriateness is defined? 4. How are ‘literary actions’ and their context related to structures of literary text? 5. Which extant problems of both poetics and the actual functioning of literature in society can be (re-)formulated in terms of pragmatic theory? 6. What is the cognitive (emotive, etc.) basis of pragmatic notions? 7. What is the social and cultural basis of the pragmatic notions mentioned above? Which conventions, norms, values, and which societal structures link the appropriateness of ‘literary’ action with the actual processes of acceptance, rejection, etc., of literary texts? Fundamentally, Leech and Short (1981: 231–254) explain that a Gricean approach can be applied both to interactions between writers and readers and to interac-

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tions between characters.1 Then again, Post-Gricean approaches do not suggest maxim-like principles but rather “lawlike generalisations about human behaviour” (Chapman and Clark 2014: 4). Developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1995) as an alternative to Grice’s account of inferential language use, Relevance Theory sees ‘relevance’ as the single guiding principle for effective communication. In this theoretical model, the only requirement is that the speaker – and not the interlocutors – makes his/her intention to convey particular meanings manifest. Key principles include the cognitive principle of relevance and the communicative principle of relevance. The theory has generally led to discussions about “literariness” and authorial intention (Clark 2014a: 155) because the reader is guided by the assumption that any utterance is optimally relevant and that the hearer always attempts to draw out as many cognitive effects as possible while putting in the least amount of effort: “What is most encouraging here […] is that ‘literariness’ is not simply treated as unserious speech that violates pre-established conventions or maxims, but is rather an effect of the interpretive principles of communication” (Warner 2014: 370). Hence, linguistic forms are also seen as an important stimulus in literary communication, because poetic effects are located in situated cognitive events rather than in textual structures. Context is therefore not assessed in terms of pre-existing felicity conditions, but it is dynamically assessed and constructed and the aim is to explain the process in arriving at these contexts. Relevance Theory has also posed a number of questions in stylistics (Culpeper 1994). For example, given Sperber and Wilson’s separation between weak and strong implicatures, it is neither clear how readers establish their preferences for decoding implicatures nor does Relevance Theory embrace all contexts. Nevertheless, it is of crucial importance to stylistics (see also Chapman and Clark 2014; Clark 2014a, 2014b): Chapman and Clark (2014: 5) claim that there have been a number of studies on Relevance Theory (Clark 2014c), but that, generally speaking, more work could still be situated in pragmatic stylistics within a neo-Gricean framewok (however, cf. Chapman 2012; Lambrou 2014). Clark (2009) suggests that stylisticians should particularly keep an eye out for cases where the nature of particular inferential processes becomes salient and also (Clark 2014b: 312) draws our attention to the fact that little work is being done where the processes involved in the production or negotiation of meaning(s) in interaction between and among communicators are explored. Rather than focusing on how interactants implicate and infer meanings from utterances, politeness theories are interested in the relational and interpersonal dimensions of illocutions, i.e. what kinds of effects arise and which types of acts

1



For a discussion of the complex participation structure of fictional texts, see Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume.

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are performed. One main question here is how social actors communicate, maintain or contest relationships with their fellow participants in the course of interaction. The body of scholarship acknowledges that utterances – including literary utterances – are performed within relations of relative power, status, and social distance. Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) were the first to connect Goffman’s (1967) concept of face with a theoretical model of politeness. Whereas ‘positive face’ refers to the self-image or personality that everybody wishes to be recognised, ‘negative face’ involves the individual’s right not to be imposed on. It is within this continuum of positive and negative face that a variety of polite speech acts – addressing the positive and the negative face – can be employed. Research in this area has moreover considered how awareness of and response to various types of face-related behaviour established in literary texts can affect how those texts are structured, narrated and constructed. Special attention is paid to relationships that are established between narrators and readers, and how the presumed face needs of one of these two participants in the communicative interaction are addressed (Sell 1985; Simpson 1989). Geoffrey Leech (1983), on the other hand, uses a different model of politeness, which, in turn, builds on Grice’s Cooperative Principle. He establishes a politeness principle that presupposes conversation partners to be rational because of their adherence to such a principle though their resulting behavior may seem irrational at first glance. He proposes six politeness maxims, among them those of tact, generosity and agreement.2 Both theories have been extensively employed in stylistics and for the analysis of literary/fictional language. Politeness models have been used to describe and explain the development of relationships between characters, often the driving forces of change and of plot (Blake 2002; Bousfield 2007; Bousfield and McIntyre 2011; Culpeper 1998, 2001; Short 1996, 2014; see also Kizelbach, Ch. 14, and Dynel, Ch. 15, this volume). Hence, the interactional dimension of linguistic im/ politeness is not only relevant to the character-character level in play texts for example, but also to a cognitive framework that describes how readers make inferences about characters. Politeness models have also been criticised for their too extensive focus on cooperation (Bousfield and Locher 2008; Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003; Locher and Watts 2005) and for the fact that dimensions like power or solidarity are too static to explain dynamic situational politeness (Busse 2006). In addition, theories with corresponding definitions of impoliteness (Bousfield 2010;

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Leech has continued to publish extensively on the notion of politeness and has admitted that early politeness research, including his own work, has been biased towards Western, “more specifically Anglo-American, culture and has therefore misrepresented politeness, ignoring considerable if not radical variations across the multiplicity of linguistic communities” (Leech 2014: xii).

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Culpeper 2010) are concerned with the various ways speakers may choose to defend or attack different aspects of their own face and that of other participants in a communicative situation. As can be seen from the description of the relevance of both interactional and more inferential models of language that feature in the analysis of fictional and literary language, stylistics began to expand into an ever more interdisciplinary field in the 1970s and many have noted the points of intersections between core pragmatic fields and foundational theories, e.g. Bakhtin’s sociological poetics. Bakthin’s (1981) work on heteroglossia was used in stylistics to highlight the general dialogic dimension of literary texts, both in the use of multiple voices or the mixing of different genres in novels (Wales 1988), and the study of poetic texts (Geyer-Ryan 1988). This is where also Michael Halliday’s (1978, 1985) milestone contribution to stylistics and his systemic functional model of language have to be positioned. His theory and grammatical model have led to a multi-level and multi-function view of style where each linguistic choice can be explained with reference to the system as a whole, and formal features can be related to the function and uses of language. Halliday’s transitivity analysis of Golding’s (1971) The Inheritors represents the point of entry for a number of studies in stylistics that see literary texts as operating within social and ideological forces. This interest in what is now called critical stylistics (Jeffries 2009) also shows that linguistics and its respective analyses disclose the power of language to shape our perception and construction of reality. The ideational function of language and transitivity choices also offer a framework to study the concept of point of view (Fowler 1996; Leech and Short 1981, 2007; Simpson 1993; Simpson and Canning 2014; Toolan 2001), that is, it is also relevant to the contexts which reflect and are construed by a text. Halliday’s interpersonal function, which is clearly pragmatic in outlook, and its respective grammatical configurations also offer a framework to investigate prose and dramatic texts (Birch 1991; Busse 2006; Weber 1992). With regard to Halliday’s interpersonal function, the investigation of dialogue and aspects of characterisation play a crucial role (Busse 2006; Kennedy 1982; Nørgaard 2007; Toolan 1988). Pragmatic stylistic investigations have influenced general pragmatic approaches, methods and theories in both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Historical linguists or historical pragmaticists realised much earlier than scholars working with conventional linguistic frameworks – though for a long time, too apologetically, claiming there was no alternative (Busse 2010a; Jucker 2015; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2010a) – that fictional discourse, i.e. literature, is indispensable for the investigation of pragmatic phenomena and pragmalinguistic developments in the history of English or other languages. In historical pragmatics, literary texts, such as historical play texts, for example, have naturally served as a source for the compilation of multi-genre corpora (Culpeper and Kytö 1997, 2010) from all periods of, say, the English language to investigate linguistic change

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and stability of pragmatic phenomena over a broader time-span. The phenomena investigated range from grammaticalisation to pragmaticalisation, discourse markers or address terms to, speaking in broader terms, interactional pragmatic phenomena (cf. Jucker and Taavitsainen 2010b). Chaucer’s tales and Shakespeare’s plays are considered to be (admittedly canonical, if not iconic) “comprehensive” language corpora of (famous) authors from specific historical-linguistic periods – Middle English and Early Modern English. Therefore, they have received major attention with historical pragmatic investigations. These investigations focus both on a pragmaphilological or diachronic pragmatic perspective including a form-tofunction and a function-to-form mapping (Busse and Busse 2010, 2012a, 2012b). Busse (2010a, 2014) sees new historical stylistics as a new approach to the stylistic analysis of historical literary texts because of its use of recent stylistic branches and tools, among which are corpus linguistic or historical pragmatic methodology. And yet, moving further than just assessing pragmatic phenomena in historical (literary) texts, she focuses on how historical literary texts mean, how styles may change or remain stable and how the (historical) reader can be inferred to make meanings. Levinson (1983) and Leech (1983) also mention literary language to show how attention must be paid – both in historical and contemporary language data – to poetic phenomena such as metaphor. More recent pragmatic investigations, both historical and those targeting modern English – also combine pragma-stylistic approaches with more thematic investigations, e.g. satire (Busse 2010c; Simpson 2003) or pragmatic failure in interactional behaviour of autistic protagonists (Semino 2014). In addition, corpus-assisted methodologies (Axelsson 2009; Busse 2010a, 2010b, 2012; Hoover 1999; Mahlberg 2012; McInytre and Archer 2010; McIntyre and Walker 2011, 2012; Montoro 2012) relate the quantitative identification of linguistic patterns to interactive features in order to measure and describe style in play texts or narrative fiction or non-fictional text types, that is, for example, to assess character traits or patterns of speech, writing and thought presentation. There are also points of intersection between pragmatics and cognitive science/ poetics. For example, schema theory and cognitive psychology have been linked with linguistic investigations in order to define literariness (Cook 1994), to account for the construction of character (Culpeper 2001) or text worlds (Emmott 1997; Gavins 2007; Semino 1997; Werth 1999) or cognitive metaphor theory (Semino 2008; Semino and Culpeper 2002; Stockwell 2002). Here, the pragmatic-contextual dimension also shows the research strand of reader-oriented stylistics represented by the work of Riffaterre (1957, 1966), Dillon (1978), Fish (1980) or Wales (1988), which investigates the mental operators in readers required for the interpretation of linguistic features. Attempts have been made at providing empirical evidence for literary text processing, for example, by van Peer (1986), who offers empiricial evidence for the theory of foregrounding. Stockwell and Mahlberg (2015) furthermore show how readers engage in mind-modelling in the process of characterisation.

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Following the description of commonalities and overlaps as well as interfaces between stylistics and pragmatics, the next section will provide a more detailed look at a) the pragma-stylistic investigation and construal of voices and at b) how multimodal discourse – fictional or not – characteristic of a particular place illustrates points of intersections between stylistic and pragmatic investigations. 3. Voices The analysis of voices – be they direct or indirect, mental or verbal or even multimodal – in fictional texts and discourse is one of the most obvious, but also one of the most complex endeavours when investigating the nexus between stylistics and pragmatics. Such analyses have been emphasised at least in sociological, stylistic, cognitive and pragmatic models (see also Hoffmann, Ch. 6, this volume on the concept of voice). Stories are part of our lives: They occur in literary form, such as poetry, prose or drama, or in non-literary genres, such as life-writing, new media and others (Page 2014: 439). Stories – historical or contemporary – can narrate fictional or ‘real-life’ events or versions of events which blur the boundaries between such categories. As such, their rhetorical basis cannot be underestimated (Burke 2014) because, as Mey (2011: 513) puts it, “[n]arrativity […] deals with the techniques and devices that a narrator has at his or her command when telling a story; among these, the notion of ‘character’ and the accompanying ‘voices’ are among the most important” (see also Mey 2000). Narratives cannot just be told in words, but narrative analysis also takes into account a wide range of multimodal resources and the many kinds of media used to transmit it. Therefore, as is the case with fiction, the meaning of the term ‘narrative’ has become diluted and what counts as a narrative has been transdisciplinarily expanded, which also results from the complex discourse architecture that may be involved in narratives. Short’s (1996) description of the discourse architecture of the three main literary genres may illustrate this complexity. For example, he identifies three discourse levels for prose fiction: level 1: the level of author addressing the reader; level 2: narrator addressing narratee; level 3: character addressing character. The typical discourse structure that characterises interaction in dramatic texts comprises two levels: that between playwright and reader/audience (level 1) and that in which the characters communicate with one another, that is, the character-character level (level 2) (Short 1996: 256–263). (See also Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume, on the participation structure of fictional texts, and Giltrow, Ch. 3, this volume, on genre.) Including these levels of discourse with various pragmatic implications in our analysis is a challenging and complex enterprise. For example, the various attempts at how fiction can be defined somewhat resembles the debate over the ontological status of characters and processes of characterisation in texts: Characterisation

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is the cognitive process by which readers comprehend fictional characters, that is, how readers make an impression of a character in their mind as they read. McIntyre (2014: 159) summarises the existing approaches – ranging from semiotic over cognitive to philosophical models – and favours “the democratising principle” of the cognitive approach because of its focus on the reader and the ways it tries to explain how and why readers behave in the way they do. He draws on Culpeper’s (2001) model of characterisation, which harmonises humanising and dehumanising (Bradley 1965; Knights 1946) concepts of characters by combining top-down and bottom-up cognitive processes, which together construe characters. While top-down processing embraces knowledge a reader already has, bottom-up processes take linguistic and other semiotic meaning-making cues from the text: What one reads/sees will then shape the reader’s prior knowledge and vice versa. (On fictional characterisation, see also Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, Ch. 4, this volume.) With regard to the analysis of drama, one of the longstanding challenges has been what the focus of stylistic analysis, i.e. the text or the performance, should be. For example, Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed (Busse 2012), but performance with its shadow of liveness is neglected in theory and practice because – for historical plays even more dominantly – performance is fluid, in flux in its production and reception, inaccessible in hindsight and prone to very individual interpretations. For film and TV series, this is of course different. And yet, all discourse events rely as much on performative as on linguistic behaviour (Busse 2006; Toolan 2014). Assessing the role of the reader and how to account for the difference of readers, which has only recently become the focus of attention in analyses of narratives, has been equally challenging. For example, in narratology, Page (2014: 442) points out that post-classical narratological approaches have theoretically given up the idea of the homogenous idealised version of readers and try to account for the readers’ messy, discordant behaviours as well as the infinitely variable conditions of previous background readings and ideological beliefs. This scalar concept of narrativity poses a challenge to the analyst when trying to test, describe, measure and analyse readers’ receptions. But drawing on methodologies from, for example, cognitive psychology has brought these investigations forward. Text-world theory and analyses applying the theory of foregrounding have been equally fruitful (Gibbons 2014; Lahey 2014; Whiteley 2011). Studies of dialogue in fictional discourse often pay attention to turn-taking mechanisms (number of turns, length of turns, initiatiating of and responding to turns, interruptions, use of address terms) and other pragmatic markers or planners, schema disruption, investigations of speech act types and their effects, politeness phenomena, or the investigations of implicatures (Busse 2006, 2010c; Culpeper, Short and Verdonk 1998; Dossena 2012; Jucker 2015; Macrae 2014; McIntyre 2004, 2006, 2008; McInytre and Busse 2010; McIntyre and Culpeper 2010; Short

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1996, 2007, 2014; Wells 1970). This goes hand in hand with providing a voice to a character in a narrative – that is, to focalise a character (Bal 1985) – which is again a field that has been addressed from different scientific angles, most prominently in narratology (see Shen 2010, 2014). From a stylistic point of view, usually all linguistic areas are investigated (Gegoriou 2014: 167) and yet there may be a focus on what Fowler (1977: 76) has termed “mind style”, that is “any distinctive linguistic representation of any individual mental self”. Although some have termed novel reading as “mind-reading” (Gregoriou 2014: 167), the boundaries between pure thought presentation, speech and narration are fuzzy. (On voice and mind style, see also Hoffmann, Ch. 6, this volume.) Leech and Short (1981) and Semino and Short (2004) have developed and further extended a highly influential model used to analyse voices of speech, writing and thought. This model has been taken up in a number of studies (Busse 2010a, 2010b; Bray 2010; Jucker 2006; Jucker and Berger 2014; Mahlberg 2012; Montoro 2011). It can deal with questions such as whether narration or discourse is presented, whether the stretches of discourse presentation concern speech, writing or thought, what effects are associated with each mode, which reporting signals occur with which paralinguistic information (Busse 2010b; Mahlberg 2012) or whether different modes of speech, thought and writing presentation are actually embedded as second-level modes in first-level stretches of discourse presentation. The model distinguishes between three scales of reported discourse: speech, writing, and thought (cf. Busse 2010a, 2010b; Semino and Short 2004). These work on parallel scales but with prototypically varying functions and effects. The order of the different scales reflects the linguistic features involved in indirect and direct forms and the faithfulness claims between anterior and posterior discourse, or, in other words, the rising degree of character involvement in direct speech, for example, as opposed to that of the narrator as one moves from one side to the other side of the model. For a detailed discussion of the different forms and functions of the speech, writing and thought presentations scales, see Leech and Short (1981, 2007), Semino and Short (2004), Busse (2010b), and Nørgaard, Montoro and Busse (2010). 4.

Recent trends

Stylistics as a discipline in its close exchange with pragmatics is ever evolving. In the following, I would like to hint at some of the newest developments in stylistic analysis, such as investigations of multimodal text types or the points of intersections between stylistics, pragmatics and urban landscaping as well as place-making. The interest of stylistics in film and telecinematic discourse (Androutsopoulos 2012; Jahn 2003; McIntyre 2008; Montoro 2010), the experimentation of authors with images, typography, layout and the like due to new technical possibilities in

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book and text production as well as the general emergence of a wealth of new text types have caused the diversification of stylistics away from the traditional take on verbal texts. Because nonverbal and verbal signs can encode both style and meaning, stylistics has encompassed the examination of modes other than the purely verbal and subsequently developed a corresponding methodological apparatus – developments which are still lacking in pragmatics proper. The established branch of multi-modal stylistics has developed along two lines: One is more cognitively based and investigates the impact of multi-modal signs on the reader (Gibbons 2012) by drawing on components of cognitive poetics, such as figure and ground, profiling, cognitive deixis, or text-world theory. The other is of social semiotic origin and aims to develop “grammars” for all modes (Nørgaard 2014) by drawing especially on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) transference of it to modes other than the verbal as “common semiotic principles operate in and across different modes” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001: 2). Both approaches apply their frameworks to multimodal genres like films, drama performances, iconic poetry, comic books or graphic novels. Because of the basis of multi-modal frameworks in existing verbal-linguistic theories, these drawbacks have recently been critically addressed and fruitfully transformed. For example, Nørgaard (2009) criticises van Leeuwen’s (2006) list of distinctive features in typography and extends it by features such as colour and edges. At the same time, she does not consider van Leeuwen’s (2006) semiotic principles of metaphor and connotation to be apt for the analysis of typographical meaning-making and suggests the Peircean account of icon, symbol, index and discourse import to be more useful (Peirce 1994). Maiorani and Christa (2014) develop the theoretical pillars of multimodality further and are largely informed by systemic functional linguistics and pragmatics. Comparisons between novels and film adaptations can be seen in Christie (2014), who uses mainly pragmatic tools to explore power relations in both genres. Bateman and Wildfeuer (2014) propose a discourse pragmatic framework to account for visual narratives. Djonov and Zhao (2014) aim to enlighten our understanding of multimodal issues drawing on critical social theory. Bednarek (2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2014) considers the semiotic intricacies of television discourse and Forceville (2014) argues that investigations of pictorial and multimodal metaphors in advertisements can enlarge our understanding of product and brand claims. The multimodal turn in linguistics, the emergence of new text types that combine classic genre features with more experimental verbal and non-verbal strategies in combination with the fact that, for example, “the traditional institutional and disciplinary boundaries separating news and entertainment, fiction and politics have become blurred” (Punday 2010: 11) also demand a fresh take on verbal and multimodal texts and discourse: There is a “proliferation of the fictive in contemporary society” (Gibbons 2014: 408). The distinctions between reality and fiction can be fluid. Hence, a central issue for contemporary stylistic and pragmatic inves-

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tigations must be to both theoretically and methodologically integrate in the analyses emergent semiotic ensembles consisting of heterogeneous modes – fictional and real – as well as “permeations between actuality and virtuality in literature and culture” (Gibbons 2014: 408) and their varying functions in diverse contemporary cultural, social, institutional, spatial and temporal performances. Genres hitherto unexplored include art installations within the context of a city and stories using interactive media (Gibbons 2014) or mobile narratives. These can be subdivided again into a number of different genres, including, for example, urban semiotic and linguistic landscape data whose defining criterion is that of mixing different genres and features that may be both fictional and non-fictional. Hence, a numer of tools and methods as well as discussions about how these should be integrated are needed to analyse their stylistic effects. For example, mobile narratives may make use of the immediacy of the spoken discourse and lend themselves to pragmatic analysis. Bell (2014) engages with fictional texts written on the computer screen that range from hypertext fiction over flesh fiction to twitter fiction and video games. Page (2012) analyses identity and interaction in digital contexts, Adler (2011) silence in the graphic novel, while Thomas (2014) looks at two of these manifestations of Twitter fiction, ‘shorty’ and ‘Twister’, which challenge the conventional perspective on narrative structure. Zappavigna (2012, 2014a, 2014b) and Dayter (2016) work with narratives in microblogging, and Enss­lin (2014) investigates literary gaming and Hodson (2014) analyses dialect in film and literature. Another area that will be of interest to both pragmatics and stylistics in the future is that of stylistics and landscaping and the production of urban places. I suggest in Busse (2017) that frequently merging fact and fiction, street art and the investigation of examples taken from the semiotic landscape like advertisements are accepted types of data in urban linguistics in general, but not so frequently addressed in stylistics. Also, I claim that literature and fictional data must serve as meaning-making types of data to investigate how characters speak and write about urban places – using specific pragmatic strategies – and how they construe them (see also Busse and Warnke 2015). This view results not only from the status of literature as a product of culture, but also from the success and the potential for identity construction, marketing and place-making which can be witnessed especially in recently published urban novels, such as Zadie Smith’s (2012) NW and Kate Tempest’s (2016) The Bricks That Built the Houses (see also Smith and Busse forthcoming). Exploring contemporary city life, the novels’ presentation of the correlations between senses of belonging, mobility, multiculturality and urban spaces have become indexical markers of what it might mean to live in south-east or north-west London neighbourhoods. For example, award winning poet and rapper Kate Tempest’s debut novel The Bricks That Built the Houses explores modern city life and tells the stories of south-eastern young Londoners Becky, Harry, and Leo who, making a living from drug dealing or dancing, attempt to cope with the

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multi-generational, multi-cultural and social changes in 21st-century London. Much like Smith’s characters in NW, Tempest’s protagonists in The Bricks That Built the Houses construe “private semiotic landscapes” (Smith and Busse forthcoming) characteristic of the urban which are presented in direct thought – often marked multimodally by orthographical words in italics – to present their awareness of what it takes to be an urban citizen. In one episode, Harry, a female drug dealer, needs to pretend to be someone from a posh gentrified south London neighbourhood with corresponding ideas of what that particular identity is supposed to look like even though she is, considering her origins, “on the wrong side of the river; a part of town full of professional creatives with dreams of simpler living – radical, secret aspirations for cottages and nuclear families” (Tempest 2016: 13). While walking this particular neighbourhood, Harry is presented to reflect on that attitude in free indirect thought: “She is all London: cocksure, alert to danger, charming, and it flows through her” (Tempest 2016: 27). Later, after she has given money and a cigarette to a begging woman, she again reflects on the city – which is presented in free indirect thought and post-commented on paralinguistically: “The city is not going to get her like it got to the others. She knows it. She nods at the thought” (Tempest 2016: 28). In Tempest’s novel, characters may also be placed geographically, ethnically and multi-culturally by the way they speak. This clearly variationist sociolinguistic agenda finds expression in Cheshire et al.’s (2011: 152) investigation of context-bound, heterogeneous, and changing (youth) varieties of multicultural London. Also, in addition to establishing Multicultural London English (MLE), the term Jafaican has been “[u]sed to refer to youth language in multi-ethnic parts of London and beyond”. However, this term “most likely has media origins and is strongly associated with hip-hop; it is likewise not essentially a ‘members’ concept’, young people preferring the word ‘slang’ to characterise their way of speaking” (Cheshire et al. 2011: 152). Tempest, like in Zadie Smith’s novel NW (Smith and Busse forthcoming), uses or describes linguistic features characteristic of MLE in order to portray a more ‘authentic’ conversational urban style. Most prominently, it is the discourse marker innit, which repeatedly occurs in a conversation Harry has with her former friend Reggie: “Shit though, innit, eh? Not having one” (Tempest 2016: 24). Also, metapragmatic practices transferred to the reader by the narrator or through the presentation of the characters’ inner thoughts address particular aspects of accents that mark a place, if not enregister it, that is, “describe processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognised register of forms” (Agha 2003; see also Johnstone 2009). When Becky and Harry speak their first words due to mutual attraction and “the prickle of attention” (Tempest 2016: 32), Harry’s direct speech highlights “‘I was interested,’ she says, ‘definitely.’ Becky hears the familiar accent of home: south-east London’s curving vowels and glottal stops” (Tempest 2016: 33). When Becky’s aunt Linda, with whom Becky and her mother

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Paula have had to live ever since her father, John, a political activist was arrested, is described, we receive the following narrative description of her: “Her heritage was Jamaican/Irish and she slipped both accents when she was saying something important, but for the most part she spoke in the round vowels of south London” (Tempest 2016: 75). Pennycook and Otsuji’s (2015) concept of metrolingualism – which describes the use of a number of languages and accents in normal, ordinary urban life as a result of multi-ethnicity and multi-culturality – clearly comes to life in narrative fiction, too. As such, monolingualism in urban space in general and in urban fiction in particular can no longer function as a standard – it is more of an ideological construct rather than a linguistic reality. These transglossic linguistic repertoires include also the use of slang and represent essential skills in order to authentically belong to this particular urban place. The fact that authors of fiction pick up on these indexicals and creatively work them into their texts is well-studied, as the reviews by Planchenaut (Ch. 9, this volume) on regional, social and ethnic variation in fiction and Locher (Ch. 10, this volume) on the inclusion of multilingualism in fiction demonstrate. 5. Conclusions In this paper, I have outlined that fiction and its language are cultural performances situated in time and space and that what counts as fiction or not is a complex enterprise to determine, better to be seen on a cline of fictionality. The complex pragma-stylistic framework and the number of points of intersections between pragmatics and stylistic have extended our views of how meaning and style are made in (fictional) and other social or cultural contexts. As cultural products, fiction, like language, exists not only in people’s heads or in texts written for publication and consumption, but may also exist in the physical environment of a space, for example, urban or not, where fiction and non-fiction may meet. As there has been continuity and change with regard to how meaning is linguistically and multimodally made in fiction, methods, tools and theories for analysing and interpreting styles and the processes of styling have been further developed and adapted, too, in both a productive and interdisciplinary interplay. This always happens in relation to a number of linguistic, multimodal or other norms that are again dependend on inter- and intratextual parameters of time, space, communities of practice and contact and so on. So what is qualified as pragma-stylistically exceptional, aberrant, deviant or unusual in one type of discourse may be regarded as in fact quite normal in other types of discurse or contexts of production and reception. I would like to finish this paper with an outlook which I have already hinted at in my analysis of fiction in urban places. The change of the demographic, sociopo-

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litical, cultural and linguistic outlook of societies worldwide and in urban spaces, caused by mobility and migration and labelled by Vertovec (2007: 3) as “superdiversity” en par with faster and more mobile communication technologies have not only led to the challenging of well-established and harmonised social categories of group membership but also to a call for meso- and micro-scale accounts (Arnaut et al. 2016: 9) of these processes that include the analysis of language that is fictional. To what extent style choices are always consciously made remains open to speculation if we look at more individualised communities of practice and contact. These new social developments are also seen hand in hand with “digital surveillance and securitisation [which are] two burgeoning processes that in many respects act as [superdiversity’s] shadowy counterparts” (Arnaut et al. 2016: 9). According to Arnaut et al. (2016: 10) algorithmic, and possibly also partly fictional identities (rather than portrayal of real individuals and their cultural performances) “are a form of pragmatics” when, for example, surveillance data, is attempted to be constructed and construed. To know and to teach how to gain access to those algorithms, to critically discuss authorship questions, linguistic ethnography and knowledge of translanguaging practices will have to play into the dynamics and processes of contemporary definitions and analyses of the pragmatics of style in fiction and the analysis of new innovative multimodal text types that are – at least in parts – fictional. References Primary sources Golding, William 1971 The Inheritors. London: Faber and Faber. Smith, Zadie 2012 NW. London: Penguin. Tempest, Kate 2016 The Bricks That Built the Houses. London: Bloomsbury. Secondary sources Adler, Silvia 2011 Silence in the graphic novel. Journal of Pragmatics 43(9): 2278–2285. Agha, Asif 2003 The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication 23(3–4): 231– 273. Alexander, Marc and Catherine Emmott 2014 Foregrounding, burying and plot construction. In: Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, 329–343. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Sell, Roger D. 1985 Tellability and politeness in ‘the Miller’s Tale’: First steps in literary pragmatics. English Studies 66(6): 496–512. Sell, Roger D. 2000 Literature as Communication. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 78.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sell, Roger D. 2001 Mediating Criticism: Literary Education Humanized. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Semino, Elena 1997 Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. London: Longman. Semino, Elena 2008 Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Semino, Elena 2014 Pragmatic failure, mind style and characterisation in fiction about autism. Language and Literature 23(2): 141–158. Semino, Elena and Jonathan Culpeper (eds.) 2002 Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Semino, Elena and Jonathan Culpeper 2011 Stylistics. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.), Pragmatics in Practice, 295–305. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Semino, Elena and Mick Short 2004 Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. London: Routledge. Shen, Dan 2010 The stylistics of narrative fiction. In: Dan McIntyre and Beatrix Busse (eds.), Language and Style: In Honour of Mick Short, 225–249. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Shen, Dan 2014 Stylistics and narratology. In: Michael Burke (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, 191–205. London: Routledge. Short, Mick 1996 Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays, and Prose. London: Longman. Short, Mick 2007 Thought presentation twenty-five years on. Style 41(2): 227–243. Short, Mick 2014 Analysing dialogue. In: Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, 344–359. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Simpson, Paul 1989 Politeness phenomena in Ionesco’s ‘The Lesson’. In: Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson (eds.), Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics, 170–193. Crows Nest, AU: Unwin-Hyman. Simpson, Paul 1993 Language, Ideology, and Point of View. London: Routledge.

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Simpson, Paul 2003 On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satirical Humour. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Simpson, Paul 2014 Just what is narrative urgency? Language and Literature 23(1): 3–22. Simpson, Paul and Patricia Canning 2014 Action and event. In: Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, 281–299. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Jennifer and Beatrix Busse (submitted) Zadie Smith’s NW (2012): Making urban allegiances, places and identities. Language and Literature. Sparrow, Tom 2014 The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism. Edingburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson 1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd Ed. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Spitzer, Leo 1948 Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stockwell, Peter 2002 Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Stockwell, Peter and Michaela Mahlberg 2015 Mind-modelling with corpus stylistics in David Copperfield. Language and Literature 24(2): 129–147. Stockwell, Peter and Sara Whiteley (eds.) 2014 The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, Bronwen 2014 140 Characters in search of a story: Twitterfiction as an emerging narrative form. In: Alice Bell (ed.), Analyzing Digital Fiction, 94–109. New York: Routledge. Toolan, Michael 1988 The Stylistics of Fiction: A Literary-Linguistic Approach. London: Routledge. Toolan, Michael 2001 Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, 2nd Ed. London: Routledge. Toolan, Michael 2014 Stylistics and film. In: Michael Burke (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, 455–470. London: Routledge. Vandenabeele, Bart 2007 On the pragmatics of aesthetic communication. In: Piotr Cap and Joanna Nijakowska (eds.), Current Trends in Pragmatics, 52–73. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. van Dijk, Teun A. 1976 Pragmatics and poetics. In: Teun A. van Dijk (ed.), Pragmatics of Language and Literature, 23–58. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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van Dijk, Teun A. 1980 The pragmatics of literary communication. In: Eduardo Forastieri Braschi, Gerald Guinness and Humberto López Morale (eds.), On Text and Context: Methodological Approaches to the Contexts of Literature, 3–16. Río Piedras, PR: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de Puerto Rico. van Leeuwen, Theo 2006 Towards a semiotics of typography. Information Design Journal 14(2): 139– 155. van Oort, Richard 1998 Three models of fiction: The logical, the phenomenological, and the anthropological (Searle, Ingarden, Gans). New Literary History 29(3): 439–465. van Peer, Willie 1986 Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding. London: Croom Helm. Vertovec, Steven 2007 Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(6): 1024– 1054. Wales, Katie 1988 Back to the future: Bakhtin, stylistics and discourse. In: Willie van Peer (ed.), The Taming of the Text: Explorations in Language, Literature, and Culture, 176–192. London: Routledge. Wales, Katie 2001 A Dictionary of Stylistics, 2nd Ed. Harlow, UK: Longman. Walton, Kendall L. 1990 Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Warner, Chantelle 2014 Literary pragmatics and stylistics. In: Michael Burke (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, 362–377. London: Routledge. Weber, Jean Jacques 1992 Critical Analysis of Fiction: Essays in Discourse Stylistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wells, Stanley 1970 Literature and Drama with Special References to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. London: Routledge & K. Paul. Werth, Paul 1999 Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Harlow, UK: Longman. Wesener, Andreas 2014 The Good, the Bad, the Authentic: An Evaluation of Concepts, Experiences, and Considered Values of Authenticity of Place in the Context of the Post-Industrial City. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Whiteley, Sara 2011 Text world theory, real readers and emotional responses to The Remains of the Day. Language and Literature 20(1): 23–42. Zappavigna, Michele 2012 Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web. London: Continuum.

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Zappavigna, Michele 2014a CoffeeTweets: Bonding around the bean of Twitter. In: Philip Seargeant and Caroline Tagg (eds.), The Language of Social Media, 139–160. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Zappavigna, Michele 2014b Enacting identity in microblogging through ambient affiliation. Discourse and Communication 8(2): 209–228.

Part II Features of orality and variation

8.

Oral features in fiction Wolfram Bublitz

Abstract: This chapter explores to what extent and why the typical oral features identified in naturally occurring spontaneous face-to-face discourse make it on screen, on stage or into a book. Following some necessary terminological clarifications (concerning notions such as medium and mode, orality and spokenness), the oral features reviewed are classified into five categories: (1) features of metacommunication, (2) features of turn management, (3) features of topic management (whose predominant functions are planning, repairing and organizing), (4) features of involvement and the micro-level category (5) features of formal reduction. The necessary (and tolerated) reduction of these oral features in scripted fictional dialogue is then comprehensively examined and explained. 1. Introduction Scripted fictional dialogue is a special kind of communicative activity. Because its participants, whether on stage, screen or paper, already know what will happen next, they do not act ex proprio motu to create meaning, context and coherence in ongoing interaction, instead they feign and ‘show’ these acts. This is why Goffman (1974: 74) categorizes such play-acting as “non-serious actions” much the same as Sbisà and Turner (2013: 7) maintain that those “aetiolated” dialogues “are not […] actions, but pretended actions”. Ironically, such pretense more often than not seems to deceive the intended audience, as Spitz (2005: 323) points out: “paradoxically, it [fictional dialogue] often strikes audiences and readers as extremely realistic and apparently represents something that rings true to them”. Nevertheless, even though its authors may strive for authenticity, realism and ‘naturalness’, scripted fictional dialogue is essentially different from unscripted, spontaneously occurring face-toface dialogue. This difference is reflected in various ways, first and foremost in how orality is presented in the participants’ verbal (and non-verbal) behaviour. Take these three short fragments of non-fictional (1) and fictional dialogue (2a and 2b): (1) is a fragment of a (surreptitiously recorded) spontaneous face-to-face dinner table conversation between three adults:1

1

This slightly idealized transcription does not display indicators of proximity, gaze direction, mimics; omitted are also some prosodic and all paralinguistic features (cf.

DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-008 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 235–263. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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(1) 1 A well /I must admìt I /feel . I mean /Edward’s mòther /and his ‘great . 2 /and his grànd ’ father […] will /come ùp on /Christmas D áy 3 B */yēs * 4 >A *but* I /feel sòmehow . the /sheer fàct of /not ‘having to ‘have . to 5 /have . this . !!really sort of - - it’s for /one thing it :does *nǎrk me that 6 B *((c 10 sylls))* 7 >A it’s /so “bloody* ex ! pènsive that he /won’t eat ‘anything ex’cept the 8 ‘largest most ‘splendid ‘pieces of mèat # *you /knów * 9 B *((2 to 3 sylls))* #/how annòying # / 10 A /and [ǝ: ǝ:] #it up / sèts me you /knów # /if he : něeded it #I 11 wouldn’t :mînd # . […] 12 D ((/come to thīnk of it)) #he’s /also he’s /also . an !extremely 13 “:grèedy indivídual # +((who))+ 14 A +/yèah + - so that /if you ‘buy e : nôugh [f] 15 D ((he /isn’t sàtisfied )) #/thànk you# 16 B +((does /anyone want hǎm ))+ 17 A */if you* 18 D +*he /isn’t* !satisfied with a+ “:normal :pǒrtion 19 A /nò [th] thank you /if you ‘buy e’nough 20 D */oh I ‘don’t líke ‘this* 21 >A *((thing)) . /for* /cheese ‘for . for /three dǎys /if he ‘sees it’s thěre he’ll êat it you /knów 22 (London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English, University of Oxford Text Archive, http://ota. ox.ac.uk/desc/0168)

(2a) is a printed scene of a play by the US-American playwright Wendy Wasserstein: (2a) 1965. A high-school dance […]. Two sixteen-year-old girls enter, susan […] and heidi . The girls find a corner and look out at the dance floor […] susan : Heidi! Heidi! Look at the guy over at the radiator. […] Look! He can twist and smoke at the same time. I love that!

Svartvik and Quirk 1980: 14). For the remaining symbols cf. Svartvik and Quirk (1980: 21–25) or http://clu.uni.no/icame/manuals/LONDLUND/INDEX.HTM; they refer to pauses (a period ‘.’ marking “a brief pause of one light syllable”, a dash ‘-’ “a pause of one stress unit”, a combination of these indicate longer pauses), simultaneous talk (enclosed by * *, # # or + +), intonation of words carrying the nuclear tone (printed in small capital letters, using the usual symbols: fall: yès , rise: yés , rise-fall: yês , fallrise: yěs , level: yēs ), range of pitch (i.e. boosters immediately preceding a syllable: ‘:’ indicating “higher than preceding syllable”, ‘!’ “higher than preceding pitch-prominent syllable”, ‘!!’ “very high”) and stress (‘‘’ meaning “normal” and ‘“’ “heavy stress”). Furthermore, a slash ‘/’ marks the onset, i.e. “the first prominent syllable in a tone unit”, double round brackets ‘(( … ))’ indicate incomprehensible words and ‘>A’ means that the “speaker continues where he [she] left off” (http://clu.uni.no/icame/manuals/ LONDLUND/INDEX.HTM).

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unbuttons her sweater and pulls a necklace out of her purse. Susie, what are you doing? susan : Heidi, men rely on first impressions. Oh, God, he’s incredible! Heidi, move! heidi : What, Susie? susan : Just move! The worst thing you can do is cluster. ‘Cause then it looks like you just wanna hang around with your girlfriend. But don’t look desperate. Men don’t dance with desperate women. Oh my God! There’s one coming. […] voice : The next dance is gonna be a Ladies’ Choice. susan , thrilled: All right. Let’s get organized here. Heidi, stand in front of me. I can’t ask Twist and Smoke to dance with my skirt this long. What should I say to him? susan rolls up her skirt. heidi : Ask him how he coordinates the twisting with the smoking. susan : You know, as your best friend, I must tell you frankly that you’re going to get really messed up unless you learn to take men seriously. […] susan :  Shit! It’s still too long. Continues to roll the waist of her skirt until it is midthigh. […] Wish me luck! heidi kisses her on the cheek: Luck! susan jumps back in horror: Heidi! Don’t! (Wendy Wasserstein [1988] 1991. The Heidi Chronicles: Uncommon Women and Others & Isn’t It Romantic, 162–165. New York: Vintage Books.) susan

heidi :

(2b) is a scripted, performed and transcribed fragment of the TV series Friends: (2b) Chandler’s office block. Chandler is on a coffee break. Enter Shelley Shelley: Hey gorgeous, how’s it going? […] Question. You’re not dating anybody, are you, because I met somebody who would be perfect for you. […] Do you want a date Saturday? Chandler: Yes please. Shelley: Okay. He’s cute, he’s funny, he’s – Chandler: He’s a he? Shelley: Well yeah! … Oh God. I – just – I thought – Good, Shelley. I’m just gonna go flush myself down the toilet now – (backs out of the room) – okay, goodbye … […] Mon + Rach’s. Everyone is there. Chandler: […] I mean, is that ridiculous? Can you believe she actually thought that? Rachel: Um … yeah. Well, I mean, when I first met you, y’know, I thought maybe, possibly, you might be … Chandler: You did? Rachel: Yeah, but then you spent Phoebe’s entire birthday party talking to my breasts, so then I figured maybe not. Chandler: Huh. Did, uh … any of the rest of you guys think that when you first met me? Monica: I did. Phoebe: Yeah, I think so, yeah. Joey: Not me. Ross: Nono, me neither. Although, uh, y’know, back in college, Susan Sallidor did.

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Wolfram Bublitz Chandler: You’re kidding! Did you tell her I wasn’t? Ross: No. No, it’s just ’cause, uh, I kinda wanted to go out with her too, so I told her, actually, you were seeing Bernie Spellman … who also liked her, so … […] Chandler: Well, this is fascinating. So, uh, what is it about me? […] WHAT IS IT?! Monica: Okay, I – I d’know, you – you just – you have a quality. All: Yes. Absolutely. A quality. Chandler: Oh, oh, a quality, good, because I was worried you guys were gonna be vague about this. (Friends, Season 1, Episode 8, The One Where Nana Dies Twice. Full transcript. http:// friends.tktv.net/Episodes1/8.html, last accessed on November 10, 2015)

Disregarding the patent fact that the three extracts appear in written mode, due to the restrictions of the medium paper (or the computer screen) used in this article, they give the impression of being quite similar at first sight as to structure (turn-taking) and a number of features that are characteristic of orally produced language such as ellipsis (Susan Sallidor did), contractions (he’s, gonna, how’s), discourse markers (well, you know) and expletives (Oh God). However, a closer look reveals that the differences between the piece of non-fictional dialogue in (1) and the two extracts of fictional dialogue in (2a) and (2b) are much more conspicuous. Without going into detail they differ as to a wide range of features that are characteristic of non-fictional but rare in fictional dialogue. Obviously, these include false starts, incomplete constructions and repairs (Example 1, lines 4 and 5: to have . this . really sort of - - it’s for one thing it does nark me that), hesitations and fillers (line 10: and ǝ: ǝ: it upsets me you know if he needed it), repetitions (line 12: he’s also he’s also), interruptions and overlaps (line 14  ff: A: +yeah+ - so that if you buy enough [f] D: he isn’t satisfied #thank you# B: +does anyone want ham+ A: *if you* D: +*he isn’t* satisfied with a+ normal portion). Leaving aside the medium induced scalar differences in orality between the print version of a dramatic play (2a) and the transcription of an enacted and aired TV series (2b), both varieties of fictional dialogue strike us as much more ‘orderly’ and ‘tidied up’ than the spontaneous non-fictional dialogue in (1). This discrepancy will take centre stage in the present article, which to this end will address the typical oral features of spoken language (as identified in spontaneously occurring face-to-face dialogue) and their reduced and modified use in the scripted fictional dialogue on stage, screen or paper. Before doing so, some terminological clarification is called for. Studies in literary criticism, stylistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics alike have repeatedly pointed out the terminological vagueness of such elusive concepts as orality and spoken language along with literacy or scripturality and written language. There is obviously no constitutive correspondence between orally produced features and spoken language or, for that matter, between manually produced features and written language. Nor are spoken expressions a positive indicator of orality and written

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items of literacy or scripturality. Spoken features can be detected in written texts that are (intended to be) orally realized (a screenplay, as in 2b), and features of written language can characterize spoken texts that are orally transmitted to be written down (e.g. through dictation). Furthermore, both spoken and written texts can be planned ahead and carefully constructed or else produced in an unplanned and spontaneous manner. Thus, before we proceed to investigate oral features, we need to explicate the polysemous and often misleadingly used notions of orality and spoken language as well as their associates medium, mode and concept, to explain the discrepancy between pattern and performance in context. The undercurrent of my deliberations will be Lakoff’s (1982: 241) claim that the characteristics regularly “ascribed to ‘oral’ discourse […] are not necessarily characteristic of the oral medium per se” (cf. also Landert 2014: 20). This evokes two questions: Firstly, what other factors in lieu of or besides the “oral medium” induce the differences between the fictional and non-fictional spoken language that we can observe in the opening examples? Secondly, are the contrasts between fictional and non-fictional spoken dialogue differences of orality and/or of spoken language? 2.

Orality as medium, mode and concept

In pragmatics and media studies, both the terms orality and medium suffer from the problem that they mean different things in different theories. The nexus between orality and medium that Lakoff (1982: 241) generates in her phrase “the oral medium per se” is certainly debatable, but by no means uncommon.2 In this article I use the term medium to refer to physical, material and extra-corporal devices such as paper, newspapers, books, radios and smartphones, which allow the production, transmission and storage of communicative signs (cf. Bublitz 2008: 260; Holly 1997: 69). According to this view, speaking and writing are not media (and the related properties of orality and literacy are even less so). With mode I refer to the representational format of communicative messages, i.e. to the ways in which the information is materialized, both as an act and as its outcome. Hence, speaking and spoken utterances are phonic modes, writing and written texts are graphic modes (as are drawings and pictures), and signing, of course, is a gestural mode. Media have a carrying function, modes have a representing function. When taking medium and mode as the only parameters, spontaneously occurring (1) and enacted fictional discourse (2b) are alike, as opposed to read and unperformed fictional dialogue (2a), which is modally and medially different. It follows that in order to explain the apparent differences re orality features in spon-

2



Cf. e.g. Stöckl (2004: 14), who refers to speaking and writing “as different medial variants of language”.

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taneous vs. enacted fictional discourse, we need a third parameter. The latter has to mirror the Janus-faced character of scripted fictional dialogue, which switches between the two modes of writing and speaking depending on how the dialogue is realized, either as an enacted spoken and viewed performance, or as a written and read printed document. Both sides are inextricably interconnected and they interpenetrate each other. When viewing the spoken enactment of a play, its mode (writing) and medium (paper) resonate. Conversely, when reading a dramatic dialogue, the potentiality of its spoken enactment lets the speaking mode resonate. It is this ambivalence, along with the fact that the speaking mode is secondary to the writing mode, i.e. depending on and reflecting the latter, that accounts for the attested differences in orality between spontaneous unscripted and scripted fictional dialogue. There is, furthermore, a continuum of orality in scripted dialogue, from a lower degree in printed and read dialogue to a higher degree in enacted dialogue (in varying strength depending on how faithful the actors are to the script). To give the third parameter a name, we borrow the term concept from Koch and Oesterreicher (1985).3 The differences in orality between spontaneous faceto-face conversation and fictional scripted dialogue (be it printed and read, or spoken and viewed) are thus caused by a conceptual discrepancy between the spoken realization by the actor of a dialogue that has been generated and conceptualized as spoken dialogue by one or several authors, on the one hand, and the spoken realization of spontaneous dialogue generated and conceptualized as such by the speaker, on the other. Accordingly, spontaneous face-to-face dialogue as in Example 1 is conceptually and modally spoken, whereas fictional drama and TV dialogues as in (2a) and (2b) are modally written (and use the medium of paper) but are conceptually spoken; when enacted on stage or screen, these dialogues change their mode (to speaking) but continue to reflect the conceptuality of the writtento-be-spoken script. 3.

Orality and spoken language

In order to find out if the attested differences between fictional and non-fictional spoken dialogue are those of orality and/or spoken language, we need to examine the relationship between these two concepts. Since Koch and Oesterreicher (1985) made the distinction between medium-based and concept-based orality, it has been generally agreed that orality and spoken language cannot be equated and are best

3



Cf. also Koch (1999). In their model of communication medium and concept are interrelated with the parameters of communicative immediacy and distance (to which I will turn presently). A number of linguists have criticized and modified their model, e.g. Dürscheid (2007), Landert (2014), Landert and Jucker (2011), Sieber (1998).

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treated as two separate notions, which are, of course, related. In keeping with traditional linguistics (cf. e.g. Brown and Yule 1983; Stubbs 1983; Schwitalla 2006), spoken language is best defined as the product of the act of speaking, which is a corporal act of producing meaningful sounds. Spoken language thus refers to the vocally produced segmental and non-segmental (prosodic) sounds which prototypically are accompanied by supporting kinesic signs (gestures, mimics, gazes and posture). Importantly, when speaking, we can avail ourselves not only of features that are typical for orality but also of those that characterize literacy. A person who is said to ‘talk like a book’, for instance, demonstrates such literary features, which means that they avoid, inter alia, signals of non-fluency, planning and repair. Instead of literacy, the term scripturality is more apt because it underscores the mediality of written language. Hence, we can pair orality with scripturality from a medial perspective, and with literacy from a conceptual perspective.4 Orality has to do with speaking as a mode. Oral features are thus spoken features in the sense that they are vocally produced in the act of speaking. As such they are a characteristic, though not a constitutive feature of spoken language. In addition to its modal meaning, there is conceptual orality, which can be assigned to spoken and written communication alike. As a mode, orality refers to a concrete (phonic) realization of language, and as a concept, to an abstract principle of construction. A default assumption of orality holds for spontaneous face-to-face conversation, though not for artefactually mediated forms of communication. Unlike these, spontaneous face-to-face conversation is, inter alia, direct (resting on eye-tobody-contact), proximate (as to its participants, place and time of speaking) and synchronous (simultaneously produced and received by its participants). Orality in face-to-face conversation rests and depends on these features and is, accordingly, inseparable as to oral mode and oral concept, which coincide. The possibility of separating the two only emerged with the advent of artefactual mediation of communication, which is, inter alia, indirect (using visual signs or technologically transmitted speech sounds when telephoning), distant (as to its participants and place), either synchronous (telephone) or asynchronous (letters and electronically mediated forms of communication). It is thus only with the invention of a second medium and mode that orality as a concept can be separated from orality as a mode, as is the case in fictional dialogue, whether printed or enacted. When ascribing orality to spoken though artefactually mediated discourse, we highlight either the phonic mode of its realization or its conceptual make-up. A conceptually writ-

4



From a sociocultural and literary point of view, literacy and/versus orality take centre stage in the influential study by Ong ([1982] 2002), who defines orality as the mode of expression “of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print” (2002: 2).

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ten text such as a story, a recipe, a letter, or a sermon can be spoken when read out loud even though it is devoid of any signs of conceptual orality. (It displays orality only in the modal sense that a human voice is used to produce the vocal sounds corresponding to the signs written on paper.) Things can be even more interwoven in some forms of computer-mediated communication that display degrees of conceptual orality even though they are modally written (cf. Bublitz 2008, 2012). Having disentangled the two notions of orality and spoken language, we can now explain the difference between non-fictional (1) and fictional dialogue (2a and 2b). (1) is characterized by orality both modally, in that it is spoken, and conceptually, in that it displays features of orality that are attributable to the ad hoc, spontaneous, unplanned character of the conversation, to its embeddedness in a socio-cultural speech situation, and to a dynamic context continuously created by the participants (who reciprocally negotiate meaning and function in an attempt to establish and secure common ground). Orality as a concept is thus a given, characteristic feature of such authentic conversation (whose features will be described below). In fictional dialogue (2a and 2b), orality is artificially generated in the act of writing by the author, who copies the concept from natural face-to-face conversation. Such scripted, constructed and pre-planned dialogue is, of course, modally meant to be spoken, staged and performed by actors, who, as a rule, are not identical to the author. Here, orality does not dynamically emerge as the function of a situation and context but is previously designed by a non-participating other. Orality in fictional written dialogue meant to be spoken has not been a legitimate, let alone pressing, research subject in media analysis and pragmatics until recently. Jucker and Locher remind us that in recent pragmatics the focus has generally been on “what was considered ‘real’ language, i.e. spontaneous spoken language” (this volume, p. 8). Ironically, the primacy of written language was uncontested for most of the history of linguistics up to the 19th century. Initiated by Neogrammarian scholars and later supported by Saussure and his successors, the axiom of the primacy of written over spoken language was reversed, thus constituting a successfully accomplished change of paradigm in linguistics.5

5



In his seminal “Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics”, John Lyons (1968: 9) refers to the “classical fallacy” that, beginning with “Greek linguistic scholarship”, “the tendency was always to consider the [spoken language] as dependent on, and derived from, the [written language]”. Of course, it would be an over-reaction to the “fatal misconception” (1968: 9) of its primacy to totally dismiss written language as an inferior system. Not only was the latter the predominant object of grammatical description for a long time, it continues to be so in contemporary linguistics, if to a lesser extent and on a par with spoken language.

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4.

243

Oral features in non-fictional and fictional dialogue

Much research into the orality of dramatic and telecinematic discourse agrees that scripted fictional dialogue on stage, screen and paper typically features a low frequency of dialogue “dysfluencies” (Alvarez-Pereyre 2011: 59).6 Taking this communis opinio as a springboard, we will look into the typical oral features of spontaneous face-to-face conversation and investigate their inevitable reduction in fictional dialogue. In addition to ethnomethodological conversation analysis, whose studies had a considerable impact on linguistics (Sacks 1992; Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974), it was with the advent of the manually transcribed and subsequently computerized corpora of spoken English conversation in the second half of the last century, notably the Survey of English Usage (later computerized as part of the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English), that close discourse analytic investigations into the previously neglected features of naturally occurring speech began to thrive in the text and discourse based branches of linguistics. The almost coincidental publication of a number of stocktaking introductory textbooks can be taken as evidence of this development, notably Stubbs (1983) and Brown and Yule (1983), in which the portrayal of features of spoken and written language takes centre stage.7 Both books offer inventories of spoken language features, which I will take (along with further findings in discourse analysis, pragmatics and sociology) as a foundation on which to establish a synopsis of oral features in spoken face-to-face discourse. Adopting a general distinction between the macro-level and micro-level features of orality, I suggest grouping the plethora of oral features covered in linguistic (and related) literature into a small number of large-scale categories: (1) features of metacommunication (e.g. discourse markers or repetitions), (2) features of turn management (e.g. turn-taking signals) and (3) features of topic management (e.g. digression indicators). These three categories cover oral features that predominantly function as signals of planning, repairing and organizing. (4) Features of involvement (as opposed to detachment in written discourse) with an interactive and thus interpersonal bias, which cut across most oral features typical of the three preceding categories. And finally the micro-level category (5) features of formal reduction (e.g. phonetic contraction or incomplete syntax), whose defining criteCf. e.g. Bednarek (2011, 2015), Bubel (2008, 2011), Jucker (2015a, 2015b), Kozloff (2000), Mittmann (2006), Quaglio (2008, 2009), Rossi (2011), Spitz (2005), and, for drama, Burton (1980). 7 Cf. also, though with different foci, Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), Biber (1988), Coulthard (1977), Halliday (1989) as well as Schubert’s (2008) overview, Schiffrin’s (1994) evaluation of competitive approaches to discourse analysis and the two handbooks by Schiffrin, Tannen and Hamilton (2001) and Schneider and Barron (2014). 6



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rion is form rather than function and whose means are typically used for stylistic reasons. Even though the preceding synopsis of oral features in spontaneous spoken face-to-face discourse is definitely not exhaustive, it nonetheless covers most items, among them those that (together with all phonetic and prosodic footprints) make accurate transcriptions of natural conversation, as in Example 1, difficult and, somewhat ironically, ‘unnatural’ reading. When we look at them, “we are struck, often, in a perverse way by their apparent unnaturalness, their difficulty in being understood” (Tannen 1984: 323). Scripted fictional discourse, on the other hand, is much easier to understand and “often strikes audiences and readers as extremely realistic” (Spitz 2005: 28). The obvious reason for the undemanding comprehensibility of fictional dialogue is the reduction of orality features, which is necessary and inevitable. Indeed, authors and everyone else involved in the creation, production and reception of scripted discourse operate on a default assumption of reduced orality. The reduction and the ensuing putative ‘naturalness’ and easy comprehensibility of scripted dialogue are attributable to the reduced performance conditions on a stage or a movie set as well as the representational medium (book, screen, TV set). Rigid limits of time (length of enacted play) and space (size of stage and auditorium) lead to a restriction of orality (fewer repetitions, false starts, paralinguistic features etc.), on the one hand, and a fixation on audio-visual perceivability (to be guaranteed even for back-seat viewers), on the other. But while it is true that “mostly everything in cinema must remain ‘within the dominant code of intelligibility’” (Kozloff 2000: 121), there is the occasional play, movie or TV series whose producers sacrifice comprehensibility for “realism” (Toolan 2011: 167). A close examination of telecinematic and dramatic research into orality reveals that, in general, the reduction of orality in fictional dialogue manifests itself in a lower rate of features of verbosity, vagueness, non-fluency, involvement and narration (cf. above and note 6). Accordingly, the observation that oral features predominantly function as signals of planning, repairing and organizing holds for scripted fictional dialogue only to a limited extent. Here is a brief outline of oral features in spontaneous spoken face-to-face discourse and how they differ as to form, function and frequency in scripted fictional discourse. 4.1.

Features of metacommunication

Though hardly noticed by its participants, the use of metalanguage as a means of referring to language (e.g. by clarifying, paraphrasing, repairing) makes up a considerable part of spontaneous face-to-face conversation but not, or only to a very limited extent, of fictional dialogue. The notion of metacommunication used in this article is based on Jakobson’s (1960) concept of metalanguage. By

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complementing Bühler’s ([1934] 1965) seminal Organon model of communicative functions with a “metalingual function”, Jakobson was the first linguist to understand the genuinely human “capacity of detaching oneself from the object use of language (i.e. from using it for purposes other than those that are related to itself) and instead focus on language by talking about it, referring to it or, indeed, reflecting upon it” (Hübler and Bublitz 2007: 2). He also recognized that, unlike the other five functions (expressive, conative, referential, phatic, poetic) in his communication model, the metalingual function is located on a higher level of communication because it is “not used to communicate propositional meaning but to explain, gloss, comment on, predicate about or refer to such propositional meaning” (Hübler and Bublitz 2007: 2). Metacommunicative means are employed when participants feel the need to attend to speech rather than attend from speech, to borrow Anton’s (1998) highly expedient distinction, who maintains that we routinely and commonly attend not to speech, but simply from it. […] in our everyday encounters, we routinely listen from our speech to the thought so intended. Inversely, when a foreign tongue is used, a language we are unable to transcend, we explicitly attend to the speech itself. (Anton 1998: 199, emphasis in original)

The great number of metacommunicative means resulting from such a need have been categorized in various ways in discourse analytic, pragmatic, sociological and, lately, in media based research. While it is generally agreed that metacommunicative means are used to refer to form and structure, meaning and function, participants and context, i.e. practically to any communicatively relevant aspect of the ongoing discursive exchanges, different theoretical approaches have developed and bred different classifications and nomenclatures. Of these, I will draw on two models, one by Clark (“collateral signals”) and the other by Gumperz (“contextualization cues”) and incorporate features examined elsewhere. Taking a broad view, the predominant functions that they concordantly ascribe to the oral means covered are those of planning and repairing as well as, though to a lesser extent, organizing. Convinced that “[s]pontaneous interactive language has its origins in joint activities” of people who “do things together in cafés, classrooms, and offices”, Clark (2004: 366) proposes a fundamental distinction between “content” and “performance” in such spontaneous interaction, i.e. between “the official business” dealt with and the “coordination” of the respective communicative acts. Even though he prefers a different nomenclature, this tallies, of course, with our claim that communication happens on two communicative planes, the exchange of propositional content and the metacommunicative indication of how to understand such content. Clark (2004) proposes a slightly more complex (but still dyadic) distinction between the utterance of content and two kinds of displaying signals which indicate how the content expressed is to be understood. Displays are of two kinds: some “indicate the producer, recipient, content, timing, and location of the signal”,

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others ground the signals by indicating their “local, ongoing performance” and are then called “collateral signals” by Clark (2004). He argues that because people in everyday conversations “normally start speaking before they have selected every word or phrase and are therefore often delayed in coming up with later words and phrases”, they often “deal with these problems” by using collateral signals “that refer to the local, ongoing performance of those primary signals” (Clark 2004: 373, emphasis in original). Collateral signals, which “give the language of cafés, classrooms, and offices its spontaneous character”, take the form of “inserts, modifications, juxtapositions, and concomitants” (Clark 2004: 381), which “replace phrases”, “make clarifications”, “introduce delays” (2004: 365) and a number of related actions. For instance: – Inserts typically consist of “parenthetical comments or exchanges interposed within the official business of a discourse” (2004: 374) and take, inter alia, the form of “asides” (in Example 1 e.g. I mean in line 1, you know in lines 8 and 22), “fillers” “to announce […] delays” (e.g. ǝ: ǝ: in line 10) and expressions like “excuse me” “to comment on self-repairs” (2004: 376). – Modifications are “signals that are achieved by modifying part or all of the display of a primary utterance” (2004: 374). Among them we find “try markers” (“rising intonation followed by a slight pause” to signal that the speaker is not sure of “a name or description”, 2004: 376) and “prolongations” that signal “the continuation of a delay in progress” (2004: 378) (e.g. sort of - - it’s for one thing it in Example 1, line 5). – Juxtapositions function as signals that display “one primary utterance juxta posed against another” (2004: 374) such as “replacement”, “repetition”, “overlap” (2004: 378–379) (e.g. in Example 1 and his great . and his grandfather in lines 1  f., he’s also he’s also in line 12 and several overlaps like +who+ – +yeah+ in lines 13  f). – Concomitants are gestures that accompany primary signals. Covering a slightly broader range of oral features in natural discourse, Gumperz (1982, 1989) develops a theory of contextualization cues. From the irrefutable assumption that context is not a static, inflexible and user-independent environmental shell (into which utterances are somehow embedded) but an “interpreted environment” (Bublitz 2006: 374), i.e. one that is permanently created, adapted and up-dated in ongoing discourse by speakers and hearers alike, it follows that participants need a particular kind of linguistic means whose job it is to relate content to context. With contextualization cues Gumperz (1989: 77) refers to such metacommunicative means and defines them “as a class of verbal signs […] that serve to relate what is said on any particular time-bound occasion to knowledge acquired through past experience”. Examples include deictics, anaphorics, quoting signals, style-shifting and other forms of referring, repairing or organizing.

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Allowing for extensive and, indeed, inevitable cross-classification, Gumperz’s context-related concept can be aligned with Clark’s collateral signals in that both cover a comparable range of lexical, structural, prosodic and kinesic phenomena. Among them – the means of reference tracking (pronouns, deictics and other referring expressions, such as in Example 1 I don’t like this in line 20, including ‘personalisation signals’ examined by Landert 2014), – the means of planning and repairing (using recycled language, e.g. repetition and glosses, hesitations and planners, silence, gaps and pauses, self- and other-repair, false starts and incomplete constructions, of which there are several tokens in Example 1, e.g. well I must admit I feel I mean in line 1, the sheer fact of not having to have to have . this . really sort of - - it’s for one thing it does nark me in lines 4  f), – the means of discourse organisation (cohesive devices such as pronouns or repetitions, gambits8 and discourse markers). Arguably, discourse markers are among the most frequently studied oral phenomena. Brown and Yule (1983: 15) and Clark (2004: 376) name expressions such as “well, erm, I think, you know, if you see what I mean” and “I mean, you know, excuse me, well, oh, like, ah, now, uh” respectively, some of which occur in Example 1, which also features I feel (somehow) (lines 1 and 4) and (really) sort of (in line 5).9 Of these, oral elements such as uh and um (or er, erm in Brown and Yule’s British English spelling) have varyingly been described as “fillers” (Clark 2004: 376), “hesitators” or, indeed, “disfluency markers”, as Jucker (2015b: 65) points out, who prefers Tottie’s (2011) term “planners” (Jucker 2015b: 64). The heterogeneous category of disfluency or non-fluency markers is inexplicit enough to cover “errors, pauses and unclear speech” (Lambrou 2014: 138) as well as “hesitations, needless repetitions, re-starts, and syntactic anomalies” (Culpeper 2001: 217), which all feature in Example 1. Of course, hesitations, classified by Clark

Gambits (such as come to think of it in ex. (1), line 12) are fixed metacommunicative expressions which organize ongoing discourse and thus help secure comprehension such as first of all, before I forget, another thing (related to topic and topical actions) or have you heard the one about (related to the type of text or speech activity), cf. Edmondson (1977) and Keller (1979). 9 These expressions are particularly prone to cross-classification because they fit into a broad range of theoretical frames, as Clark (2004: 376) points out in his synopsis, which I have supplemented in two places: “editing expressions […], discourse markers (Schiffrin 1987, [Jucker and Ziv 1998; Lenk 1997; Östman 1981]), discourse particles (Schourup 1985), pragmatic expressions (Erman 1987), disjunct markers […], discourse operators […], clue words […], cue words […] [and discourse signals (Stenström 1990)]”. 8



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and Gumperz as a means of planning, prototypically indicate disfluency. They opportunely serve as “speaker continuation signals” (Duncan 1972) in order to block interruptions or as attention-directing devices to guide the hearer’s comprehension (cf. Bublitz 1988: 180 for an overview). In fictional dialogue, the metacommunicative features of orality with a planning and repairing function are, as one would expect, less frequent than in spontaneous dialogue, chiefly because fictional dialogue is carefully pre-planned and assiduously constructed (cf. Examples 2a and 2b above). This has been demonstrated in a considerable number of movie, television and drama studies (cf. note 6), whose authors agree that in their data there are clearly fewer false starts and incomplete utterances, self- and other-repairs, hesitations, repetitions, glosses/ paraphrases, discourse markers, planners or fillers and vague words. Other reasons for the restricted use of some of these orality features include, e.g., the insufficient advancement of narration (Bednarek 2010: 78). Despite their low frequency of occurrence, authors nonetheless incorporate means of planning and repairing into their scripts for reasons that are, at least in part, alien to spontaneous discourse. Bednarek (2010: 66) specifies functions such as “provid[ing] realism, comic confusion” (as in Example 2b), “show[ing] mental states such as emotions” or “align[ing] turn-taking with camera angles”. On the same plane we find references to style and rhetoric as likely reasons, e.g. in Jucker’s (2015b: 63) claim “that authors use uhs and ums to achieve certain stylistic effects”, as e.g. Rachel’s Um … yeah in Example 2b, and Rossi’s (2011: 37) observation that repetition in scripted dialogue is “a refined rhetorical strategy” not for “compensating planning difficulties, memory gaps” but as “a kind of discourse deixis”, as e.g. Chandler’s repetition of what is it in Example 2b. 4.2.

Features of turn management

The features of turn management, including first and foremost the means and principles of turn taking, turn allocating, overlaps and interruptions, are constitutive of orality and deserve a closer look. From our discussion of participant formats we know that human interaction is dyadic. It involves (at least) two human participants focussing on one another at all levels of communication, including the organization of turn-taking, which is cooperatively regulated. This behaviour is, as Goffman (1964: 135) points out, attributable to the fact that “[t]alk is socially organized, not merely in terms of who speaks to whom in what language, but as a little system of mutually ratified and ritually governed face-to-face action, a social encounter”, which relies on “cues […] for requesting the floor and giving it up, for informing the speaker as to the stability of the focus of attention he is receiving”. From the inventive research carried out in ethnomethodological conversation analysis, we know that (as a rule and at least in the societies investigated) turn-taking follows a large number of such lexical, grammatical, prosodic and gestural cues

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as well as a moderate number of principles. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) attribute the smooth functioning of turn-taking in spontaneous conversation to the participants’ close observation of such principles which ensure, inter alia, that a change of turn only occurs at specific places in ongoing discourse, that simultaneous talking only lasts for a very short period of time or that a speaker may select either another participant or him-/herself as the next speaker. To implement these principles, participants have a large choice of verbal and non-verbal cues or signals at their disposal, which have been divided into speaker signals and hearer signals in a number of pivotal studies by Duncan (1972, 1974), Duncan and Niederehe (1974) and others. Speakers typically issue turn-yielding, speaker continuation and speaker state signals while hearers give auditor back-channel, claiming-of-the-turn and hearer state signals. The latter in particular have attracted much research (and created a number of competing terms such as back-channel signals, listener responses or hearer signals). In face-to-face conversation, they are obligatory, expected, frequently elicited and used to confirm current and announce continuing status as a hearer (as, e.g., yes in Example 1, line 3).10 These principles and signals can, however, only be applied to self-regulated spontaneous face-to-face conversation without a third party controlling turn- and, incidentally, topic-management, as, e.g., in (public) panel discussions or, indeed, in author-controlled fictional dialogue. This also holds for overlaps, interruptions and forms of silence. The latter are commonly classified as intra-turn silences (pauses) and inter-turn silences (gaps and lapses, cf. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974: 715) and can be used in a variety of functions (such as creating suspense, expressing despair or simply affirmation and negation). Pauses in particular, as e.g. in really sort of - - it’s (line 5) or yeah - so that (line 14 in Example 1), are noteworthy for orality assessment in enacted fictional dialogue because they frequently have a planning function in making meaningful lexical, syntactic or semantic choices, as Rochester (1973: 64) discovered. This applies foremost to filled pauses, which, like hesitations or repetitions, occur whenever a decision has to be made by the speaker (cf. Goldman-Eisler’s pivotal study of 1961). In fictional discourse, turn-taking and speaker-change are, of course, carefully planned and by no means as (seemingly) random and arbitrary as in spontaneous discourse. From literary studies on the functions and distribution of turn-taking and turns, we learn, e.g., that they are specifically designed for character portrayal in drama. Bousfield and McIntyre (2011), for instance, call attention to Short’s (1996: 206) conclusion that “powerful characters typically take the most and the longest conversational turns, initiate conversational exchange, control the topic of

10

Hearer signals can be verbal (yes) and non-verbal (e.g. nodding, gazing, shrugging), cf. Bublitz (1988: 169–173), Goffman (1964), Goodwin (1981), and Kendon (1967).

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conversation, interrupt other characters and allocate turns to others” (Bousfield and McIntyre 2011: 110). This tallies with findings about turn (and topic) design in plays, movies or TV-series, which exhibit “a relatively even distribution of (short) turns” (Bednarek 2010: 66). Moreover, unlike in spontaneous discourse, “speaker change is not locally managed but totally author-controlled with turn-taking rights being established on dramaturgical grounds rather than on democratic conversational principles” (Spitz 2005: 22). On another plane, turn internal interruptions, overlaps and thus simultaneous speech as well as “ignored or misheard turns” (Toolan 2011: 161) are much less frequent than in impromptu face-to-face conversation, simply in order to avoid incomprehensibility (cf. Heldner and Edlund 2010; Kozloff 2000: 121 and, for exceptions in contemporary plays by female writers, Spitz 2005). 4.3.

Features of topic management

Topic management is, of course, a principal characteristic of any conversation because conversation is always about something. Discourse topic is not a well- or unanimously defined (or, indeed, definable) notion (and, of course, not to be confused with sentence topic or ‘theme’ (vs. ‘rheme’) as described in Prague School Linguistics). From a pragmatic and hermeneutic perspective, discourse topic is best described as a participant- and context-dependent notion that emerges continually. It is a dynamic rather than a static, invariant entity, inherent in discourse and independent of its participants. Rather than saying ‘a discourse has a topic’ in the same way as ‘a sentence has a subject’, we should say that speakers and hearers ascribe topics to ongoing discourse. Topic is an option provided by the discourse. When agreed on, it is then handled by applying topical actions like introducing, changing or closing. In non-fictional face-to-face discourse, we have to distinguish between controlled and non-controlled topic choice and treatment. In spontaneous conversation, participants jointly agree on which discourse topic to talk about, which topical actions to perform (either explicitly or, as is the rule, tacitly), and whose turn it is to contribute to the discourse topic and to perform topical actions. This is different in institutionalized forms of non-fictional discourse such as panel discussions, interviews etc., which are more formal, often public and inevitably regulated and controlled. Panel discussions in front of an audience, for instance, normally feature topics which the participants have mutually agreed on beforehand or are prepared to accept when introduced by the chairperson, who is also entitled to control the way in which the topic is dealt with, which participant’s turn it is, and mostly even the order of speakers and the length of each contribution. In non-controlled spontaneous face-to-face discourse, participants treat discourse topics in various ways by, inter alia, introducing, changing, shifting, digressing from or closing them (cf. Bublitz 1988: 15–140). Of these actions,

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spontaneous digressions, such as does anyone want ham in Example 1 (line 16), deserve a special mention because they are a typical feature of orality in natural discourse but not or only in a restricted sense in fictional discourse. Participants in everyday conversation operate on the principle that a current topic is only changed by mutual consent and not without good reason. One good reason for changing a topic is the participants’ lack of interest in the current topic. Another good reason for introducing a new topic before the old topic has been (properly) closed, and hence for digressing, is a (sudden) change in the speaker’s interest, who, for whatever reason, is more strongly interested in the new than in the old topic. Digressing speakers act on the spur of the moment, without observing the procedure that normally precedes a change of topic. Unlike comprehension-securing digressions (which provide additional information without which the following topic talk would be incomprehensible), spontaneous digressions are not conceivable in scripted fictional dialogue (unless deliberately constructed to portray a character). Unlike spontaneous discourse, fictional film or drama discourse exhibits a low frequency of the topical actions that are particularly characteristic of highly context- and situation-related talk, where they are not handled and controlled by one of the participants entitled to do so. Likewise, topics are normally not shifted, digressed from, introduced at random and on the spur of the moment. This holds for spontaneous digressions as well as for the (abrupt and impulsive) changing, shifting or closing of topics without mutual consent (cf. Kozloff 2000: 74; also Toolan 2011: 162–163). 4.4.

Features of involvement

To explain why participants in spontaneous talk use means of orality at all, Chafe (1982: 36) argues that features of orality (and, incidentally, scripturality) are a necessary consequence of two “differences in the speaking and writing processes”: “speaking is faster than writing” and “speakers interact with their audiences directly, whereas writers do not”. The first rather obvious but (according to Chafe) too often neglected difference is taken to explain the speaker’s preference for phonetically and grammatically reduced forms (cf. below) and the writer’s preference for complex forms. The former leads to “fragmentation” in spoken discourse and the latter to “integration” (“the packing of more information into an idea unit than the rapid pace of spoken language would normally allow” by, e.g., nominalization) in written discourse (Chafe 1982: 38–39). The second difference, i.e. that “speakers interact with their audiences directly, whereas writers do not”, concerns the interpersonal and interactive quality of faceto-face communication and explains why spoken discourse displays involvement and written discourse detachment. Speakers who get involved with their interlocutor “share a considerable amount of knowledge concerning the environment of the conversation” and “can monitor the effect of what he or she is saying on the

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listener”, while the latter “is able to signal understanding and to ask for clarification” (Chafe 1982: 45). Comparable to Chafe’s concept of involvement, there is another pragmatic approach that captures the dual nature of orality in conceptually spoken and written texts, which takes immediacy and interactivity as defining parameters. Interactivity is a unit of measurement of the degree to which participants perform the communicative acts of creating meaning and fostering interpersonal relations (cf. Eisenlauer and Hoffmann 2008). Evidently, dyadic face-to-face conversation involving the speaker and hearer in direct, immediate and reciprocal contact is characterized by the highest degree of communicative interactivity imaginable. Actors on stage and on screen also interact with each other, directly, and with their audiences, indirectly. From the recipient’s point of view, watching a scripted scene on stage or on screen involves a rather low degree of interactivity, comparable to that between a reader and writer/author. The distinction between the highly developed interactivity in spontaneous face-to-face conversation as opposed to the reduced interactivity between actor and actor, on the one hand, and actor (or author) and overhearing and addressed audience, on the other, corresponds to Koch and Oesterreicher’s (1985) distinction between communicative immediacy and distance, which are interrelated with the parameters of medium and concept (and form a continuum). Briefly, forms of human communication (whether spoken or written) which display a high rate of features typical of written language are near the pole of communicative distance, while those that display a high rate of spoken language features are near the pole of communicative immediacy. In a distinct summary, Landert (2014) gets to the core properties of the two scalar notions:11 High communicative immediacy is thus, among other features, characterised by a non-public setting in which the communicative partners are close and the communication is spontaneous and interactive. Koch and Oesterreicher (1985: 21–23) argue that such a setting typically leads to communicative acts which are less planned, which have a low information density and which are linguistically less complex and elaborated. High communicative distance refers to the opposite end of the scale. Communicative acts with a high degree of linguistic immediacy are more typically realised as spoken language and communicative acts with a high degree of linguistic distance can more typically be found in written language. (Landert 2014: 21–22)

To express involvement and immediacy, Chafe (1982: 46–48) lists a number of typical means, which include first person pronouns, private verbs (e.g. I must 11

Raible (2002: 8967–8968) places immediacy and distance in a historical context: “For a similar distinction, Karl Bühler ([1934] 1965) had already introduced a pair of Greek terms used by Wilhelm von Humboldt in the 19th century: language as enérgeia vs language as érgon, i.e. language as an activity or process (involving present partners), as opposed to language as something created, produced, edited, for instance a book”.

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admit I feel I mean in Example 1, line 1), discourse markers, emphatic particles, terms of vagueness and “fuzziness” (e.g. I feel somehow in line 4, sort of in line 4  f) as well as verbs of saying to indicate direct quoting. This list comprises items that are also covered in other theories of linguistic orality, notably in Biber (1988), where involved discourse is opposed to informational discourse, and in Landert (2014), where means of “personalising language” are viewed as a sub-group of involvement features. In her investigation of involvement in face-toface discourse, Spitz (2005: 167–168), referring, inter alia, to Tannen (1984) and Sacks (1992), discusses “cooperative overlaps” as a means of showing interpersonal involvement. These stretches of simultaneous speech, which may include paraphrases, comments, questions and feedback on feedback, ties in with other involvement building “recipient actions” (Bublitz 1988: 197–249) such as interjections and exclamations (including expletives), sentence completions, echoes and repetitions. All these features of involvement and immediacy serve to support both the interlocutor’s propositional content (what is said) and stance towards such content (how it is said). A dual directionality towards the internal, diegetic interlocutor and the external, non-diegetic audience is thus characteristic of scripted dialogue. Taking such double-headedness into account, we can say that the enacted dialogue displays involvement within the scene but detachment in other respects (thus reflecting the conceptual status of the orality features used and the lack of interactivity between performers and viewers.) Involvement is a characteristic feature both of non-fictional and fictional discourse. In scripted and performed dialogue, it is normally only reduced when it concerns means of vagueness and fuzziness, which are sparingly used to avoid unintelligibility. For ‘dramatic reasons’, TV series, films and plays even exhibit a high frequency of involved language, especially in cases where verbal exchanges between characters are dominated by aggravation (and a lack of mitigation and consideration) as well as emotionality, as attested for TV series by Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005: 280) and Bednarek (2011: 60), for modern “power plays” by Spitz (2005: 228) and by Burton (1980) for conflict centered traditional drama (whose “interactants – fictitious as they are – argue, try to assert themselves, insult each other, ignore each other, refuse to do what they are asked to do, don’t bother to be polite […] and so on”, Burton 1980: 116). On the other hand, exclamatory acts featuring swearwords, obscenities, expletives, profanities are much rarer in most genres on stage and screen mostly out of consideration for the audience’s feelings. 4.5.

Features of formal reduction

Formally reduced features of orality create clipped and ‘fragmented’ utterances which evoke the impression of (stylistic) informality and casualty. Besides phonetic forms of reduction (such as it’s, won’t, wouldn’t and several others in Exam-

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ple 1), there are also lexical and syntactic ones, which have been itemized in Brown and Yule (1983): – syntax with little structure, i.e. incomplete sentences [as the sheer fact of not having to have to have this really sort of in Example 1, lines 4  f], coordination (little subordination), hardly any passives and clefts, – indeterminate group agents instead of passive (everything they do in Edinburgh they do it far too slowly), – markers of paratactical structure (and, but, then), – rarely more than two premodifying adjectives, – one predicate is attached to a given referent at a time (old man McArthur he was a wee chap oh very small and eh a beard […]), – topic-comment structure (rather than subject-predicate structure; the cats did you let them out), – deictics and gaze direction as a means of referring, – generalised vocabulary (do, thing, nice, stuff, place). (Brown and Yule 1983: 14–19, slightly adapted) In fictional dialogue, script writers endow their characters with particular accents, dialects and styles mainly to uphold the illusion of pragmatic and socio-cultural realism (cf. in this volume: Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, Ch. 4; Busse, Ch. 7; Planchenault, Ch. 9). Thus, features of formal reduction play a key role in scripted fictional dialogue, chiefly to create stylistic informality and discursive ‘naturalness’ (as, e.g., Susan’s ‘Cause and wanna in ‘Cause then it looks like you just wanna hang around with your girlfriend in Example 2a). When actors are instructed to speak in a clipped, casual, informal style, they resort to contracted features which are not (or only slightly) reduced compared to their occurrence in non-fictional discourse. They are thus an indispensable tool for character portrayal. There is only one (expectable) reason for these contracted means to be reduced and that is the very real danger that speech, even though it may strike an audience as highly realistic, may become unintelligible. 5.

Orality and the dual structure of fictional discourse

In the fictional dialogue enacted on stage or on screen, orality is a corset for the speaking actor who (in Goffman’s 1982 diction), by presenting written-to-be-spoken, i.e. conceptually oral lines, is simply the performing ‘animator’ of text made up and written by an absent ‘principal’ and ‘author’ at an earlier time and place. However, cases of ‘genuine (i.e. not deliberately scripted) orality’ do occur on stage (though not on screen) but they are exceedingly rare. They occur when actors step out of their roles and address the audience or members of the audience, a coughing visitor for instance, spontaneously and not as a move pre-planned by the

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author or director of the play. Such unscripted orality is a total breach of expectation for two interconnected reasons: On the one hand, it is ‘not part of the game’, i.e. of the ongoing socio-communicative activity, and on the other hand, it involves an unforeseeable change of participation format and leads to a realignment of the participant roles involved. From a pragmatic perspective, it is evident that the parties involved, from the author and actor to the co-actor and viewer, understand the particular language game played on stage or on screen based on the strength of their own communicative competence (Hymes 1962) and thus on their knowledge of the kinds of social and cultural acts that constitute the communicative encounters concerned. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s famous concept of the language game, Levinson (1979: 365) proposes to install ‘types of activities’ as a “level of pragmatic organization” beyond speech acts, which refer to conventionally established socio-cultural activities such as telling a joke, preaching a sermon, interviewing or chatting at a dinner party. Germane to our topic is the activity type ‘enacting a scripted dialogic scene’, which differs crucially from ‘talking spontaneously face-to-face’ as its corresponding template. Being engaged in an oral communicative encounter is different from playing (and thus pretending) to be engaged in an oral communicative encounter. The participants and audience alike know that the actor’s utterances are multi-addressed, equally directed at the co-actors present, as well as the observing audience. The negotiation and ensuing creation of meaning of the upcoming speech act or the next move are totally restrained by the written source material. And so is orality. Scripted orality as pretended orality is ratified as such by the audience of a play or the viewers of a film because they recognize the ongoing type of activity or language game (cf. similarly Kozloff 2000: 16, 47; Rossi 2011: 45). The unforeseeable change in the participation format and the realignment of participant roles caused by a sudden change to ‘genuine orality’ mirrors the dual structure of communication that is characteristic of fiction. It is common knowledge in literary and media studies as well as in linguistics that actors on stage or on screen communicate both at the diegetic level with their (ratified or non-ratified) co-acting addressees and at the non-diegetic level with their audience, if not directly then indirectly by advancing the author’s message. There is therefore some degree of interactivity between the subliminally addressed audience and the author via the actor. Spitz (2005), applying Goffman’s (1982) model of participation (for an in-depth discussion see Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume) contends that the viewer of a performed play and the reader of a printed play are best categorized as addressee and overhearer, “depending on the level of discourse one is looking at”: on one level […], the playwright designs the dramatic dialogue specifically for the spectator/reader of the play (text). On this level, then, the recipient of a drama is the addressee. […] On another level […], the situation of the spectator/reader who is listening to/reading the dramatic dialogue is similar to that of an overhearer in everyday situations who is bystander or eavesdropper to a conversation. Both are unratified par-

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ticipants to a social encounter having no rights or obligations in it. In both cases, the interaction they are overhearing – whether it is factual or fictional – is sealed off from them, belonging to a self-enclosed realm. (Spitz 2005: 25)

By slightly adapting Spitz’s ascription, we can say that under normal circumstances the attending observer of the enacted scripted orality of a play is an overhearer (and, on a higher level, an indirect addressee, i.e. an unaddressed but meant recipient). In the case, however, of no longer enacted but spontaneous (‘genuine’) orality, the viewer turns into the direct addressee (i.e. the addressed recipient). It is this actor’s charade of stepping out of their role to directly and spontaneously address (a member of) the audience that induces a change in the status of orality from one constructed beforehand to one created ad hoc and en place. The intricate, dual level structure of fictional discourse also becomes evident in the creation of meaning, function and context. Unlike participants in non-fictional, naturally occurring face-to-face conversation, their counterparts in fictional dialogue only pretend to mutually construct an emerging context and to create meaning. Fictionally crafted characters act in a reduced way in a reduced kind of situation because meaning and context are fully prescribed and thus entirely foreseeable. However, turning to the extra-diegetic plane of communication between author (and actor), on the one side, and addressed reader or overhearing observer, on the other, meaning and context are interactively created, at least from an interpretive point of view. When readers or viewers assign meaning to a written text (e.g. a play), they have no direct access to the writer as a co-present interactant and thus have to make assumptions about what could be meant on the basis of the text’s language and further available data, including both the writer’s assumed and the reader’s own factual knowledge, episodic and conceptual memory, cultural background and emotional frames of mind (cf. Spitz 2005: 24). 6. Conclusion When playwrights and scriptwriters who wish their scripted dialogues to look and sound ‘natural’ set out to mimic reality, i.e. the orality of spontaneous discourse, they have to make sacrifices and dispense with accuracy and thus authenticity for a number of obvious reasons, chiefly related to the mode and medium induced restraints of comprehensibility and entertainment (as well as attraction of large audiences, cf. Bednarek 2010: 65–66). That they nonetheless design dialogic exchanges that evoke the illusion of natural orality is evidence of their faith in the readers’ and viewers’ inclination to regard such exchanges (along with all the other actions on stage, screen and paper) with a knowing and a feigning eye. Where the knowing eye sees an actor and the art of acting, the feigning eye sees a character and their impulsive and unconstrained behaviour. Correspondingly, what the

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knowing eye recognizes as pre-planned, scripted and reduced orality, the feigning eye sees as unprompted, spontaneously devised and voiced orality. Reduced orality, whose typical features have been reviewed in this article, is therefore always both recognized and tolerated by the reader or viewer, who knows that it is a constitutive and thus indispensable characteristic of fictitious dialogue, carefully designed by an absent author-writer with a specific audience in mind, i.e. “it is always designed for us” (Kozloff 2000: 121). References Primary sources Friends: The one where Nana dies twice. 1994 Dir. James Burrows. Screenplay by David Crane and Marta Kauffmann. Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions and Warner Bros. http://friends.tktv.net/ Episodes1/8.html [last accessed on November 10, 2015] Svartvik, Jan (ed.) 198? London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English. University of Oxford Text Archive. http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/0168 Wasserstein, Wendy 1991 The Heidi Chronicles: Uncommon Women and Others & Isn’t It Romantic. New York: Vintage Books. First published [1988]. Secondary sources Alvarez-Pereyre, Michael 2011 Using film as linguistic specimen: Theoretical and practical issues. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.),Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 47–67. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Anton, Corey 1998 ‘About talk’: The category of talk-reflexive words. Semiotica 121(3–4): 193– 212. Beaugrande, Robert de and Wolfgang U. Dressler 1981 Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longman. Bednarek, Monika 2010 The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London/New York: Continuum. Bednarek, Monika 2011 The language of fictional television: A case study of the ‘dramedy’ Gilmore Girls. English Text Construction 4(1): 54–84. Bednarek, Monika 2015 Corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis of television and film narratives. In: Paul Baker and Tony McEnery (eds.), Corpora and Discourse Studies: Integrating Discourse and Corpora, 63–88. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Biber, Douglas 1988 Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bousfield, Derek and Dan McIntyre 2011 Emotion and empathy in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas: A case study of the ‘funny guy’ scene. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 105–124. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Brown, Gillian and George Yule 1983 Discourse Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bubel, Claudia M. 2008 Film audiences as overhearers. Journal of Pragmatics 40(1): 55–71. Bubel, Claudia M. 2011 Relationship impression formation: How viewers know people on the screen are friends. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 225–247. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bublitz, Wolfram 1988 Supportive Fellow-Speakers and Cooperative Conversations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bublitz, Wolfram 2006 It utterly boggles the mind: Knowledge, common ground and coherence. In: Hanna Pishwa (ed.), Language and Memory: Aspects of Knowledge Representations, 359–386. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bublitz, Wolfram 2008 ‘Sailing the islands or watching from the dock’: The treacherous simplicity of a metaphor. How we handle ‘new (electronic) hypertext’ vs ‘old (printed) text’. In: Andrea Gerbig and Oliver Mason (eds.), Language, People, Numbers: Corpus Linguistics and Society, 249–273. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bublitz, Wolfram 2012 From speaker and hearer to chatter, blogger and user: The changing metacommunicative lexicon in computer-mediated communication. In: Ulrich Busse and Axel Hübler (eds.), Investigations into the Meta-Communicative Lexicon of English: A Contribution to Historical Pragmatics, 151–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bühler, Karl 1965 Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer. First published [1934] Burton, Deirdre 1980 Dialogue and Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Modern Drama Dialogue and Naturally Occurring Conversation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Chafe, Wallace L. 1982 Integration and involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature. In: Deborah Tannen (ed.), Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, 35–53. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

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Clark, Herbert H. 2004 Pragmatics of language performance. In: Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds.), Handbook of Pragmatics, 365–382. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Coulthard, Malcolm 1977 An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Longman. Culpeper, Jonathan 2001 Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. London: Longman. Duncan, Starkey 1972 Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 23(2): 283–292. Duncan, Starkey 1974 On the structure of speaker, auditor interaction during speaking turns. Language in Society 3(2): 161–180. Duncan, Starkey and George Niederehe 1974 On signalling that it’s your turn to speak. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 10(3): 234–247. Dürscheid, Christa 2007 Private, nicht-öffentliche und öffentliche Kommunikation im Internet. Neue Beiträge zur Germanistik 6(4): 22–41. Edmondson, Willis 1977 Gambits in foreign language teaching. In: Herbert Christ and Hans-Eberhard Piepho (eds.), Kongreßdokumentation der 7. Arbeitstagung der Fremdsprachendidaktiker, Gießen 1976, 45–47. Limburg: Frankonius. Eisenlauer, Volker and Christian R. Hoffmann 2008 The metapragmatics of remediated text design. Information Design Journal 16(1): 1–18. Erman, Britt 1987 Pragmatic Expressions in English: A Study of ‘You know’, ‘You see’ and ‘I mean’ in Face-to-Face Conversation. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell. Goffman, Erving 1964 The neglected situation. The American Anthropologist 66(6): 133–136. Goffman, Erving 1974 Frame Analysis. New York: Harper and Row. Goffman, Erving 1982 Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon Books. Goldman-Eisler, Frieda 1961 A comparative study of two hesitation phenomena. Language and Speech 4(1): 18–26. Goodwin, Charles 1981 Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press. Gumperz, John J. 1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gumperz, John J. 1989 Contextualization cues and metapragmatics: The retrieval of cultural knowl-

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edge. In: Caroline R. Wiltshire, Bradley Music and Randolph Graczyk (eds.), Chicago Linguistic Society 25: Papers from the Parasession on Language in Context,77–88. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Halliday, Michael A.K. 1989 Spoken and Written Language. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Heldner, Mattias and Jens Edlund 2010 Pauses, gaps and overlaps in conversations. Journal of Phonetics 38(4): 555– 568. Hoffmann, Christian R. 2012 Cohesive Profiling: Meaning and Interaction in Personal Weblogs. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Holly, Werner 1997 Zur Rolle von Sprache in Medien: Semiotische und kommunikationsstruktu­ relle Grundlagen. Muttersprache 107(1): 64–75. Hübler, Axel and Wolfram Bublitz 2007 Introducing metapragmatics in use. In: Wolfram Bublitz and Axel Hübler (eds.), Metapragmatics in Use, 1–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hymes, Dell 1962 The ethnography of speaking. In: Thomas Gladwin and William C. Sturtevant (eds.), Anthropology and Human Behavior, 13–53. Washington, DC: The Anthropological Society of Washington. Jakobson, Roman 1960 Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In: Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jucker, Andreas H. 2015a Uh and um as planners in the Corpus of Historical American English. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Merja Kytö, Claudia Claridge and Jeremy Smith (eds.), Developments in English: Expanding Electronic Evidence, 162–177. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Jucker, Andreas H. 2015b Pragmatics of fiction: Literary uses of uh and um. Journal of Pragmatics 86: 63–67. Jucker, Andreas H. and Yael Ziv (eds.) 1998 Discourse Markers: Descriptions and Theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Keller, Eric 1979 Gambits: Conversational strategy signals. Journal of Pragmatics 3(3–4): 219– 238. Kendon, Adam 1967 Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologica 26: 22–63. Koch, Peter 1999 Court records and cartoons: Reflections of spontaneous dialogue in Early Romance texts. In: Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), Historical Dialogue Analysis, 399–429. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Koch, Peter and Wulf Oesterreicher 1985 Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz. Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgebrauch. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 36: 15–43.

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Kozloff, Sarah 2000 Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lakoff, Robin 1982 Some of my favorite writers are literate: The mingling of oral and literate strategies in written communication. In: Deborah Tannen (ed.), Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, 239–260. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Lambrou, Marina 2014 Stylistics, conversation analysis and the cooperative principle. In: Michael Burke (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, 136–154. Oxford, UK: Routledge. Landert, Daniela 2014 Personalisation in Mass Media Communication: British Online News between Public and Private. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Landert, Daniela and Andreas H. Jucker 2011 Private and public in mass media communication: From letters to the editor to online commentaries. Journal of Pragmatics 43(5): 1422–1434. Lenk, Uta 1997 Marking Discourse Coherence: Functions of Discourse Markers in Spoken English. Tübingen: Narr. Levinson, Stephen C. 1979 Activity types and language. Linguistics 17: 365–399. Lyons, John 1968 Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mittmann, Brigitta 2006 With a little help from Friends (and others): Lexico-pragmatic characteristics of original and dubbed film dialogue. In: Christoph Houswitschka, Gabriele Knappe and Anja Müller (eds.), Anglistentag 2005, Bamberg – Proceedings, 573–585. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Ong, Walter J. 2002 Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London/New York: Routledge. First published London: Methuen [1982]. Östman, Jan-Ola 1981 You Know: A Discourse Functional Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Quaglio, Paulo 2008 Television dialogue and natural conversation: Linguistic similarities and functional differences. In: Annelie Ädel and Randi Reppen (eds.), Corpora and Discourse, 189–210. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Quaglio, Paulo 2009 Television Dialogue: The Sitcom ‘Friends’ vs. Natural Conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Raible, Wolfgang 2002 Literacy and orality. In: Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 8967–8971. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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Rochester, Sherry R. 1973 The significance of pauses in spontaneous speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2: 51–81. Rossi, Fabio 2011 Discourse analysis of film dialogues: Italian comedy between linguistic realism and pragmatic non-realism. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 21–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sacks, Harvey 1992 Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson 1974 A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50(4): 696–735. Sbisà, Marina and Ken Turner 2013 Introduction. In: Marina Sbisà and Ken Turner (eds.), Pragmatics of Speech Actions, 1–21 (Handbooks of Pragmatics 2.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Schiffrin, Deborah 1987 Discourse Markers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schiffrin, Deborah 1994 Approaches to Discourse. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Schiffrin, Deborah, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.) 2001 The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Schneider, Klaus P. and Ann Barron (eds.) 2014 Pragmatics of Discourse. (Handbooks of Pragmatics 3.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Schourup, Lawrence C. 1985 Common Discourse Particles in English Conversation. New York: Garland. Schubert, Christoph 2008 Englische Textlinguistik. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Schwitalla, Johannes 2006 Gesprochenes Deutsch. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Short, Mick 1996 Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London: Longman. Sieber, Peter 1998 Parlando in Texten: Zur Veränderung kommunikativer Grundmuster in der Schriftlichkeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Spitz, Alice 2005 Power plays: The representation of mother-daughter disputes in contemporary plays by women. A study in discourse analysis. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of English, Universität des Saarlandes (Saarland University). http://d-nb. info/979505364/34 [accessed on September 20, 2015] Stenström, Anna-Britta 1990 What is the role of discourse signals in sentence grammar? In: Jan Aarts and Willem Meijs (eds.), Theory and Practice in Corpus Linguistics, 213–229. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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9.

Doing dialects in dialogues: Regional, social and ethnic variation in fiction Gaëlle Planchenault

Abstract: For professionals who strive to make their characters speak in a way that sounds true to their readership/audience and that is also informative of the characters’ story and identity, using the right resources is fundamental. Writers and performers display non-standard phonological and lexical variables (represented by the means of eye dialect in literature or performed accents in films) in order to index social, regional and ethnic traits as well as associated values. Performed voices inform the analyst about the society in which the media discourse takes place, about its relations to legitimate and non-standard ways of speaking, as well as to discriminated groups. In this chapter, I endeavour to demonstrate that, in fiction, dialect variation is a favoured practice in the depictions of the Other, but also that performances of rural/regional and social dialects have given way to stylizations of the ethnic Other. 1. Introduction Modulating one’s voice to speak like another person is a practice that is learned early when young children start mimicking other voices. This ability is what makes us fundamentally human and social, as it is by styling the Other that one defines who one is and to what groups or communities one belongs (Bell 1999). Performances of ‘verbal art’ (Bauman 1975) are common practices in different cultures around the world, where linguistic displays of regional, social and ethnic variations are linked to genres of discourse (such as ethnic stylizations in jokes or comedies). The competence to perform such voices develops during socialization and relies on the learning of categories based on social conventions that link ways of speaking to ways of being (men vs. women, adults vs. children, heroes vs. victims, the strong vs. the weak, etc.), the former becoming more complex as the spheres of socialization develop. Performances of voices in fictions make use of such social categories and attached values, but also rely on others that are specific to the medium. For Chion (1999: 129) and with regards to films, “[t]he process of ‘embodying’ a voice is not a mechanistic operation, but a symbolic one”. This operation is based on social assumptions regarding characters’ origin, race, social class as well as ways of speaking in fictional genres (e.g. in British realistic dramas, working-class white men speak in certain ways while black women in American comedies are associated to typified voices, and villains in 1990’s Hollywood DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-009 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 265–296. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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films often had a British accent), constituting enregistered voices (i.e. ‘indexical of speaker attributes’, Agha 2005) and performed genres (known as stage dialects or screen dialects, Kozloff 2000). With the aim to highlight the functions of dialect representations in fiction, I open this chapter with two excerpts. The first presents a few lines of dialogue from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Gilliam and Jones 1975). In the scene, King Arthur and his men have a short encounter with a couple of Norman soldiers who are refusing to let the Englishmen enter the castle that they are guarding: –  But what are you then? – I’m French! Why do you think I’ve got this outrageous accent, you silly King? [The French character pursues with further insults and make faces] –  … What a strange person! Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Gilliam and Jones 1975)

The second excerpt comes from a text written in 1951 by the well-known French film critic André Bazin, in which he describes the southern French accent performed in Pagnol’s films: The accent does not constitute, in effect, in Pagnol’s cinema, a quaint accessory … it is consubstantial to the text and, therefore, to the characters. His characters possess it as others have a black skin. The accent is the personified matter of their language, its realism. (Bazin 1985: 181)1

Even though performances of L2 variation (in the case of Monty Python’s British actors playing French characters who speak English with a non-native accent) differ from performances of L1 variation (or regional accents such as Pagnol’s actors’), these two excerpts bring to light three common functions of dialect representations in films: (1) contrastive, (2) informative, and (3) indexical. First, variation is most often perceived in contrast (as a result of the immediate presence of the standard language in diegesis, or with regards to the media’s linguistic norm), and voices are perceivable through voicing contrasts: “No figure of personhood is typifiable as a discrete voice (of whatever type) unless it is differentiable from its surround” (Agha 2005: 40). Second, since standard language serves as a default setting,2 any deviation from it serves the characterization process. Performances 1



2



“L’accent ne constitue pas, en effet, chez Pagnol, un accessoire pittoresque […] il est consubstantiel au texte et, par-là, aux personnages. Ses héros le possèdent comme d’autres ont la peau noire. L’accent est la matière même de leur langage, son réalisme.” (Bazin 1985: 181). From here onwards, and unless stated otherwise, all quotations translated from French into English will be my own translation. Literature written in dialect and dialect theatre are outside the scope of this chapter. It is however worth bearing in mind that such literature exists and may even reach substantial audiences. With regards to regional theatre, The Guardian also noted a strong

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of dialects inform the audience about the story (its historical and geographical settings) as well as about the fictional characters. In the case of films and next to visual cues, spectators are used to draw information from the linguistic characteristics of a voice (for voice see also Hoffmann, Ch. 6, this volume),3 so much so that the way a character speaks is taken as meaningful with regards to his/her nature. Through processes of enregisterment (Agha 2005), the production of such variations in fiction has come to signify associated values (in films for example, the French are often depicted as bon-vivant and/or rude, Planchenault 2015). This practice has been done with such regularity that the simple fact for a character to speak in a non-standard vernacular prompts the audience to believe that s/he is “silly, quaint, or stupid” (Kozloff 2000: 82). Often, such performances are not only taken as a deviation from a linguistic norm but also, as the first excerpt shows (the characters who display non-standard vernaculars are believed to be strange), as a disturbance to the social order and an impediment to clear communication. As Bazin’s unexpected comparison between the Southern French accent and skin colour, dialectal features are at turn perceived as a mark of distinction or a stigma. Focusing on dialogues in literature and films, this chapter first considers the practicalities of representing dialects in fiction, including social, regional as well as ethnic variation (often represented as non-standard varieties of a standard language). Second, it gives a review of the literature in the field, showing that scholars have often highlighted stereotyped practices in the performance of dialects (such as phonetic or lexical rules) and focused on stylizations (the “artistic representation of another’s linguistic style”, Bakhtin 1981: 362) in order to bring to light the politics in the performances of the Other. 2.

Regional, social and ethnic variation in fiction: Notes on the creative process

2.1.

Writing dialogues: Writers, play writers, screenwriters

Irrespective of the genre in which the dialogues finally appear (i.e. book, play or film), the creative process behind the production of dialects in fiction most often begins in the written form. During the writing process, literary and script writers share common preoccupations. One in particular that occupies the front stage is the desire to sound right. With this goal in mind, manuals destined to self-

3



popular appreciation of such plays as they permit the audience to hear “genuinely local voices on stage” (Bye 2010, my emphasis). In this chapter, the use of the word voice goes beyond its traditional meaning to include linguistic characteristics such as accents.

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taught writers advice accuracy: “this book demonstrates how to write dialogue that sounds authentic and original” (Chiarella 1998, back cover, my emphasis). The artistic goal of mimesis (i.e. writers and filmmakers striving to imitate the real world; see Barthes’ effet de réel4) has two functions: realism5 and/or to capitalise on audiences’ sociolinguistic knowledge. However, Culpeper (2001: 208) notes that “the possibilities and assumptions relating to accent and dialect in speech cannot be straightforwardly transferred to writing” and that writers are limited by the medium that they are writing in. Writing-instruction manuals often warn budding writers against the ideological implications of dialect variation in written fiction. Davis (2008: 24) explains that writing a few lines in non-standard English “says more about [the characters’] relative class backgrounds than about their geographical origins”. Highlighting the lay beliefs that relate ways of speaking to ways of being, he adds that “[j]udging from the page, one might be tempted to conclude that [the character] is not particularly intelligent” (Davis 2008: 24). During the earlier stages of creation, writers of dialogues bear in mind that the performance/reception of their texts will take place in specific contexts, and use different tools to access the symbolic resources that will inform the reader/spectator on the characters and the story. In the case of theatre plays and films, knowing that what they write is to be read and performed, dialogues are therefore “written to be spoken as if not written” (Gregory and Carroll 1978: 48). With regards to dialects, one obvious difference is the use of eye dialect in written fiction and – with similar functions – performed accents in films. Other devices can also be used (Table 1). For Kozloff (2000: 26–27), “dialect, mispronunciation, and inarticulateness have been used [in film dialogues] to ridicule and stigmatise characters”, and Culpeper (2001: 206) argues that “dramatists can capitalise upon the attitudes stereotypically associated with particular accents and dialects”. While other scholars may prefer a different terminology (e.g. non-standard), I have decided in this chapter to follow Kozloff’s (2000), Culpeper’s (2001), and Hodson’s (2014) lexical choice. Most linguists would define a dialect as a “variety of language which differs grammatically, phonologically and lexically from other varieties, and which is associated with a particular geographical area and/or with a particular social class or status group” (Trudgill 2003: 35, emphasis in original). Similarly, in their book on the stylistics of fiction, Leech and Short (1981: 134) remind their readers that 4



5



According to Barthes (1968), films produce this impression of reality (‘effet de réel’) that is a part of the feelings of fascination that cinema provokes in audiences around the world. In order for suspension of disbelief to take effect and even in the cases of films whose goal may not be realism, filmmakers generally want their film to be credible and therefore strive for their dialogues to sound natural (i.e. not artificial; see Bublitz, Ch. 8, this volume).

Doing dialects in dialogues  Table 1.

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Devices used to represent regional, social and ethnic variation

Literature (Hodson 2014)

– Respelling (sometimes referred to as ‘misspellings’) – Eye-dialect – Linguistic features (lexical or syntactic) and code-switching – Metalanguage (such as narrator’s metalinguistic comments) – Literary genres: character types are most often found in specific genres (comedy or realistic drama for example), which also depend on literary periods

Film

– Performances of voices (accents as well as other phonological features: non-articulation, speed/rhythm of delivery, etc.) – Linguistic features (lexical or syntactic) and code-switching – Metalanguage (such as characters’ comments in dialogues) – Extra-linguistic props such as body language, costume, settings, etc. – Film genres: character types are associated with genres (comedy, realistic drama, action film, etc.), which may also vary according to the period of production. Moreover, a genre may also favour specific modes of typification (i.e. stylizations in comedies)

“[l]inguists have used the term dialect for varieties of language which are linguistically marked off from other varieties and which correspond to geographical, class or other divisions of society”. It is noticeable that a dialect is mainly defined by contrast as in one definition a variety is defined as differing from others, and in the other quote, it is said that the variety is marked off. Now, for manuals destined to actors rehearsing a part, a dialect is “a sort of second language that has been superimposed on the natural American language of the actor” (Herman and Herman 1997: 16), a genre that they describe as a set of rules, but more recently the celebrated accent coach Paul Meier (2012) argued that: I and my fellow North American dialect coaches find it useful to talk about English-language dialects in contrast with foreign-language accents (…). Though dialect may have subtle, idiosynchratic variation in each speaker, it is generally more consistent and predictable than an accent. Accents may involve mispronunciations, hyper-corrections, and mistakes in stress, rhythm, etc. (Meier 2012: 9)

To summarize, it appears that there are two conflicting views on what a dialect is: on the one hand, it is described as a non-standard version of a natural language (the latter perceived as the most generally found variety of this language), and, on the other hand, it represents the inherent variability of a language that it is spoken by a wide regional, social and ethnic diversity of people. As both perspectives bring difference to the forefront, I will observe that, in the studies of cinematic discourse, scholars’ interest often lies in “how sociolinguistic difference ‘means’

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in film” (Androutsopoulos 2012a: 144). These perspectives are also reminiscent of the duality between the linguistics theory of language and folk linguistics as described by Niedzielski and Preston (2009, see Figure 1). In both cases, dialects are understood as subcategories of a language, a version of this language according to practical use. However, in one case, dialects are seen as the varied forms that exist when a language is in use in a given community (defined according to a geographical area or a social status) and in the other case, dialect is the ordinary version (sometimes corrupted) of the good language: an understanding that, I will later argue, is commonly shared by writers in literature and films. These dual perceptions are also reminiscent of the dichotomy that exists between standard and non-standard. Opposed in terms of appropriateness, acceptability and correction, the former is often seen as the most appropriate, acceptable and correct variety notwithstanding the context of interaction (formal vs. informal).1 Even though the standard may present variation (according to degrees of familiarity in the relation between the characters or the context of the exchange), the standard language is generally perceived as the neutral form in the media: it does not index any specific belonging to a community – “not marked for region”, although it is “defined primarily in social and evaluative terms” (Culpeper 2001: 207). As a linguistic default setting, it is the most widely used, especially in formal media contexts (such as the news) and seen as the most appropriate variety to guarantee clear communication. This said, it should not be ignored that the realisations of standard and non-standard languages in fictions also differ from what they would be perceived to be in real life. This is due to the historical dominance of the standard in the media.2 Moreover, in the case of fiction in particular where dialogues are first produced as written text (therefore under the “ideological power of orthography”, Jaffe and Walton 2000: 582) and since literary genres have contributed to the standardisation of language and to its prestige, the decision to use non-standard forms is highly significant. The choice to use markers of orality in fictional speech

1



2



Whereas it is not necessarily the case in reality as vernaculars may be more appropriate in certain circumstances (such as informal events). For example, Culpeper (2001: 207) notes that “in [his] local Lancashire pub, the regional accent carries more prestige than RP, which in that context may attract negative attribution of snootiness”. As commented on by a reviewer, the same can be said of other countries’ regional varieties. I would however like to add, as I explain shortly after, that the prestige that the local variety carries in informal contexts may not be transfered when the latter is represented in literature or film – and this is true notwithstanding the audience’s origin (see for example spectators’ comments on L’esquive, quoted in Planchenault 2012). The media often plays a crucial part in the standardisation of a national language. For example, in France, it has often been argued that the centralisation of media institutions (radio broadcast, TV channels, and film studios were often based in Paris) favoured the levelling of French accents in favour of a standard pronunciation.

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Figure 1. Folk and linguistic theories of language from Niedzielski and Preston (2009: 371), reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan

(by using non-standard spelling for example; see also Bublitz, Ch. 8, this volume) are often made in order to mark off (even when this specific traits are widely shared) individual ways of speaking and, by this mean, the characters themselves, to such extent that the use of non-standard spelling comes to automatically index regional/social groups and related values (Taavitsainen and Melchers 1999: 13). However, the relation between non-standard spelling and regional/social varieties is problematic. With regard to this, Leech and Short (1981: 135) argue that “[t]he impression of rendering non-standard speech by non-standard spelling is pure illusion”. It is a highly symbolic act, which is demonstrated by the fact that, in novels, lower-class characters pronounce and as an’ or ’n. But this is a reflection of an elision which occurs naturally in English speech, without respect to dialect … it is its non-standardness that strikes us, not the supposed phonetic reality behind it. (Leech and Short 1981: 135)

Adamson (1998) develops this idea further and, mentioning the real challenge that writers encounter when it comes to represent non-standard language, she relates the use of eye dialect to the social stigma of illiteracy: The most common method is to use non-Standard spelling. In its most skeletal form, known as eye-dialect, this is little more than a way of signalling ‘non-Standardness’ since the spellings have no phonetic implications that would in fact distinguish non-Standard from Standard pronunciations (as when grate is used for great, sez for says, or would of for would’ve). As many commentators have noted, the effect of eye-dialect is al-

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ways derogatory: the forms are read as mis-spellings and the character whose speech they represent somehow acquires the social stigma attached to illiteracy. Slightly more strenuous uses of orthography attempt to evoke a specific variety by selecting one or two stereotype features and making them stand for the whole. (Adamson 1998: 600, emphasis in original)

A case of non-standard orthography that has been most studied is the representation of the Cockney vernacular in English Literature. For example, Leech and Short (1981) mention that in Dicken’s novels, “wos is in fact an illiterate spelling of the standard pronunciation of was, but somehow the social implications of the misspelling are mentally transferred to Jo [i.e. Bleak House’s character]’s manner of speech” (Leech and Short 1981: 135). In such cases, the stigma of illiteracy is so strong that writers need to use such devices with caution, particularly if they want to avoid certain features that would send the wrong message to the readers, or taint the character in a too negative way. 2.2.

Performing and interpreting dialects: Actors, readers and spectators

As well as informing the hearer on the speaker’s feelings or mood (Révis 2013; see Landert, Ch. 16, this volume, on stance), the texture of a voice says a lot about who the speaker is:3 his or her identity (profession, personality, sexual orientation, or other traits important to the narration at play) and origins (national, regional or social). Authors and performers rely actively on such tools to convey precious information about the characters and the story. When they envoice a character (i.e. create the character’s voice, Planchenault 2015: 111), they imagine who s/he is and where s/he comes from, literally and metaphorically (i.e. not only in terms of social origin but also of allegiance to the group/culture and the stance that the performance gives with regards to the hegemonic culture/language). Therefore, and as Meier (2012: 9) puts it, the actors’ aim is to “‘disappear’ inside their character’s story […] and to don another [culture] as a cloak”. This said, when an actor performs a voice, what this voice says to an audience about the character that he or she plays goes beyond mere techniques of characterization (see also Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, Ch. 4, this volume): it says a lot about the widely shared prejudices towards non-standard ways of speaking. With regards to the representation of dialects in films, whereas eye dialect was not absent from silent films (it appeared in intertitles4), there was a notice-

3



4



This occurs with a certain measure of control and intentionality as a speaker may want to dissimulate certain aspects of his/her identity or to pass for someone else. An often-cited case of controversial depiction of race in films, The Birth of a Nation (Griffith 1915) displayed written ethnolectal stylizations in the form of eye dialect in captions such as: ‘Is I yo’equal cap’n – jes like any white man?’ [2:30].

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able reluctance in the beginning of the talkies to use accents in films as it was thought that they would impede comprehension. Chion (1999: 125) has therefore reminded readers of the technical ‘split’ that separates the voice from the body in films, as image and sound used to be recorded separately. In the early days of the film industry, and in a time when movie cameras were very noisy, actors had to dub their own performances and were sometimes dubbed by other actors, as the storyline of Singing in the Rain (Donen and Kelly 1952) shows. For Chion (1999: 126), grafting voices on particular bodies or bringing elements that from the start do not necessarily stick together depend on arbitrary conventions. Consequently, as Hodson (2014: 38) argues, in the case of Britain, “most readers and filmgoers are completely encultured into accepting the dominance of Standard English”. Going back to the reception of non-standard language performances, one could note that artistic performances of dialects in films and plays are generally evaluated on esthetical ground or with regards to the quality of the performance’s rendering of an authentic vernacular.5 When Meryl Streep is well-known for having successfully tackled very different accents, other performances went down in history as notoriously bad (e.g. Russel Crowe’s Robin Hood). In academic studies, although Culpeper (2001) dedicates an important part of his book to the cognitive processes that allow readers to infer characters from texts, little has been systematically said on the audience’s perception of dialects in fiction. Since the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall on audiences (see his 1980’s seminal ‘Encoding/ Decoding’, reprinted in Hall 2000), it is generally admitted that the reception of media texts vary. However, what one finds on spectators’ appraisal of dialect representation in films often remains anecdotal. For example, Hodson (2014: 207) informs us that readers tend to dislike non-standard representations as they slow down reading and that, because of the “close cultural association between Standard English and Literacy”, the latter usually perceive such occurrences as incongruous. Culpeper (2001: 209) notes that, being wary of not alienating readers, writers are therefore not “aiming at the systematic and accurate representation of real-life sociolinguistic facts, but at supplying some markers of particular varieties, leaving readers to fill the gap with background knowledge”. As for the remaining occurrences of dialect representations, I will now explore the circumstances in which such appearances of non-standard language occur. The following section presents some of the contexts that have been studied in the field.

5



In such cases, a theatre critic admitted to be an “accent fundamentalist” (Nestruck 2008 in the Guardian).

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Researching dialects in fiction

The interest in the study of speech representations in fiction is not recent. In the second part of the 20th century, stylistic approaches were often favoured to study literary dialogues, in novels as well as in plays, in their written form (see Busse, Ch. 7, this volume). While Bakhtin’s study of the diversity of voices in the novel – or heteroglossia (which he sees as reflection of the “internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects”, 1981: 260) was influential in encouraging scholars to consider literary representations of sociolinguistic diversity, few studies addressed the social dimension of language variations in literary genres. In a short section entitled ‘Dialect and idiolect’, Leech and Short’s Style in Fiction (1981: 134) proposes three levels of study: “graphological, syntactic (grammatical and lexical) and semantic”, and it is true that scholars who study such social dimensions generally focus on the study of stylistic tools such as eye dialect (such as in the edited collection Writing in Nonstandard English, Taavitsainen, Melchers and Pahta 1999) and uses of regional or social lexicon. I present below a few examples of such studies. 3.1.

The study of idiolects and dialects in literature

Culpeper (2001), in a chapter dedicated to textual cues in characterisation and a shorter section that concentrates, similarly to Leech and Short (1981), on idiolects and dialects, notes that writers are limited by the medium they are writing in because of the fact that what they mean as realistic features will first be seen as non-standard. To convey a sense of dialect, authors pick the elements that they judge significant enough without taking the risk of confusing their reader or even impeding their reading (see also Hodson 2014). Culpeper (2001: 211), for example, notes that “Shakespeare’s graphological presentation of English accents is sketchy … his presentation of English dialects is limited to the odd lexical item or grammatical form”. Such cues are however enough for the actors to “supply relevant dialectal features” (Culpeper 2001: 211). As already mentioned in the first section of this chapter, there is also a strong ideological component to non-standard forms which can be used intendedly for their effects on the readers. First, accents are a comic device: Culpeper (2001: 211) mentions that the Elizabethan theatre used a conventional stage dialect called ‘Mummerset’ for “poking fun at rustic characters”. Taavitsainen and Melchers (1999: 13) note also the use of non-standard features for “comical purposes and to release laughter” and that “it is mostly the low and the rural that are represented as speakers of non-standard; humorous parts are attributed to minor characters and non-standard language to side episodes” (Taavitsainen and Melchers 1999: 13). As mentioned earlier, writers have recourse to non-standard features in dialogues to index character traits and stereotypical associations. In order to comment on the use that dramatists make of non-standard

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(sometimes highly stigmatised) forms, Culpeper (2001: 207) presents an excerpt from The Crucible (Miller 1953) and demonstrates that Arthur Miller’s use of forms such as double negatives, or the replacement of the possessive my by me, contributes to show the character as “good-natured but vulnerable” in contrast with an intelligent and confident speaker of RP. In a more recent study, Hodson’s (2014: 83–127) study of Victorian fiction confirms that eye dialect and respelling inform readers on the social background, level of education or intelligence of the characters, but also signal the difficulty encountered by writers who may not want to appear as if they are looking down on their character. In order to avoid stereotyping, writers may choose to downplay dialectal variation and recur to other tools such as narrator’s metalinguistic comments. For Hodson (2014: 144), this latter feature is a key difference in the representation of dialects in literature and films. I would also add that due to the fact that films reach wider audiences (local as well as transnational), scholars are able to further study the implications of dialect representations in films and their role in the dissemination of language ideologies in society. The next section presents a detailed study of the research in the field. 3.2.

The study of regional, social and ethnic variation in films

Why a sociolinguistic study of language in film dialogues? Although it was often the case that films were considered as a readily accessible data for the study of real languages (Rossi 2011), recent studies have highlighted the problematic relationship between the fictional depictions of languages and authenticity (Alvarez-­ Pereyre 2011). Going beyond mere “fidelity checks” (i.e. studying the authenticity of cinematic language in comparison with a language that would be considered as the ‘original’, Androutsopoulos 2012a), these studies often attempt to link fictional languages to systems of indexicalities and to show that such media texts contribute to maintaining current ideologies of standard and minority languages, as well as representations of the communities who speak them (Johnson and Milani 2009). One could precisely date the start of the sociolinguistic interest in linguistic representations in films to a seminal piece: Lippi-Green’s (1997) chapter ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf’ in her monograph English with an Accent. In her study of accents in Walt Disney’s films, Lippi-Green (1997) correlated dialect choices to character status: when main characters have mainstream American or British accents, the villains and marginalized characters speak with an African American accent (such as Dumbo’s crows or The Lion King’s hyenas) or with “foreign” accents (middle Eastern or European). Furthermore, when some characters who are not completely negative speak in French-accented English, Lippi-Green notes that such characters’ professional occupations are also limited (to culinary professions for example), highlighting the fact that the distribution of non-standard features to certain characters amount to linguistic as well as ethnic discrimination. Since

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then, a limited number of studies have been dedicated to dialectal or ethnolectal variation in film dialogues. In the near twenty-year interval of my corpus, I have selected 16 studies (see Table 2). Considering that four of them are from a special issue published in 2012, such dearth translates into an irregular production with up-to-5-year gaps between some of the publications. While there is no doubt that some studies will have eluded my research, their scarcity has been confirmed by other scholars. In 2000, Georgakopoulou (2000: 120) notices that “[i]t is fair to say that, to date, film has mostly caught the imagination of history or social sciences paradigms with no interest or little in verbal codes”. Less than ten years later, Bubel (2008: 55) still deplores that “[a]lthough scholars of both film and human communication have pointed out that linguistic analyses of film dialogue promise to be rewarding, few people have followed up this suggestion systematically”. And closer to us, Androutsopoulos (2012a: 139) defines it as “an under-examined field of sociolinguistic inquiry”. Table 2.

Sociolinguistic studies of film dialogues (in chronological order; HW = Hollywood)

References

Studied ­languages

Studied ­corpora

Studied ­features

Cinematic ­indexicalities

LippiGreen (1997)

Varieties of English

24 Disney Films (1938–1994)

Regional and non-native accents

Character types ­(positive/negative) and features (profession, personality, etc.)

Georgakopoulou (2000)

Greek

Greek ­Comedies (1950’s)

Sociolect choices

Social categories (newly rich, professionals, blue collar-workers, nightlife types)

Abecassis (2005)

Parisian French

5 French films (1930’s)

Salient features (slang, nonstandard items)

Social group ­differences

Meek (2006)

American Indian ­English

HW films and TV series (1990’s)

Dysfluent speech forms, non-standard grammatical features

Hollywood Injun English (the noble savage motif)

Van den Avenne (2008)

Français tirailleur (Senegalese infantrymen French)

Camp de ­Thiaroye ­(Sembène, 1988)

­Stylized ­basilectal African French

Stylized corrupt French (as an emblematic rejection of the colonial ­language)

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References

Studied ­languages

Studied ­corpora

Studied ­features

Cinematic ­indexicalities

Gibson and Bell (2010)

Pasifika English

New Zealand animated TV series bro’Town (2004–2009)

DH-stopping and TH-fronting Linking-/r/

Stylized Samoan accented English Youth identity

Bucholtz (2011); Bucholtz and Lopez (2011)

Mock AAVE

59 HW ­productions (1976–2008)

Phonological, grammatical and lexical features

‘Linguistic ­minstrelsy’ (performance of the wigger)

Androutsopoulos (2012b)

Turkish German

Supersëks (German comedy produced in 2004)

Sociolinguistic repertoires

Character repertoires

Higgins & Furukawa (2012)

Hawaii ­English

4 HW productions (1987– 2008)

Non-native accent and lexicon

The exotic Other as threatening and hypersexual (i.e. Orientalist discourse)

2 French films (produced in 2003 and 2008)

Social and regional accents

Lack of education as well as a community’s culture and identity

Planchenault French (2012)

Tsiplakou & Ioannidou (2012)

Greek

Aigia Fuxia (Greek sitcom, 2008–2010)

Regional accent, basilectal and obsolete lexicon, code-mixing

Subversion of the classic image of the backward “peasant-like” linguistic Other

Buscombe (2013)

American Indian ­English

American ­westerns (1950’s)

Syntactic and stylistic markers (deletion of pronouns, metaphors from nature, etc.)

Hollywood Indian speech

Chung (2013)

Asian ­English

HW ­productions (1935–2007)

Syntactic and phonetic markers (confusion between r and l, etc.)

Mock Asian-Yellow voices

Hodson (2014)

Varieties of English

British films (1980’s and 1990’s)

Dialect features, non-standard grammar

Working-class ­characters

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This said, what are the sociolinguistic studies of cinematic discourse6 that can be found? While Table 2 shows a notable diversity in the studied films (some studies are based on corpora of up to 59 productions, others focus on a few films, and socio­ cultural contexts of production and reception are also very varied), the selected references present important commonalities in the following four domains: studied performed languages, methodology, objects of analysis and theoretical background. Studied performed languages – All studies focus on dialogues that are written and performed in a variety of European languages (French, German, Greek, etc.) and, for half of the studies, in English (concentrating for most cases on Hollywood productions).7 Methodology of study – While a few accessorily use quantitative tools, studies are predominantly qualitative. – When more and more studies embrace the multisemiotic dimension of films by choosing a multimodal approach and consider that body language and clothing often support linguistic stereotyping, the sociolinguistic studies of cinematic discourse focus essentially on dialogues. Object of analysis – Researchers often focus on instances of contrasting dialects where non-standard items are all the more striking and meaningful since they appear next to standard languages. Characters who speak non-standard varieties therefore appear as not having the same status as the characters who speak standard forms. In the study of dialogues, sequences that bear such linguistic particularities (phonetic or lexical, legible or audible) are perceived as ideologically meaningful, and scholars often mark the transcription of such spectacular fragments (Rampton 1999: 423) with italics, bold fonts and other typographical devices, or by categorizing the latter in tables.

6



7



The corpus includes studies done on what is also called ‘telecinematic discourse’ (such as dialogues from TV fictions or series). I am aware of the limits of the corpus, which is due not only to the limitation of my own linguistic competence and the fact that it remains difficult to access references written in languages that I don’t read, but also to the mainly western perspective adopted by the field. While some dialogues aim at presenting non-native accents which sometimes are non-European (and non-Indo-European in the case of American Indians or Hawaiians characters), such performances often appear in European and American productions and are limited to stylizations. For example, linguistic practices in Bollywood productions remain under-studied and the rare articles published on the subject deal mainly with linguistic practices outside of the film (Shankar 2004).

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– Despite Bell and Gibson’s (2011: 558) argument that “[p]erformed language provides a window on the world of the creative and the self-conscious, the kind of language excluded from sociolinguistic work which targets ‘natural, unselfconscious speech’”, Androutsopoulos (2012a: 144) notes a “vernacular bias” in scholars’ analytical choices. And it does appear that many studies concentrate on the stylizations of dialects, sociolects, and ethnolects in films, eschewing for the most to consider the creative and individual dimensions of verbal performances. – In their analysis of dialogues, studies provide hegemonic readings of ‘cinematic indexicalities’ (Androutsopoulos 2012a) and therefore often hinge on production-reception poles of interpretation without always marking a clear demarcation between the two or considering possible alternative readings (Hall 2000). Theoretical background – While some studies of film dialogues are influenced by the former approaches used to analyse literary dialogues (Bednarek 2010, 2012; Richardson 2010) and despite sporadic use of common tools/concepts of analysis (Bahktin’s heteroglossia or Said’s orientalism), a major difference between the study of dialogues in literary texts and the study of dialogues in films is the latter’s deliberate step away from stylistics. The study of language in films does not differ widely from more traditional analyses of media language (such as the written press or the broadcast media). In their studies of sociolinguistic diversity in films, scholars often favour critical discourse analysis and analysis of styling and stylizations. – Showing a social constructivist heritage in their assumption that perception of the fictional world is mediated by cultural and linguistic knowledge, scholars study films as “cultural forms about culture – in which the deepest meanings and values of a culture are embodied” (Bauman 2011: 715), and dialogues as the expression of the writers’ beliefs on shared cultural knowledge. Because of this stance, their studies owe also to the work of perceptual dialectologists (see Giles and Coupland 1991: 32–59 for an overview), which showed that perception of dialects provoke interpretations whereby accents are linked to speakers’ attributes and stereotypical traits. – Scholars often share from the same theoretical toolkit derived from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1989, 1995; Van Djik 1993, 1998), cultural studies (Hall 1996, 1997; hooks 1992), concepts developed by American linguistic anthropologists (Jane H. Hill’s [1995] theory of mock language; Gal and Irvine’s [1995] semiotic model of analysis; Silverstein’s [2003] orders of indexicality) as well as British sociolinguists (Rampton’s [1995] theory of crossing and Coupland’s [2001, 2004] stylization), etc. – Since Lippi-Green’s (1997) seminal study, scholars have studied film dia-

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logues to highlight the salient features that are used to index character types as well as speech communities. One could adapt Leech and Short (1981) to note three levels: phonological (accents), syntactic (grammatical and lexical) and semantic (ideologies). Settling for a micro-to-macro discursive approach, I propose three types of sociolinguistic studies of film dialogues: (i) phonological focus, (ii) discourse focus and (iii) repertoire/character focus. i. Phonological focus Confirming Bell and Gibson’s (2011: 570) belief that “[a]ccent is perhaps the most obvious linguistic means by which performances index identity”, the studies in this category focus essentially on performed accents (Gibson and Bell 2010; Planchenault 2008a, 2012). However, reminding ourselves that, for linguists, “varieties which differ from one another only in pronunciation are known as accents” (Trudgill 2003: 35, emphasis in original), it becomes obvious that the relation between performed accents and their authentic counterparts is often problematic. What are the accents that are studied in films? While they can be identified and labelled (such as AAVE or British English, or French-accented English), Hodson (2014: 60) argues that “completely true-to-life accents are never captured on film”. The rules that guide performances of accents are often summary. It appears that quite often the overused rule in performing accent is: say [x] instead of standard [y]. For example in the case of French-accented English, such a rule means that actors should pronounce [z] instead of [th] or [ʁ] instead of [r], prompting Herman and Herman (1997: 137) to note the common belief that “[actors] merely have to say ‘zee man ovair zair’, and presto chango, they have become Gaston Duval”. In their study of the sociophonetic processes in a New Zealand TV programme, Gibson and Bell (2010) highlight other linguistic practices. They find that the performed stylization of Pasifika New Zealanders (i.e. individuals whose families or ancestors migrated from the South Pacific islands) may overshoot quantitatively (by increasing the frequency of a feature’s occurrence) and qualitatively (through lengthening or exaggerated phonetic positioning); “selectively produce some features of the variety, but omit others (perhaps on grounds of salience or lack of it), [and] mis-realize other dialect features in an unlimited number of ways” (Gibson and Bell 2010). However, when some phonological features are used to stylize Samoan accented English, others (especially in the case of second-generation speakers) rather seem to index youth identities. In my own study (Planchenault 2012) of an excerpt from the French comedy Bienvenue chez les ch’tis (Boon 2008), I show that the accent is an essential comic motive as well as an object of ridicule. In the first encounter between the two main characters (after the manager’s car nearly runs over his future employee, Mr Bailleul), the dialect speaker is shown as an unintelligible creature (who, in this scene,

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looks very much like the famous hunchback of Notre-Dame), to the extent that the cause for his peculiar way of speaking is thought to be a displaced jaw. (1) Bienvenue chez les ch’tis (Boon 2008, transcription and translation from Planchenault 2012: 262)8 1 Vot’ mâchoire, ça va là? – The manager: ‘Is your jaw ok?’ 2 Non, non, non, j’ai mal à ma tchu, j’suis tombé sur ma t’chu, quoi. – Mr Bailleul: ‘No, no, I fell on my arse … I fell on my arse’. 3 Le t’chu? Oh la la, c’est pas terrible quand vous parlez. Vous voulez pas qu’on aille montrer vot’ mâchoire à un médecin? – The manager: ‘Your arse? Oh dear, it does not sound too good when you speak. You don’t want to see a doctor?’ 4 Non, j’ai rin Vindiou! – Mr Bailleul: ‘No, I don’t have anything for Pete’s sake!’ 5 Oh j’vous assure, vous vous exprimez d’une façon très particulière! – The manager: ‘Believe me, you express yourself in a very peculiar way’. 6 C’est parce que j’parle ch’ti sh’est sha? – Mr Bailleul: ‘It’s because I speak ch’ti, isn’t it?’ 7 Pardon? – The manager: ‘Excuse-me?’ 8 Be´, j’parle ch’timi quô! – Mr Bailleul: ‘I speak ch’timi!’

In this first interaction with the accented character, features of hyper-dialectal variation take place within a specific context. To stylize the Picard variety, lexical variants are limited to emblematic words (such as the pronoun mi and ti - ch’timi is the name of the French variety and also means ‘it’s me’) and salient phonological features are favoured (in bold letters: /ʃ/ for standard /s/, /o/ for /wa/, /tʃ/ for /k/). As Culpeper (2001: 213) argued, too much regional words in playwrights would impede comprehensibility and flummox the audience. In the quoted scene, even though the audience has no problem understanding both characters, the communication difficulties encountered by the latter illustrate nicely Lodge’s (1993: 3) description of French prescriptivism as “the belief that the ideal state of the language is one of uniformity and that linguistic heterogeneity is detrimental to effective communication”. As Lodge (1993: 6) pointed out regarding folk perceptions of French, the spectator is meant to believe that “non-standard varieties are merely failed attempts to express oneself properly”.

8

In reproducing the studied excerpts, I have done my best to keep scholars’ original typographic choices.

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Among social stigmas,9 accents occupy a prominent position. This is not a recent or French phenomenon, as Chambers (2013) shows by quoting Cicero’s (55 BC) encouragement to his readers to avoid “not only the asperity of rustic pronunciation but the strangeness of outlandish pronunciation” (Cicero, as quoted in Chambers 2013: 4). Giles and Coupland (1991) report that since the 1960s, research has repeatedly demonstrated that speakers of non-standard varieties are evaluated – mainly on the basis of their accent (see the ‘Speaker Evaluation Paradigm’ and matched-guise technique, for example) – as being less intelligent, competent, confident and/or ambitious. I will later say more on such ideological implications. ii. Discourse focus The articles that belong to this category focus on instances of bilingualism, such as presence or absence of code-switching taken as tokens of linguicism (Bleichenbacher 2008, 2012), mock languages (Higgins and Furukawa 2012; Hill 1993, 1995), and ethnic stylizations designed for monolingual audiences (Androutsopoulos 2007; Chung 2013; Meek 2006; Planchenault 2008a; see also Locher, Ch. 10, this volume). For Coupland, stylization refers to a performance in which “others’ voices are (…) displayed and framed for local, creative, sociolinguistic effect” (2004: 249) and therefore involves “the knowing deployment of culturally familiar styles and identities that are marked as deviating from those predictably associated with the current speaking context” (2001: 345). In one study of such stylized performances, based on a corpus of Hollywood productions set in Hawai’i, Higgins and Furukawa (2012: 180) note that “Hawaiian characters are typically portrayed as linguistically ‘deviant’ for failing to accommodate linguistically to the haole [i.e. white outsider] protagonist”. Analysing a sample of dialogue (see excerpt [2]), Higgins and Furukawa (2012: 190) argue that “the use of Mock Hawaiian creates an indirect indexicality between hypersexuality, the Hawaiian language, and Hawaiian people, and as such, is an example of ‘covert racist discourse’ (Hill 1998)”.

9



According to Goffman (1963), a stigma is an attribute that is deeply discredited by a given society and because of which the individual who bears it may be rejected: the reaction of others to the stigma spoils the individual’s social identity. While stigmas are usually understood as physical or psychological marks borne by individuals that as a result have them categorized as different, Goffman (1963: 4) defined a third category that he called ‘tribal stigmas’. With these terms, he referred to the phenomenon whereby traits are given to ethnic, national or religious groups that are seen as a deviation from a prevailing normative ethnicity, nationality or religion.

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(2) 50 First Dates (Segal 2004, transcription from Higgins and Furukawa 2012: 189) Ula: By the way cuz (‘pal’), I met this sexy, blond tax attorney at Starbucks today. Henry: Uh huh. Ula: I told her you da kahuna (‘big man’, lit. ‘priest’ in Hawaiian) she wanna have fun (‘she wants to have fun, i.e., sex with’) on this island. Henry: Uh huh. Ula: You want her numba? Henry: You pimping tourists for me again, Ula? Ula: Yes, I live vicariously through you, rememba? My life sucks. Come on, give ha the Waikikiki sneaky between the cheeky.

Under the cover of humorous play with words, such as the conversion of the place name Waikiki (a popular tourist area) into a sexual act, discursive practices perpetuate the Orientalist discourse that depicts the Native as the savage Other. In such studies, one notes a strong interest for stylizations that rely heavily on stereotypes “that allow for simplistic, and often racist caricatures of people, rather than complex portrayal of cultural difference” (Higgins and Furukawa 2012: 195). This focus could be explained by the fact that stylizations are more visible, and certainly more shocking, than more nuanced performances (see Section 3.3 on the politics of stylization). One may wonder, though, whether such an academic predilection for caricatural types of language performance may incur the risk of a research bias. I argue that researchers should turn their gaze to the more nuanced representations of non-standard varieties, in which they may well find that the same stereotypical features are circulated. These representations have been internalized to such an extent as to be found also in representations – stylised or realistic – that are performed by the members of the depicted community (Planchenault 2012). iii. Repertoire and character-based analysis Since the early studies of speech representations in fiction, ways of speaking have been linked to character types (Culpeper 2001; Lippi-Green 1997): not only in terms of positive or negative features that were associated with such types, but also with regards to characters’ importance in the story (i.e. main vs. secondary characters; flat characters vs. round characters). In such analysis of cinematic discourse, scholars look at what code(s) is/are assigned to which characters and highlight the ideological implications of these associations. Androutsopoulos’ (2012b) study of the German comedy Süperseks presents the varied linguistic repertoire of second-generation Turkish migrant characters. After having described the male protagonist, Elviz, as a native German speaker [NG] and a passive bilingual with regard to Turkish [T], the film shows him as a competent stylizer. In one scene in particular, after having overheard the female protagonist mention her intention to find herself “a real Turk” in order to trick her father, Elviz appears with an unbuttoned shirt and begins stylizing in Interlanguage German [IG]:

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(3) Süperseks (Wacker 2004, translation from Androutsopoulos 2012b: 318) Elviz: [IG/T] Hallo, my name Elviz, the uncle of Djana. I have a question. Djana, how dance, she dance good, yeah? Cause cost much money, para yok. ((‘no money’)) Anna: [NG] Yeah, yeah, Djana is great. Hi, I’m Anna, sorry I couldn’t make it yesterday to your dance contest. Elviz: [IG/T] Ah, yok yok yok ((‘no no no’)) … no problem, eh?



According to Androutsopoulos (2012b: 321), Süperseks offers both stereotypical and more nuanced representations of sociolinguistic variation in an urban ethnic minority setting: “nuanced insofar as they draw on a repertoire of codes … stereotypical in that they rely on binary contrasts (between good/bad and major/minor characters)”. Such linguistic choices are predictable for a German audience as the comedy relies heavily on mainstream ideologies of language and ethnicity, class, generation and gender. At the end of his study, Androutsopoulos (2012b: 323) acknowledges that a multimodal approach should be an integral part of any study of cinematic discourse as “[l]anguage style is only a part of a complex set of characterisation devices (Culpeper 2001) and more research is needed to understand its place in cinema’s toolkit of identity resources”. It is true to say that, studied by linguists, lines of dialogue are often extracted from their multisemiotic context, and given priority, whereas other meaningful symbolic resources are generally ignored or, at best, pushed into the background of the analysis. Finally, I should mention, if briefly (for more details, see Valdeón, Ch. 12 and Guillot, Ch. 13, this volume), that dialects in films are also studied by scholars whose interest lies in film language and translation. In such cases, analysts focus on the strategies used to translate regional varieties or dialectal variation (see for example Translating Voices, Translating Regions, Armstrong and Federici 2006) or to dub vernaculars (Planchenault 2008b), as well as in the loss that occurs in the translation of linguistic stylizations (Guillot 2012a, 2012b; Petrucci 2012). 3.3.

The politics of dialects in fiction

Most scholars who adopt a sociolinguistic approach in their study of cinematic discourse seem to agree on the far reaching implications of dialect representations in fiction. They often relate what they see in film dialogues to language ideologies and unequal power relations in society. Hence, for Kozloff (2000: 26–27), the analyst should first ask the following questions: “Who gets to speak about what? Who is silenced? Who is interrupted? Dialogue is often the first place we should go to understand how films reflect social prejudices”. While Coupland and Jaworski (2004: 33) have argued that one cannot ignore the strategies behind the act of styling and stylizing, one matter that has recently been brought to scholars’ attention is the choice of terminology to name such language performances. Labels used to define them vary, as Carroll (2013: 260) discusses: “While Rampton and others (…) have argued that stylizing is a means for members of politically dis-

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advantaged groups to resist the social order, there is also literature on the topic that uses the term ‘mock’ rather than ‘stylized’ to highlight the pejorative motives of this type of language use”. In my book (Planchenault 2015), and to avoid the dichotomy between styled in the case of performances seen as [more realistic] and stylized [less realistic], I use the word accented (in ‘accented voice’ and ‘accented French’), with a full awareness of the terms’ pejorative connotations. In the performances that I study, accented voices appear to the general audience as marked and, in their most caricatured forms (i.e. stylizations), such marks are based on linguistic stigmas. It is however necessary to go beyond a paradigm of authoritarian norm vs. discriminated speech communities to study the positive values that are also linked to accents (in terms of aesthetics, human qualities and authenticity: i.e. romantic values are attached to rustic varieties, hipness to urban varieties). Recently, Androutsopoulos (2012a: 149) notes the “changing indexical values of vernaculars in late modernity”. As a result, discriminated actors can recruit and reshape semiotic resources for pragmatic purposes (Hill 2009) and stereotypes become circulating resources that can be used by different players (Reyes 2009). However, balancing such an ideological turn, Hill (2009: 85) also puts into question the use of labels by ethnographers for analytical purposes (such as ‘mock language’, which she coined) and, encouraging them to think about their implications, she argues that symbolic resources are still articulated within a white-­hegemonic framework and constrained by a racist world. Such comments bring us to remark on the fact that, while earlier studies of stylizations in the media focused on regional variation (Coupland 2001; Kelly-Holmes and Atkinson 2007) and, whereas some studies of stylizations in films still analyse such representations of regional and social dialects (see Abecassis’ [2005] study of the Parisian français populaire, my study of Banlieue slang10 in Planchenault [2012], or Hodson’s [2014: 209–215] study of Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird), most contemporary studies (especially from North American scholars) are dedicated to the representations of ethnic variation in films. To clarify the political implications of such performances as well as the ethnic shift in the academic focus, I present below a few cases of such studies of ethnic stylizations. In a corpus of more than fifty Hollywood films produced over a period of 30 years, Bucholtz (2011) studies the representations of a character that has been defined as a wigger: a derogatory term formed as a blend of the racial insult white nigger and used to refer to a white male hip hop fan who borrows linguistic (such as the overuse of emblematic profanities and slang) as well as non-verbal features ordinarily linked to African-American urban youth. While the wigger character’s inauthenticity contrasts humorously with the African-American commitment to a

10

And it is to be noted that in the last decade the media discourse on banlieue and Français de banlieue has adopted a more and more ethnicized focus (Fagyal 2010).

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street-based culture, Bucholtz (2011: 264) shows that the minstrelesque character has served to “enforce essentialized boundaries between blackness and whiteness by activating longstanding ideologies of race, gender, and language”: the wigger films of the last decade, like most other mediatized and commodified products of cultural representation, insist upon the re-embodiment of the voice along predictable lines of race and gender. They thus constitute ideological acts of indexical regimentation that reduce rather than expand the possibilities of identity. (Bucholtz 2011: 264)

Such practices are reminiscent of Rampton’s (1995: 486) work on crossing and his questions: “Which discursive patterns derive from which identities? … on what grounds is priority given to ethnicity?”. To shed more light on the matter, I turn to a study of second-generation migrants’ stylizations. In order to analyse performances of ethnic voices in French cinema (Planchenault 2015), I have examined a few films from post-beur directors (Maghrebi French filmmakers such as Abdellatif Kechiche, see Higbee 2013), and found in their testimonies that they often expressed a desire to step away from commonly circulated representations of race in French cinema. However, while they vowed to break free from stereotypical voices, their films still displayed traditional ethnic stylizations that served unexpected functions. In one of such stylizations, in the film Né quelque part (Hamidi 2013), the brother of the hero (who otherwise speaks native French) makes fun of their dad by mimicking his Arabic-accented French. He then performs a few lines in stylised Arabic French, an exercise that follows the previously mentioned phonological rule Say [y] instead of standard [x]:11 (4) [ʒi] [di] travailler pour mes enfants, [ʒi] [si] pas là pour m’amuser J’ai dû travailler pour mes enfants. Je suis pas là pour m’amuser – ‘I had to work for my children, I am not here to have fun’ (Planchenault 2015: 98)

In sketches performed by stand-up comedians, impersonating the non-native parent is an emblematic exercise (see for example, how the US American comedian Margaret Cho impersonates her Korean mother or Canadian comedian Russell Peters stylizes his Indo-Canadian dad in a well-known skit ‘How to become a Canadian citizen’, available in several versions on youtube). Bucholtz and Lopez (2011: 684) argue that “stylized crossing is temporary rather than habitual and often foregrounds distinction, or disalignment with the performed identity”. As such, performed by British-born teenagers who stylize the accented language of their immigrant parents (Rampton 1995; Saeed 2008), it is a way to deny linguistic

11

In performed stylizations of Arabic-accented French, French vowels (such as [ə], [e], [y] or [ɔ̃]) are systematically replaced with [i]. Je and j’ai are therefore pronounced [ʒi] and ‘du’ is pronounced [di].

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affiliation and to “display this desire to be like the dominant group, particularly because they go to such extremes to set themselves apart from the ‘other’” (Saeed 2008: 17). In films, I argue that cinematic performances of stylized languages allow second-generation migrants to distantiate themselves, while presenting the member of the older generation (i.e. the migrant) as an ethnic Other (Planchenault 2015). This brings me to the question, following Hall (1990: 222): “Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak?”. In the case of the United States, Gal (2009: 328) argues that “[e]thnicity in the United States is often a matter of commodification: the claim to ‘ownership’ of voices, accents, and images that, because of social distance, provide authenticity but not stigma”. A recent Hollywood production that was directed by a Mexican animator, The Book of Life (Gutierrez 2014), gives another interesting example of such commodification of accented voices across generations: while the grandparents and parents speak English with a non-native accent (with the grandparents displaying the strongest Mexican accent) and code-switch frequently in Spanish, the children speak unaccented American English. The question that remains regarding the appropriation of stigmatized features is whether such linguistic features are particularly stigmatized for their use in real life or if it is the representations of such forms in fiction that contribute to maintain such stigma? Moreover, are they stigmatized because of their relation to stigmatized groups or would they remain so whatever the groups who utter them? For example, in English, next to /h/ or /th/, /r/ seems to be a privileged site of stylization (in regional accents as well as non-native accents) and in such-cases, r-dropping or trilled pronunciation prompts the audience to categorize the speech as non-standard (Bucholtz 2011; Gibson and Bell 2010; Planchenault 2015).12 Such emblematic features can henceforth be used in the creation of fictional languages. It is the case of Hagrid’s speech, one of the characters in J.K. Rowling’s (1997–2007) Harry Potter. Even though it appears that the half-giant wizzard’s accent is not fully fictional but imitates a West country accent, Hodson (2014: 158) who has studied the mixture of eye dialect (such as in the line: ‘Glad yeh found the place all righ’!’) and character comments that describe Hagrid’s speech as ‘grunting a lot of the time’, argues that “his speech [which] is not marked for any specific regional dialect, but displays a range of low prestige features” results in showing “a sympathetic character, but not a very bright one” (Hodson 2014: 159). The following exchange from a fan’s forum13 confirms the dual perception of the character (my emphasis):

See also a recent study of the stigmatised English contraction ain’t (Donaher and Katz 2015). 13 http://alohomora.mugglenet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=79 12

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(5) Question posted on April 19, 2012 why does Hagrid have an accent? He is one of the only characters in the series that Jo gives a dialect to and I was wondering why she did this? Does it add to Hagrid’s character, giving him that warm and trustworthy feeling? Or is it a way of showing that he is a bit more ‘uneducated’ than the other characters First answer posted on the same day Gotta say, I love Hagrid! I’ve always felt that the accent was just to reinforce a more rustic or unfinished personality. It kind of gives him character, you know? He’s more comfortable in the outdoors with animals than in a parlor!

Such comments show once more that performances of dialect should not be analysed as isolated discursive practices but should always be related to ongoing practices of linguistic differentiation. 4.

Conclusion and suggestions for future research

For professionals whose job it is to create a world that is credible, to put in this fictional world characters the readership/audience can believe in, and to have the same characters utter lines that not only ring true but are also evocative of their story and identity, using the right resources is fundamental. To this aim, writers and screen-writers may make the choice of a ‘significant detail’ (see Burroway 1996: 58), a telling detail that can appear in the physical description or the linguistic behaviour of a character. For writers and performers, non-standard phonological and lexical variables are rich semiotic resources that can be accessed to depict social, regional and ethnic features as well as associated values. Such choice of symbolic resources make dialogues ‘cultural forms about culture’ (Bauman 2011: 715), and consequently a privileged site to study beliefs and ideologies in society. Analysing performed voices informs us about the society in which the media discourse takes place, about its relations to standard and non-standard ways of speaking, as well as to discriminated groups. In this chapter, I have endeavoured to demonstrate that, in fiction, dialect variation is a favoured practice in the depictions of the Other. As spatial territories expand and communities are not spatially-bound anymore, the profile of the Other has changed and performances of rural/regional and social dialects have given way to multiple stylizations of the ethnic Other. However, one should also consider, that as it was the case of Elizabethan theatre’s rustic characters or film’s depictions of regional characters, the recent ethnic characters are not “classless”. Armstrong (2004: n.p.) proposed that “there is a correlation between regional origin and (say) social class such that regional origin is increasingly detectable in speech as one goes down the social-class continuum, and vice versa, the higher the speaker’s social class (level of education, etc.), the more attenuated the regional accent”. Similarly, I would like to argue that the same paradigm could be applied to ethnic

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accents in films. Furthermore, one should note that some vernaculars are still little heard and/or studied: ethnic voices such as Romani’s in European cinema or diversity in World Cinema (such as Bollywood or even Nollywood, see Adedun 2010). I also argued that studies favour stylizations rather than the more nuanced representations of dialects in realistic films. In the media, heteroglossia is performed through processes of linguistic differentiation. In a time of superdiversity (Vertovec 2007), diversity emerges from the plurality of media voices as well as within each individual voice (in linguistic practices of crossing or in the stylizations of the non-native parent). All of these performances deserve researchers’ attention, even when their significant details are not shown in spectacular ways. For Davis (2008: 25), ‘[h]abitual styles of speech – even those of characters from fairly similar backgrounds – differ as greatly as do Norma’s from Dick’s. We must never tire of listening for the variations”. Bearing this in mind, I propose a holistic approach to the study of cinematic discourse, which, next to the traditional discursive and critical analysis, would encompass additional perspectives: – a multimodal perspective that would integrate the multiple ways by which the visual aspects support (or at times contradict) language performances; – a diachronic and/or comparative perspective that would question whether such performances were always present in such forms, but also whether the same features are used to represent other non-standard variants; – a metalinguistic perspective that would look into the discourses that are held on non-standard representations, within the written piece, as well as from the outside (by reviewers, audiences, etc.); – finally, an artistic perspective that would shed more light onto the creative dimension of performances, as well as the role individuals play in re-articulating long-held discourses of linguistic differentiation.

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Hall, Stuart 2000 Encoding/Decoding. In: Paul Morris and Sue Thornton (eds.), Media Studies: A Reader, 2nd Ed., 51–61. New York: New York University Press. Herman, Lewis and Marguerite Herman 1997 Foreign Dialects: A Manual for Actors, Directors, and Writers. New York/ London: Routledge. Higbee, Will 2013 Post-beur Cinema: North African Émigré and Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since 2000. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Higgins, Christina and Gavin Furukawa 2012 Styling Hawai‘i in Haole wood: White protagonists on a voyage of self discovery. Multilingua 31(2–3): 177–198. Hill, Jane H. 1993 Hasta la vista, baby: Anglo Spanish in the American Southwest. Critique of Anthropology 13(2): 145–176. Hill, Jane H. 1995 Mock Spanish: A site for the indexical reproduction of racism in American English. Language & Culture: Symposium 2. http://language-culture.binghamton.edu/symposia/2/part1/ [accessed on January 15, 2016] Hill, Jane H. 2009 On using semiotic resources in a racist world: A commentary. In: Angela Reyes and Adrienne Lo (eds.), Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America, 84–89. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hodson, Jane 2014 Dialect in Film & Literature. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. hooks, bell 1992 Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press. Jaffe, Alexandra and ShanaWalton 2000 The voices people read: Orthography and the representation of non-standard speech. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(4): 561–587. Johnson, Sally and Tommaso M. Milani 2009 Language Ideologies and Media Discourse: Texts, Practices, Politics. London: Continuum. Kelly-Holmes, Helen and David Atkinson 2007 “When Hector met Tom Cruise”: Attitudes to Irish in a radio satire. In: Sally Johnson and Astrid Ensslin (eds.), Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies, 173–187. London: Continuum. Kozloff, Sarah 2000 Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Leech, Geoffrey and Michael Short 1981 Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman. Lippi-Green, Rosina 1997 Teaching children how to discriminate: What we learn from the Big Bad Wolf. In: Rosina Lippi-Green, English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States, 79–103. London: Routledge.

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Lodge, R. Anthony 1993 French, from Dialect to Standard. London/New York: Routledge. Meek, Barbra A. 2006 And the Injun goes “How!”: Representations of American Indian English in white public space. Language in Society 35(1): 93–128. Meier, Paul 2012 Accents & Dialects for Stage & Screen. Lawrence, KS: Paul Meier Dialect Services. Nestruck, Kelly 2008, May 13  Do accurate accents matter in theatre? The Guardian [Theatre blog]. http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2008/may/13/ doaccurateaccentsmatterin Niedzielski, Nancy and Dennis Preston 2009 Folk linguistics. In: Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski (eds.), The New Sociolinguistics Reader, 2nd Ed., 356–373. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Petrucci, Peter 2012 The translation of cinematic discourse and the question of character equivalence in Talk to Me. Multilingua 31(2–3): 231–251. Planchenault, Gaëlle 2008a ‘Who can tell, mon ami?’: Representations of bilingualism for a majority monolingual audience. Sociolinguistic Studies 2(3): 425–440. Planchenault, Gaëlle 2008b ‘C’est ta live!’: Doublage en français du film américain Rize ou l’amalgame du langage urbain des jeunes de deux cultures. In : Michaël Abecassis (ed.), Glottopol: Revue de Sociolinguistique en Ligne 12: 182–199. Planchenault, Gaëlle 2012 Accented French in films: Performing and evaluating in-group stylisations. Multilingua 31(2–3): 253–275. Planchenault, Gaëlle 2015 Voices in the Media: Performing French Linguistic Otherness. London: Bloomsbury. Rampton, Ben 1995 Language crossing and the problematisation of ethnicity and socialisation. Pragmatics 5(4): 485–513. Rampton, Ben 1999 Styling the other: Introduction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4): 421–427. Révis, Joanna 2013 La voix et soi. Ce que notre voix dit de nous. Bruxelles: De Boeck Solal. Reyes, Angela 2009 Asian American stereotypes as circulating resources. In: Angela Reyes and Adrienne Lo (eds.), Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America, 260–287. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Richardson, Kay 2010 Television Dramatic Dialogue: A Sociolinguistic Study. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Rossi, Fabio 2011 Discourse analysis of film dialogues: Italian comedy between linguistic realism and pragmatic non-realism. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 21–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Saeed, Tanzeela 2008 Doing Nakl: A mimicry of resistance by British-born South Asian adolescents in East London. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 54. http:// www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/education/research/ldc/publications/workingpapers/54.pdf [accessed on January 15, 2015] Shankar, Shalini 2004 Reel to real: Desi teens’ linguistic engagements with Bollywood. Pragmatics 14(2–3): 317–335. Silverstein, Michael 2003 Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23(3–4): 193–229. Taavitsainen, Irma and Gunnel Melchers 1999 Writing in nonstandard English: Introduction. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta (eds.), Writing in Nonstandard English, 1–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Taavitsainen, Irma, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta (eds.) 1999 Writing in Nonstandard English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Trudgill, Peter 2003 A Glossary of Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tsiplakou, Stavroula and Elena Ioannidou 2012 Stylizing stylisation: The case of Aigia Fuxia. Multilingua 31(2): 277–299. Van den Avenne, Cécile 2008 “Les petits noirs du type y a bon Banania, messieurs, c’est terminé”: La contestation du pouvoir colonial dans la langue de l’autre, ou l’usage subversif du français-tirailleur dans Camp de Thiaroye de Sembene Ousmane. In: Michaël Abecassis (ed.), Glottopol: Revue de Sociolinguistique en Ligne 12: 111–122. Van Djik, Teun A. 1993 Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society 4(2): 249–283. Van Dijk, Teun A. 1998 Opinions and ideologies in the press. In Allan Bell and Peter Garrett (eds.), Approaches to Media Discourse, 21–63. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Vertovec, Steven 2007 Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(6): 1024– 1054.

10. Multilingualism in fiction Miriam A. Locher Abstract: Multilingualism is a fact that has shaped and is shaping the linguistic set-up of our societies. Fictional texts also have a long tradition of drawing on polyglottal means, a fact that has been studied in many different disciplines. This chapter sketches the different research traditions that explore the phenomenon. It touches especially on the techniques of incorporating different languages in the same fictional text, such as attempts at presenting authentic multilingual renditions as well as simplifying the multilingual situation in processes that draw on the potential of linguistic indexicality, translation and contextual embedding. The main focus lies on the potential pragmatic effects that the texts can achieve, such as scene creation/enrichment, character creation, the creation of humor, the display of social criticism, realism and ideological debates of difference and belonging. For a text to work it is rarely necessary to transpose multilingual reality entirely in all its complexity into a fictional text. However, the ways in which multilingualism does occur in fiction deserve to be studied in their own right. 1. Introduction It is no new fact that we live in a fundamentally multilingual world, that individual societies are multilingual to at times astonishing degrees and that past and present migration movements constantly add new languages to a particular linguistic set-up. In contrast to this, we find deeply ingrained notions of language standards and nationalistic ideologies of one nation-one language (e.g. Hsy 2013: 6; Sollors 1998b: 2, 2002: 3; Taylor-Batty 2013: 19), which have influenced the canon of fictional texts that have been considered to be part of, for example, German, French or English literature teaching. While one might thus expect that the written mode for fictional writing is monolingual, we nevertheless face centuries of multilingual texts of written and also more recent diegetic forms that make use of polyglottal strategies to create many different effects (see, e.g., Sebba, Mahootian and Jonsson 2012). This insight is valid both with respect to its historical dimension, in the sense that we find fictional multilingual texts throughout the centuries, as well as with respect to the emergence of new literatures, as for example discussed in diaspora, minorities and post-colonial (and beyond) studies. Creators of fictional texts have to make a decision as to how much of multilingualism to allow entry into their artifacts. This process is important since the target readership or audience cannot necessarily be assumed to be equally multilingual, DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-010 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 297–327. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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i.e. have access to the meaning of the linguistic codes included in the fictional product. In her work on the inclusion of dialect in fiction, Hodson (2016) makes the important point that the ‘indexical field’ (Eckert 2008) that a particular dialect feature (of, e.g., phonological, grammatical or lexical nature) evokes, might not be accessible to all readers and might also not be accessible over time once the indexical value shifts: Thinking of dialect representation in terms of ‘the indexical field’ thus allows for the fact that different people will respond to any given dialect representation in different ways, and also that those meanings will shift over time; as Agha has noted, ‘cultural value is not a static property’ (Agha 2003: 232). (Hodson 2016: 426)

The same argument can be made for the inclusion of multilingual codes within fictional texts as well. In other words, a medieval writer employing a ployglottal style might well create different or new effects in present-day readers. Tolstoy’s inclusion of French passages in his Russian novels might be in need of translation for some present-day readers. In fact, even (near) contemporaries struggled with the amount of included French in the Russian text.1 Furthermore, today we would be hard-pressed to find readers as multilingual as the English Renaissance scholar John Milton, who not only read more than ten languages but also wrote in four (Hale 1997: xi). While he may well have reached his educated target readership at the time, who might have been equally versed in Latin, Greek, Italian and English, present-day readers are likely to be in need of translations. As Hodson (2016: 426) argues, the concept of ‘indexical field’ allows to bring the reader into the equation, so that this clear element of addressivity, which is part of all (fictional) texts, also positions the topic of multilingual fictional texts clearly within pragmatics. It is important to stress that how much multilingualism to include is not a simple process of reduction of complexity. First of all, there is no need for fictional texts to be accurate renditions of the face-to-face situations they describe. As McIntyre (2016: 439) points out for dialect variation in fictional texts, “credibility does not necessarily stem from authenticity”. The same argument can be made for renditions of multilingualism in fictional texts. Just like enregistered dialect features can be used as indexes for cultural information (Agha 2003; Hodson 2014, 2016), members of other (sub-)cultures can be indexed by the inclusion of phonological features (accents), vocabulary from different languages or grammatical infelicities associated with learner language or language interferences or entire passages in

1



Bleichenbacher (2008b: 22), reporting on Grutman’s (2002: 338) study, writes that in “Lev Tolstoj’s [sic] War and Peace, […] the impressive number of French passages had to be reduced and, in part, replaced with Russian in subsequent editions of the novel: Tolstoj had overestimated to what extent his audience was able to read French, then a highly prestigious second language among the upper-class Russian population”. See also Kremnitz (2004: 15).

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different languages than the base language. These shorthands are rarely complete or realistic from a sociolinguistic perspective (and they needn’t be), but they serve important creative and indexical purposes (Hodson 2016: 428). As a matter of fact, the readership or audience of diegetic texts is usually well aware of the indexical shorthands and by engaging in reading or watching enters a ‘fictional compact’ or ‘narrator-audience contract’ (Jahn 2005: n.p.). As Rossi (2011) puts it for diegetic texts: The reproduction of reality is always a compromise: authors pretend to offer the audience a piece of reality, with an “illusion of spontaneity”, which the audience feigns to believe, thanks to the “suspension of disbelief”, necessary “to collaborate in this fiction” (Kozloff 2000: 16, 47). Yet “film dialogue […] is never realistic; it is always designed for us” (Kozloff 2000: 121). (Rossi 2011: 45)

In my understanding of this passage, I do not see “never realistic” as negative but as part of the characteristics of the data. Berliner (1999: 5) convincingly argues about “Hollywood movie dialogue” that such dialogue may strike us as realistic, but it is most unlike real speech. This contradiction becomes more intelligible, though no less curious, once we understand ‘realism’ to be not the authentic representation of reality but rather a type of art that masks its own contrivance. (Berliner 1999: 5)

Treating fictional texts of written or diegetic form as worthy of being studied in their own right, I follow Alvarez-Pereyre (2011: 62) and Androutsopoulos (2012a: 142; 2012b) among others. Both make a case for treating such texts as cultural artifacts from which we can learn more about how identities and ideologies are negotiated through linguistic indexing processes. While I thus agree with the first part of McIntyre’s (2016: 442) conclusion that “fictional dialogue is similar to naturally occurring speech, [but] it is not the same as naturally occurring speech”, I want to make a strong case to treat fictional dialogue as naturally occurring in its own right, even though it is not the same as dialogue in face-to-face non-fictional encounters. Alvarez-Pereyre (2011: 62) points out that “[t]he very fact that the lexicogrammatical structures have been, carefully and non-spontaneously, chosen to fulfill the particular functions assigned, makes them extremely good specimens for the study of the relationships between forms, meanings and functions” (emphasis in original). To explore this connection in the case of the inclusion of multilingualism in fictional texts is the topic of this chapter. I will use the term ‘text’ to refer to fictional artifacts in writing as well as in diegetic form and will give a rough sketch of the different research traditions that study the phenomenon of multilingual fictional texts in Section 2. My aim here cannot be a comprehensive literature review for each identified sub-field but to give the reader an idea of the potential of the topic. In doing so, the main focus lies on the possible pragmatic effects that the texts can achieve. The examples reported are taken from the existing literature or present a convenience sample derived from my own English reading and viewing practices.

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Insights into an interdisciplinary research field

When talking about the scope of their edited collection on Fictional Representations of Multilingualism and Translation, Delabastita and Grutman (2005) make the apt remark that: [T]the area which could theoretically be meant to be covered by the present volume becomes spectacularly large. Indeed, if we want to study all cases where real-world multilingualism turns out to be toned down or suppressed in its fictional representation (for whatever reason), in addition to all cases where multilingualism, coupled or not with translation, duly finds a place in fictional representations, we end up studying more or less all of recorded human history. Quite a research programme! (Delabastita and Grutman 2005: 14)

Following their pragmatic rationale, this overview chapter – like their collection – is “more modest in scope” (Delabastita and Grutman 2005: 14). In this literature review, I will touch upon a number of research areas that have dealt with multi­lingual elements in fiction and will particularly focus on the reported linguistic insights. This section is also structured in such a way that the links to the other chapters in the handbook become apparent. These are in particular the chapters on fictional characterization (Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, Ch. 4), regional, social and ethnic linguistic variation in fiction (rather than multilingualism between national languages; Planchenault, Ch. 9), and the chapters that deal most directly with issues of (national) multilingualism, i.e. translation of fiction (Valdeón, Ch. 12), subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic texts (Guillot, Ch. 13), and the creation of past, future, utopian and fantasy worlds (Adams, Ch. 11). When viewing the ample literature on fictional multilingual texts, we can bundle them as follows: – – – – – –

Insights on the techniques of including multilingual elements Insights on the functions of multilingual elements Insights on code-switching derived from working with fictional data Insights on particular multilingual authors Insights derived from post-colonial, minority and diaspora texts Insights from studies on translation, dubbing and subtitling

This categorization is not mutually exclusive. In other words, scholars who are interested in how multilingualism is technically (formally) portrayed in fictional texts usually also explore the functions of including several languages; scholars working on code-switching as a linguistic process might also share an interest in a particular novelist or a specific telecinematic product; scholars working on historical texts might be interested in the ideological effects and social criticism that inclusion and exclusion of different languages might achieve, etc. In what follows, I will briefly exemplify each field by mentioning a selected number of studies in

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order to give an impression of why scholars are interested in multilingual phenomena when looking at fictional texts. Whenever possible, I will point to the connection to pragmatics. 2.1.

Techniques of including multilingual elements in fictional texts

Sternberg (1981) argues that authors who create texts with multilingual settings can employ “vehicular matching” (i.e. the inclusion of the realistic multilingualism of particular situation), adhere to the “homogenizing convention” (i.e. create a unilingual2 text), or use “translational mimesis” (i.e. a mixture of the two extremes) (see also Taylor-Batty 2013: 41). The latter can be classified into four formal possibilities for the inclusion of multilingualism: (1) selective reproduction, (2) verbal transposition, (3) conceptual reflection and (4) explicit attribution. Selective reproduction “takes the form of intermittent quotation of the original heterolingual discourse as uttered by the speaker(s), or in literature, as supposed to have been uttered by the fictive speaker(s)” (Sternberg 1981: 225). Verbal transposition refers to bilingual interference which might result in “an interlingual clash of the two codes within the transposed utterance” (Sternberg 1981: 227). While an “ostensibly unilingual medium” is maintained, polylinguality is nevertheless suggested (Sternberg 1981: 227). As examples, he lists phonological and grammatical irregularity, as well as lexical choice and style, as a result of which the linguistic features might suggest polylinguality (Sternberg 1981: 227–228). Conceptual reflection refers to the level of what Scollon and Scollon (1990) call discourse system, i.e. the socially acquired pragmatic knowledge of how to do things in a particular culture. Sternberg (1981: 230) argues that “what it retains is not so much the verbal forms of the foreign code as the underlying socio-cultural norms, semantic mapping of reality, and distinctive referential range, segmentations and hierarchies”. Finally, explicit attribution is “a direct statement on the reporter’s (or even the reportee’s) part concerning the language (or some aspect of the language) in which the reported speech was originally made” (Sternberg 1981: 231). These meta-comments on the linguistic repertoire (e.g. reference to a character’s accent or the language spoken in the reported interaction) thus evoke multinguality without changing code. Sternberg (1981: 232) stresses that the area between the two poles of vehicular matching and homogenizing unilingualism is quite fuzzy and often overlapping. Sternberg’s (1981) classification matches partly what Bleichenbacher (2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2012) offers in several studies on multilingual Hollywood movies

2



I use the term unilingual and monolingual interchangeably. Sternberg (1981) uses unilingual.

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that have English as their base language. He explores the presence or absence of multiligualism in scenes where multilingualism would be the norm in natural settings, following Mareš’ (2000a, 2000b, 2003) work: – Elimination: “[A]ny speech that would have been in another language is completely replaced with an unmarked standard variety of the base language” (Bleichenbacher 2008b: 24) – Signalization: “[T]he replaced language is explicitly named in a metalinguistic comment” (Bleichenbacher 2008b: 24) – Evocation: “[C]haracters speak a variety of the base language that is characterized by interference (transfer) from the language they would really be speaking”; e.g. accent, short code-switches (Bleichenbacher 2008b: 24) – Presence: “[T]he other language is no longer replaced at all” (Bleichenbacher 2008b: 25) Sternberg’s (1981) “vehicular matching” corresponds to presence, the “homogenizing convention” to elimination, while “translational mimesis” comprises both signalization (see especially explicit attribution above) and evocation (see especially verbal transposition above). Taking the viewers into account, Bleichenbacher shows how some strategies are more risky than others with respect to uptake/comprehension. Table 1 shows, for example, that a close adherence to the presence of multilingualism might jeopardize comprehension (bottom right). Table 1.

A taxonomy of multilingualism in fictional texts, based on Mareš (2000a, 2000b, 2003) (as presented in Bleichenbacher 2008b: 24)

Strategy

Most distant from ­depicted reality ­Elimination

Signalization

Evocation

Closest to ­depicted ­reality ­Presence

Treatment of other ­languages

Neither used nor mentioned

Named by the narrator or by characters

Evoked by means of L2 interference phenomena

Used

Audience awareness of other ­language(s)

Depends on ability to ­process extralinguistic hints

Through ­metalinguistic comments

Depends on correct inter­pretation of interference phenomena

Full

Audience comprehension of ­content

Full

Full

Full, unless the audience is unwilling to ­listen to nonstandard speech

None, unless the other ­language is somehow translated

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Consider an extract from the beginning of Henry James’ (1877) novel The American. Mr. Newman, a wealthy American, is in Paris and visits the Louvre. He observes a young woman (Mademoiselle Noémie Nioche), who is copying a painting, approaches her and asks for the price of the as of yet unfinished copy. (1) The American (James 1877: n.p.; bold face added, italics as in the original) 1 He placed himself before her picture and looked at it for some moments, 2 during which she pretended to be quite unconscious of his inspection. 3 Then, addressing her with the single word which constituted the strength 4 of his French vocabulary, and holding up one finger in a manner which 5 appeared to him to illuminate his meaning, “Combien?” he abruptly 6 demanded. 7 8 The artist stared a moment, gave a little pout, shrugged her shoulders, put 9 down her palette and brushes, and stood rubbing her hands. 10 11 “How much?” said our friend, in English. “Combien?” 12 “Monsieur wishes to buy it?” asked the young lady in French. 13 “Very pretty, splendide. Combien?” repeated the American. 14 “It pleases monsieur, my little picture? It’s a very beautiful subject,” said 15 the young lady. 16 17 “The Madonna, yes; I am not a Catholic, but I want to buy it. Combien? 18 Write it here.” And he took a pencil from his pocket and showed her the 19 fly-leaf of his guide-book. She stood looking at him and scratching her 20 chin with the pencil. “Is it not for sale?” he asked. And as she still stood 21 reflecting, and looking at him with an eye which, in spite of her desire to 22 treat this avidity of patronage as a very old story, betrayed an almost 23 touching incredulity, he was afraid he had offended her. She was simply 24 trying to look indifferent, and wondering how far she might go. “I haven’t 25 made a mistake – pas insulté, no?” her interlocutor continued. “Don’t you 26 understand a little English?”

The narrator lets the reader understand that the conversation is held in two languages – French and English. We encounter signalization in explicit mentions of the code used (see bold in lines 4, 11, 12, 26) and a small number of words in French that are typographically enriched through italics. We also learn that neither of the two interlocutors is capable of speaking and comprehending more than a few words in the other’s language. This is expressed through metacomments (lines 3–4, 25–26), but also through the dialogue itself. The reader has access to both parts of the conversation through the fact that the text marked as being French with the help of meta-comments is actually written in English (i.e. through a process of erasure).3 When we look more closely at the dialogue we can see that the 3

The movie Love Actually (2003) entails a scene with comparable effects where two characters (an English writer and his Portuguese cleaner) do not speak each other’s lan-

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interlocutors often only approximately match their answers to each other, implying that they do not actually understand each other’s code. Newman’s response in lines 17–18 is pragmatically slightly off but does not disrupt the dialogue. Such slight mismatches re-occur in the continuation of the scene and comprehension is usually aided with the help of cognates that both comprehend. For example, the cognates ‘delicate’ and ‘address’ presumably help comprehension in extract (2) of the dialogue: (2) The American (James 1877: n.p.; bold face added, italics as in the original) But the American frowned. “Ah, too red, too red!” he rejoined. “Her complexion,” pointing to the Murillo, “is – more delicate.” “Delicate? Oh, it shall be delicate, monsieur; delicate as Sèvres biscuit. I am going to tone that down; I know all the secrets of my art. And where will you allow us to send it to you? Your address?” “My address? Oh yes!” And the gentleman drew a card from his pocket-book and wrote something upon it.

This interlacing serves as yet another metacommunicative cue that signals multi­ lingualism to the readers. The linguistic set-up of the situation is then further complicated by the arrival of Mademoiselle Nioche’s father, who, in contrast to his daughter, does speak English. Mademoiselle Noémie told Mr. Newman: (3) The American (James 1877: n.p.) “And precisely, here is my father, who has come to escort me home,” said Mademoiselle Noémie. “He speaks English. He will arrange with you.” […] “Are you the young lady’s father?” said Newman. “I think she said you speak English.”

The “I think” in Newman’s address to Mr. Nioche once more alerts the reader to the fact that Newman cannot entirely comprehend what Mademoiselle Noémie says to him. We then get to read entire passages between daughter and father written in English but signaled through meta-comment as being in French to which the protagonist Newman is not privy. The father acts as translator between Newman and his daughter and the chapter ends with French language lessons for Newman being negotiated. The extract demonstrates quite nicely how comprehension for the reader is ensured while not giving up on explicitly marking the multilingual situation. In the written medium, the possibility of the narratorial meta-comment thus enriches the linguistic situation.

guage and yet engage in a dialogue by using each their own language. Their turn-taking results in a meaningful dialogue which is accessible to the viewers by means of subtitling. The characters, however, are unaware of the exact meaning of each other’s words. By means of these multilingual and technical means, the viewer has more knowledge than the characters in the movie.

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In the PBS television series adaptation of this scene, the dialogue between the two characters occurs entirely in English with the exception of the address term Messieurs used by Noémie (The American 1998). There is no further allusion to the multilingual situation, which could have been achieved, for example, by giving the French character an accent or making use of the voice-over narrator to establish the communicative problems. A reason for this may be that the scene also does not occur at the beginning of the novel but eight minutes into the episode. As such, the French setting has long been established, for example by means of a narratorial voice-over, which gives information on Paris as location.4 Camarca’s (2005) study of Canadian author Nino Ricci discusses how comprehension is ensured when enrichment goes beyond formulaic and stereotypical usage of a second code. Camarca (2005) uses the terms translation, cushioning and embedded translation to describe Ricci’s techniques of incorporating Italian in his English text. An example of translation is illustrated with the direct speech “‘L’ammazzo, I’ll kill him!’”, where a verbatim translation follows the Italian (Camarca 2005: 230). In the process of cushioning “Ricci embeds the ‘alien’ word or sentence in the English text ‘in such a manner as to make the meaning virtually explicit’ (Langeland 1996: 18)” (Camarca 2005: 233). In the case of embedded translation, a “network of correspondences” is built up that allows the reader to comprehend the text: (4) ‘Antonio Girasole, alzati, per favore’ Antonio would rise and face forward, the priest standing only inches behind him, close enough for Antonio to feel his breath against his neck. ‘Tell me, Antonio, quante persone ci sono in Dio?’ Always an easy question to begin. ‘Three persons, Don Nicola.’ ‘Tre persone, giusto. And what are they called, these three persons?’ ‘Il Padre, il Figlio, e lo Spirito Santo.’ ‘Bene, Antonio, molto bene. You are truly a theologian, a Jesuit even.’ (Ricci 1990: 44, as quoted in Camarca 2005: 234, emphasis in original)

As the dialogue evolves, the meaning of the Italian passages within the English text become transparent because of the dialogic structure, while maintaining the effect of cultural enrichment. Any kind of mixture from presence to erasure is possible in fictional texts. An author can oscillate between these strategies depending on the communicative purposes that the polyglottal inclusion should serve. As mentioned before, adhering to a faithful rendition of real-world multilingualism is in fact not necessary in order 4



Bleichenbacher (2008b: 78–82) discusses several scenes in Hollywood movies where foreign languages as well as accents as meta-comments for characterization are employed and then dropped after a while once the viewer can be assumed to have been informed about the positioning of the character. See Section 2.3.

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to achieve credibility (Hodson 2016: 428; McIntyre 2016: 439). When an artifact goes the extra mile to make multilingualism a topic, then this is clearly noteworthy. A case in point is The Passion of the Christ (2004), which, in an attempt to transport the viewers back to Jesus’ surroundings as well as possible, uses Latin, Hebrew and a reconstructed Aramaic.5 Comprehensibility is ensured by means of subtitling (see also Adams, Ch. 11, this volume; Guillot, Ch. 13, this volume). Having mentioned some strategies that ensure comprehension, it is important to highlight that not all texts aim at translating every aspect of polyglottal elements. For example, Taylor-Batty (2013) in her work on modernist texts argues that The fact that modernist writers tend to focus specifically on interlingual encounters that are characterised by misunderstanding, incomplete comprehension and distortion further complicates the matter, resulting in a tension not only between the language(s) represented and the language(s) used to represent them, but in the very use of language to represent instances where language fails to communicate in any transparent way. That tension, however, produces not textual failure, but a fascinating and compelling exploration of the ways in which the encounter with linguistic and cultural difference can become a transformative experience. (Taylor-Batty 2013: 39–40)

This comment functions nicely as a transition of the discussion of surface form to the functions of including multilingualism in fiction. 2.2.

Functions of multilingualism in fictional texts

Scholars rarely stop at listing merely the technical aspects of incorporating multilingualism in a fictional text. The question of the pragmatic potential of the inclusion (or exclusion), i.e. the effects/functions of including multilingual aspects in fictional texts, are often the driving force for the studies on fictional multilingualism. However, Sternberg (1981: 233) stresses that neither the occurrence nor the function of the “mimetic devices” he described can be predicted: The point is, however, that the absolute location of a device (or for that matter the text’s whole gamut of devices) can in itself tell us very little about its actual mimetic effect or force or function, which can never be determined a priori but turns in each case on a large complex of variables and constraints – general and specific, historical and ­poetic, sociolinguistic and generic, textual and contextual. In different contexts, the same translational form may serve different functions and the same function may be served by different forms. (Sternberg 1981: 233)

5

According to an interview with the language advisor William Fulco (Bierma 2004: n.p.), he even “incorporated deliberate dialogue errors in the scenes where the Roman soldiers, speaking Aramaic, are shouting to Jewish crowds, who respond in Latin. To illustrate the groups’ inability to communicate with each other, each side speaks with incorrect pronunciations and word endings”.

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Thus, it is important to state that “the actual quantity of foreignisms in a text is rather less important than the qualitative role they play within its overall structure, i.e. their potential as functional elements” (Delabastita and Grutman 2005: 17). No matter its quantity, we can thus argue with Taylor-Batty (2013: 40) that “[t]he interlingual encounter – and its representation – always brings distortion, problems of interlingual and intercultural communication, and a foregrounding of difference”. In what follows, I will briefly illustrate a number of functions that range from including small polyglottal snippets used for cultural enrichment, character and place positioning, the creation of in-groups and out-groups, the creation of humor, defamiliarising/estrangement effects to social criticism and realism. These functions are not mutually exclusive and the sequence does not imply ranking of importance or frequency. Furthermore, the ensuing sub-sections on code-switching, particular multilingual authors, post-colonial, minority and diaspora texts as well as insights from studies on translation, dubbing and subtitling will further take up the issue of functions of fictional multilingualism. Snippets of foreign languages can be interspersed in the descriptions of settings when creating scenes that play in locations where the base language is not employed. Linguistic pointers can thus be used to mark the scene as ‘foreign’. For example, showing or mentioning public transportation signs, street names, place names and emblematic landmarks add to the linguistic landscaping in a particular scene (Bleichenbacher 2008b: 73–74; Blommaert 2013; Landry and Bourhis 1997). Furthermore, mentioning institutions (Buckingham Palace, the Colosseum, the shul) can function as a shorthand to index cultural settings. The film studies scholar Kozloff (2000) uses the term “anchorage of the diegesis and characters” to describe this effect, i.e. using linguistic pointers to set a scene and, in this case, to give it a ‘foreign’ flavor. While Kozloff (2000) makes this point for the function of dialogue in fiction in general, polyglottal elements in narrative passages in texts and visual information in telecinematic artifacts can also achieve this effect. An example can be taken from The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris (2013). The paragraph in extract (5) is from the beginning of the novel and we have just encountered Chani on the day of her wedding, anxiously waiting for the day to take its course. (5) But where was the Rebbetzin? After the lessons had ended, she had promised to be at the wedding. Chani blinked and scanned the room once more before allowing disappointment to set in. She comforted herself with the prospect that the Rebbetzin was already inside the shul watching from the women’s gallery. Chani vowed to look up before she entered the chuppah. (Harris 2013: 3)

Before this extract, the Jewish context was already evoked by cultural references and the explicit mention that prayers were voiced in Hebrew. In the quoted paragraph, the words Rebbetzin, schul, and chuppah are neither italicized to mark them

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as somehow out of the ordinary (compare to the extract from The American above), nor are they explained. Instead, we get access to Chani’s thoughts, for whom these lexical expressions are part of her everyday language and cultural experience. The reader can either gather their meaning from the context and in the continuation of the story or turn to an extensive Yiddish/Hebrew-English glossary at the end of the book. One of the potential effects of this inclusion of Yiddish and Hebrew words might be that the reader feels invited into this world of orthodox English Jews and their practices rather than being positioned as an outsider to whom cultural context has to be explicitly explained. The effect of cultural enrichment (Camarca 2005: 232) can also be achieved within the dialogues. Drawing even on small elements of languages other than the base language of the text allows the authors to tap into their readers’/viewers’ world knowledge such as in the case of using Italian greeting formulas in a text otherwise rendered in English (see the comments in the introduction on indexicality). Camarca’s (2005) study of Canadian author Ricci gives us the following examples: (6) ‘Signora, I think they’re starting the engines’ my mother said … ‘Si, si grazie. I hope you’ll excuse me for the way I lost my head but you can imagine how a woman feels’ … ‘La ringrazio, singora, grazie tant’ she said, backing out the door and clasping my mother’s hand; but a moment later, as she hurried away down the hall, she was cursing again. ‘L’ammazzo! I’ll kill him! I’ll kill them both’ ‘Addio,’ my mother said, watching her go. ‘Poveretta’. (LOS 199) (Ricci 1990: 199, as quoted in Camarca 2005: 230, emphasis in original)

According to Camarca (2005: 230, 231), this direct speech is “a simulation of a real speech”, “formulaic and stereotyped”. She also reports on the use of interspersed Italian words in the narrative part of the author’s texts, such as “Then a bowl of tortellini and a plate of trippa” (Ricci 1990: 69). Camarca (2005: 232) argues that “English represents the shared code, the language of communication and commerce, therefore code-switching in this environment assumes a symbolic function, and not a mimetic one, marking cultural boundaries (see Gordon and Williams 1998)” and is used for “cultural enrichment”. As shown in detail in Ch. 4 by Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla on ‘Fictional characterisation’ and Ch. 9 by Planchenault on ‘Doing dialects in dialogues: Regional, social and ethnic variation in fiction’ in this handbook, linguistic elements can be used strategically to attribute fictional characters with pointers about their linguistic, social, ethnic, and/or regional background. We can also use these insights for multilingual elements in fiction. For example, the Italian snippets in extracts (4) and (6) above give background knowledge about the protagonists. In general, linguistic features can be used as indexes for regional, social or ethnic belonging (Hodson 2016). As Planchenault (2008, 2011, 2012, 2015, this volume)

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shows, a French accent in a movie in English alone can be indexical of evoking a multilingual situation and shaping a ‘foreign’ character. Importantly, Planchenaut (2015: Ch. 6) reveals that a French accent is often used as a shorthand to alert the viewer to a stereotypical and thus simplified view of Frenchness or characteristics of the French. While, this impression can later be confirmed or subverted in the fictional artifact, Planchenault (2015: 107–108) argues that there are long-established hegemonic readings of such cues (e.g. the use of a French accent to index ‘romance’ or ‘bon vivant’), which are embedded in the discursive tradition of representation of otherness in a particular culture. Consider also the extract from Star Trek. The Future Begins (2009), where the freshly formed team of the brand new starship Enterprise face their first mission in the faraway future. The Captain, who has just taken his seat on the bridge, addresses Ensign Chekov, with whom he is not yet familiar. (7) Stark Trek. The Future Begins. (2009), minute 40, 1.03 minutes Context: Ensign Chekov does a ship-wide mission broadcast informing that the planet Vulcan was experiencing seismic activity and now might need help in evacuations. 1 Sulu: engines at ^maximum warp [Captain.] ((TURNS AROUND)) 2 Captain: [^Russian] whiz kid, 3 ‘what’s your name ^Chanko? 4 ^Cherpov? ((C. TURNS AROUND)) 5 Chekov: Ensign , ((NODS)) ^Pavel ^Andreievich sir. 6 7 Captain: ^fine. 8 Chekov Pavel Andreievich. 9 begin ^ship-wide mission ‘broadcast? 10 Chekov: ^yes sir ‘happy to. ((TURNS TO COMPUTER AND STARTS TYPING)) 11 ^ensign authorization ‘code . 12 Computer: ^authorization not recognized. 13 Chekov: ^Ensign authorization ^code, 14 , 15 . ((C. SIGHS)) 16 Comp.: ^access granted. 17 Chekov: may I ^have your attention ‘please. 18 at ^2200 hours,

Next to the visual multi-racial/species appearance of the crew, this short scene manages to evoke the idea of multilingualism and multi-culturalism in a very succinct way. First, the viewers are explicitly told that the (very young) Ensign is Russian (line 2), which is followed up with a number of suggested family names that have a Russian ring to them. Ensign Chekov confirms his name and then gives evidence that English (the given lingua franca on the bridge) is not his mother tongue by demonstrating a Russian accent in rounding the pronunciation of the letter v (line 11). This pronunciation is rejected by the computer, which apparently

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is not programmed to have a tolerance for different accents. As a consequence, Ensign Chekov, who seems to be aware of his accent, corrects himself by carefully enunciating the consonant in his second attempt (line 15). These linguistic indexes thus confirm his “non-American” nationality, while being part of the multi-national crew. Applying Bleichenbacher’s (2008b) formal categories of the inclusion of multilingualism, which are aligned along a continuum from absence to presence of non-base languages (see Table 1), we can say that in this particular example from Star Trek we find signalization of another language, since Russian is explicitly mentioned, and evocation through Chekov’s accent. Bleichenbacher (2008b: 26−30) is particularly interested in the functions of such multilingual display and identifies the creation of realism, the expression of social criticism and the creation of humor as motivation for the inclusion of multilingualism in movies. In the case of extract (7), the creation of humor is most likely to be the reason for inclusion. In more general terms, Delabastita and Grutman (2005) argue that: Intratextual glossing and the creation of intertextual echoes and metalinguistic effects – all of which always involve a careful balancing of the author’s quest for textual sophistication and what s/he perceives to be the linguistic skills of his/her prospective public – do not exhaust the range of possible functions of multilingualism and text-internal translation. Thus, interlingual misunderstandings and mistranslations can be used for comic effect too, namely by bringing about what humour theorists would call an incongruity or conflict between different cognitive schemes. (Delabastita and Grutman 2005: 18)

In the earlier examples, the inclusion of multilingualism can be argued to contribute to storyworld creation, character positioning, creating a touch of realism as well as in-groups and out-groups (between characters and for readers). Bleichenbacher’s (2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2012) studies are particularly concerned with negative and stereotypical linguistic renditions of characters in fictional texts. He follows up on Lippi-Green’s (1997) seminal study of Disney characters, which showed that language differences were systematically used to create positive and negative characters in a discriminatory fashion: Characters with strongly positive actions and motivations are overwhelmingly speakers of socially mainstream varieties of English. Conversely, characters with strongly negative actions and motivations often speak varieties of English linked to specific geographical regions and marginalized social groups. Perhaps even more importantly, those characters who have the widest variety of life choices and possibilities available to them are male, and they are speakers of MUSE [Mainstream Standard US English] or a non-stigmatized variety of British English […]. (Lippi-Green 1997: 101)

Bleichenbacher’s (2008b: 220) study of multilingualism in Hollywood movies confirms this trend to correlate negative and marginalized characters with nonbase language speakers to a certain extent, but he points out that the narrative plot

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can override such trends so that predictions about certain languages being always associated with negativity are not possible. In Chapter 11, this volume, Adams discusses how to linguistically create past, future, utopian, and fantasy worlds. The complex creation of future worlds and their linguistic composition is a creative challenge that is often meant to index future power shifts (see Bleichenbacher’s 2008b category of social criticism). For example, the lingua franca in the just mentioned Star Trek is English, but there is ample evidence of other languages, including Klingon (see, e.g. Adams 2011; Okrand et al. 2011), and meta-discussions on translation and interpretation; the sci-fi series Firefly (2002–2003) suggests that the new lingua franca is a mixture of Chinese and English; social criticism is also made prominent in the 2013 science fiction of Elysium, which plays on a Spanish and English speaking earth whose ruling class resides in a space port above earth and speaks French and English but not Spanish. Authors of fantasy worlds also follow a long tradition of creating multilingual worlds (Adams 2011, this volume). In Tolkien’s work on Middle Earth, entire languages and their derivations are discussed. We also find, for example, mention of “the rough Dothraki tongue”6 in the Game of Thrones book series. In its recent TV adaptation, the production moves beyond signalization and evocation of foreign languages and invents new languages for which subtitles are then provided. As stated above, the quantity of these foreignisms is not game-changing since even small inclusions of elements other than the base-language can already create a defamiliarization or alienation effect that suffices to signal to readers that they are dealing with a different world (see Adams, this volume, on the concept of estrangement). For example, in the Black Magician and The Traitor Spy trilogies, Trudi Canavan names “a domestic animal, bred for wool and meat” a “reber” or a “stimulating drink made from roasted beans, originally from Sachaka” a “raka” (Canavan 2011, glossary). At the same time, she avoids the lexemes sheep and coffee. While the base language thus remains solidly English, the fact that we are not dealing with England or even our world is indexed by using fantasy words for everyday items. The special issue on telecinematic discourse edited by Androutsopoulos (2012a) is specifically concerned with how sociolinguistic complexity is rendered in telecinematic discourse and how the texts can inform and reflect language ideologies. Androutsopoulos’ (2012b) own contribution discusses the movie Süperseks (2004), that draws a complex linguistic picture of Hamburg’s Turkish community. He establishes the repertoires of languages in the movie (native German, near-native German, inter-language German and Turkish), links them to the characters’

6



One such meta-comment is: “Dothraki was incomprehensible to her [Daenerys], and the khal knew only a few words of the bastard Valyrian of the Free Cities, and none at all of the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms” (Martin 1996: n.p.).

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usage and then to the scenes in order to discuss their effect within the telecinematic artifact. He reports that the characters’ linguistic repertoires differ by their narrative importance, gender and generation. In scenes with bilingual dialogue, code choice and code-switching are found to contextualise conflictual relations among major characters. Süperseks relies heavily on stereotypical assumptions about language and ethnicity, class, gender and generation, by which stereotypical relations between sociolinguistic difference and narrative evaluation or importance are sustained. (Androutsopoulos 2012b: 301)

As mentioned, the inclusion of multilingual elements in fictional texts can result in many different effects and be employed for different purposes. The list presented here is therefore not meant to offer a closed set of possibilities and can thus be expanded. In fact, the following sections will take up the functions of the inclusion of fictional multilingualism again in the light of the particular research fields. 2.3.

Code-switching in fictional texts

Next to the study of language acquisition, bilingualism, the sociology of language and translation studies, the study of code-switching is one of the important fields in linguistics that deals with multilingualism. Code-switching has also been studied in fictional contexts both to find out more about code-switching in general and to learn about how it is being used in fiction (e.g. Androutsopoulos 2012b; Bleichenbacher 2008b; Callahan 2001, 2002, 2004; Camarca 2005; Diller 1997; Jonsson 2012, 2014; Martin 2005; Montes-Alcalá 2012). Bleichenbacher (2008b) discusses extracts from Hollywood movies that pertain to four different types: 1. Situational code-switching: Scenes where code-switches into another language are motivated by situational factors. These factors include aspects of the communicative situation, such as the speaker’s linguistic repertoire, the addressee(s) of a turn, or the topic discussed. 2. Metaphorical or marked code-switching: Scenes where code-switches into another language are especially highlighted, and appear as a turning point in the interaction, rather than a mere reaction to situational factors. Typically, these instances of code-switching are used for the aims of linguistic politeness and language display. 3. Indexical code-switching: Scenes where there is a complete absence of any psycholinguistic, pragmatic or sociolinguistic reasons for characters to codeswitch into another language (typically their L1). Rather, the characters codeswitch for the benefit of the viewer, as a mere index of their OL [other language] ethnolinguistic background. 4. Edited code-switching: Scenes where different conversations, which are each monolingual but in different languages, are conjoined through camera move-

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ment or editing into a single scene. Thus, the juxtaposition of turns in different languages appears purely as a result of cinematic editing. (Bleichenbacher 2008b: 192) Of the 241 scenes (derived from 28 movies), the majority pertains to categories one and two, i.e. “plausibly motived” code switches (Bleichenbacher 2008b: 192). Nevertheless, in 35 scenes (15%) there is indexical and in 34 (14%) edited code-switching. These can be argued to be specific techniques for fictional multilingualism. Indexical code-switching was previously discussed in connection with evocation, i.e. well-known snippets of foreign language are employed to index the multilingual context and characters. Edited code-switching is unique to the audiovisual medium. Special mention deserve those code-switches that establish multilingualism and then – after having positioned the characters and settings – shift to the base language of the text. For illustration, Bleichenbacher (2008b: 19–80) mentions The Hunt for Red October (1990), in which the Russian Captain Ramius and his second talk in Russian (with English subtitles) and are thus established as Russian speakers. This is followed by a dialogue between Ramius and another officer in subtitled Russian, which, then, however, switches into English as the base language of the movie. This unrealistic code-switch, which replaces Russian with English, is only reversed towards the end of the movie when there is a scene in which the different languages play a role (i.e. American characters meet Russian characters). Another example is taken from Clear and Present Danger (1994) where two Columbians speak Spanish (with English subtitles) to each other when they have their first appearance in the movie; they then switch to English as the base language of the movie (Bleichenbacher 2008b: 79). These examples play on the expectation that viewers are willing to engage in the fictional compact and to suspend disbelief. Further research is motivated by establishing how authors employ code-switching to achieve literary effects. For example, Camarca (2005: 240) argues that the code-switching contained in Ricci’s trilogy (written in English with Italian elements, see examples [4] and [6] above), while not being realistic from a linguistic point of view, “render[s] his work more realistic, at least on a literary level”. Code-switching is thus seen as a literary device. The same view is put forward by Martin (2005: 403), who argues that For the multilingual author, switching between two or more languages is not an arbitrary act, nor is it simply an attempt to mimic the speech of his or her community; code-switching results from a conscious decision to create a desired effect and to promote the validity of the author’s heritage language. […] Incorporating native and heritage languages along with English within a literary work, usually through code-switching, creates a multiple perspective and enhances an author’s ability to express his or her subject matter. (Martin 2005: 403)

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Multilingual authors and their texts

There is an extensive body of studies that is interested in the surfacing of multilingualism in fictional texts and their effects not only in their own right but also in particular with respect to a specific author’s works and his/her biography (for overviews, see, e.g., Forster 1970; Kremnitz 2004, 2015). Authors write both texts that contain several languages (intratextual multilingualism) as well as different texts in altogether different languages (intertextual multilingualism; Hale 1997; Kremnitz 2004: 14). In other words, an author may mix linguistic elements from different languages within, for example, a poem or novel, but may also write a piece in one language and another in a different language. For example, Camarca’s (2005) above-mentioned study on Ricci’s trilogy is a case in point for a study of intratextual multilingualism. An extreme case of intratextual mixing is macaronic verse, which “usually refers to the mixing of words, sometimes whole lines, of more than one lang. [sic.] in a poem, most often for comic or satiric effect though sometimes (and more recently) with serious intent” (Brogan and Goldsmith 1993: n.p.). Macaronic verse is already reported for the 12th century but “Ezra Pound (The Cantos) and T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land) have transformed [it] into a serious and important technique of poetic composition, allusion, and structure” (Brogan and Goldsmith 1993: n.p.). In contrast, Taylor-Batty (2015) gives special attention to multilingualism in modernist writing by authors such as Jean Rhys, James Joyce or Samuel Beckett that include both intratextual and intertextual multilingualism. The main research field from which these studies usually derive are literary and cultural studies but also theology, history or stylistics. The fact that multilingual writing, or ‘literary multilingualism’ (Taylor-Batty 2013: 9) is not new surfaces nicely in such studies. For example, we find ample work on the linguistic choices in the Middle Ages where plurilingual texts are no exception (e.g. Forster 1970; Zink 1995; Diller 1997; Machan 2010; Zacher 2011; Hsy 2013). For example, Hsy (2013: 6) in his Trading Tongues “maintains that polyglot poets and other medieval writers code-switch not only for pragmatic purposes but also for deliberately artistic ends; using different languages to develop distinct expressive registers, to stylize certain types of speech, or to evoke a vivid sense of place”. One of his main points is that scholars should consider “not only the ‘roots’ but also the ‘routes’ of medieval culture; that is we should pay careful attention to how language use is informed by local practices as well as how languages themselves are reshaped and transformed through dispersal across space” (Hsy 2013: 89). This call for the need to paying attention to practices and to cultural and socio-historical context resonates well with pragmaticians:

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[O]ur approach to literary history changes dramatically once we consider the pervasive contact and interpenetration between Middle English and other languages, and writers (such as Caxton or Chaucer) whom we might perceive as quintessentially “English” or associated with a particular city like London emerge as writers who are profoundly implicated in negotiating polyglot spaces beyond England per se. (Hsy 2013: 25)

As another case in point, the English Renaissance poet John Milton’s multilingualism and the impact this had on his work has received much attention (Hale 1991, 1997; Hale et al. 2007). Hale’s (1997) work on John Milton displays this quite nicely. In part I of his (1997) monograph, Hale discusses how Milton wrote in four different languages and particularly used different languages for different genres and audiences. These insights are linked to Milton’s life (e.g. his travels to Italy and his scholarly studies) and the fact that Milton was faced with having to make a decision about what language to write in throughout his life: Before leaving Italy Milton has chosen his medium by thinking what is his most-desired audience, and then the rest follows by decorum. He chose Latin or English accordingly thereafter: he chose Latin for European or pedagogic consumption, English for the History of Britain. The choice of tongue reveals fundamentals about the particular act of thought. (Hale 1997: 6)

Milton’s linguistic choices are fundamentally informed by the times during which he lived, when Latin, Greek and Hebrew belonged to the learned languages and especially Latin, as lingua franca, allowed him access to a readership beyond England. While this may have been typical for a Renaissance man, Hale (1997: 16) argues that Milton made conscious language choices that he repeatedly commented on in a philologist tradition. In part II of his book, Hale (1997) then discusses intratextual multilingualism such as the use of Latinisms, Graecisms, Hebrewisms and Italianisms in his English work. (See also, among others, Delabastita [2002] and Delabastita and Hoenselaars [2015] on multiligualism in the English Renaissance drama). Another example of a study of more recent intratextual multilingualism is Amador Morena (2005), who explores the works of the Spanish authors Javier Marías (Todas las almas [1989], Corazón tan blanco [1992]) and Antonio Muñoz Molina (Carlota Fainberg [1999]) and argues that the many English snippets and cultural allusions in the Spanish body of the texts are in fact the result of the two authors’ immersion into an Anglophone cultural surrounding as well as the consequence of the narrative plot. For example, Marías’ Corazón tan blanco (My Heart so White) fundamentally deals with language matters since the main characters are translators and interpreters themselves. According to Amador Morena (2005), the novels are addressing a particular reader, i.e. one who

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is not only an educated reader, but also a reader who is presumed to be proficient in English, and who will, therefore, be able to comprehend the numerous examples of code-switching, the ‘philological dissections’ and cultural references to the English-speaking world that appear in their respective novels. (Amador Morena 2005: 201)

As motivation for this intricate interweaving of the English language into the Spanish texts, Amador Morena names the wish to “add credibility to both their characters and narrators”. The creation of credibility, authenticity or accessibility, however, is not necessarily the driving force for the inclusion of multilingualism in fictional texts. ‘Polyglot wordplay’ (Monod 2005) may be an art form in itself that is typical of authors such as Joseph Conrad (e.g. Baxter 2013; Monod 2005; Pousada 1994), Samuel Beckett (e.g. Lalor 2010) or James Joyce (e.g. Bollettieri Bosinelli 2001; Korg 2002). Vladimir Nabokov’s work has also received ample attention since the Russian author writes in Russian, French and English, liberally mixes the forms inter- and intratextually and has also published his ideas on translation (e.g. Kager 2013; Liberman 2005; Nassar 1993; Razumova 2010; Safariants 2007; Taylor 2005). Especially noteworthy is probably the case of strategic mistranslation, i.e. fictional characters misinterpret or misquote multilingual texts, which can result in humorous effects (see, e.g., Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale in the Canterbury Tales or Taylor 2005 on Nabokov’s Ada). The latter is of course only the result when the readers are sufficiently multilingual themselves to spot the mistranslation as a source for humor. What transpires nicely in this field is that the languages that authors have access to and interweave in their texts are not only part of their own biographies but are of course also embedded in their cultural context and carry indexical value for their time. In Milton’s case his fluency in Latin was shared by many learned people (and his readers) at the time, which is no longer the case today. Nabokov’s language choices, in contrast, might also have been used to create an in-group of equally multilingual readers, but may also have resulted in alienating or irritating readers. As a consequence the study of an author’s choice of languages results in a fascinating study of cultural contexts. However, neither an author’s language choice nor the effect that this choice might have on readers can be reliably predicted (Kremnitz 2004, 2015). Kremnitz thus comes to a similar conclusion as Sternberg (1981) with respect to the occurrence or the function of multilingualism, quoted above. After exploring the language choices of a large number of authors (Joseph Conrad, Fernando Pessoa, Elias Canetti, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Galsan Tschinag and Giwi Margwilaschwili), Kremnitz (2004, 2015) concludes that

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the authors’ choice of literary language is motivated by a subtle interplay of external conditions, societal parameters, sociological judgments, biographical coincidences and the authors’ reactions to these usually complex and multiply overdetermined situations. However, while a particular author’s choice or a biographical development might be plausible in retrospect, there is no certain way to predict such developments. The number of (potentially) game-changing variables is too big. (Kremnitz 2015: 246, my translation)

2.5.

Multilingualism in post-colonial, minority or diaspora texts

In many ways, the previous section overlaps with the current on post-colonial, minority and diaspora literature. The difference that I want to suggest is that the former studies are primarily motivated by an interest in a particular author as an individual in his or her cultural context. The primary texts of interest for this section, however, are positioned as contributions to a wider field and explore texts for which it is characteristic to entail elements of multilingualism or a discourse on language choice, multilingualism and cultural belonging. Literary and cultural studies are the main sources here, but as many scholars also ask the question of the function of linguistic choices, we can make the link to pragmatics as well. In the case of post-colonial (and beyond) studies, scholars and authors alike point to the dilemma of writing in the former colonizers’ language (e.g. English or French) and the subtle ways in which present-day writers have appropriated and changed the original base language to meet their ends. Zabus (2007: 112), in her studies on the West African Europhone novel, reports “Loreto Todd’s felicitous formulation – ‘the relexification of one’s mother tongue, using English vocabulary but indigenous structures and rhythms’ (Todd 1982: 303)” to describe this process. For example, Mofin Noussi (2009) argues that Zakes Mda in the South African novel The Heart of Redness (2000) shows that an enriching cohabitation between, for instance, the languages of Xhosa and English is possible. The author [Mda] goes about this essentially through the africanization or, more precisely, the ‘Xhosa-ification’ of the English language, which confers a stylistic particularity on the novel. This africanization of the English language is achieved through the techniques of glossing, leaving words untranslated, reflexification, and the insertion of Xhosa proverbs in an anglophone written text. From these translation processes as revealed in the novel, linguistic hybridity appears as the standard towards which South African populations and South African writers must aspire in order to promote the much-desired linguistic and socio-political reconciliation. (Mofin Noussi 2009: 291)

Famous authors such as Salman Rushdie in India, Chinua Achebe in Africa, many proponents of Native American peoples on the North American continent, such as Leslie Marmon Silko or Simon J. Ortiz, stand for well studied authors who write (primarily) in English rather than their ancestors’ languages and who have appropriated English to express their own cultural experiences and identities.

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There is also a growing body of literature that deals with authors who have moved elsewhere due to migration movements and write in a base language other than their ancestors’ language. Kremnitz (2004, 2015: 172), for example, points to a body of texts that has been referred to as “Gastarbeiterliteratur” (a term, he says, which has disappeared again), when talking about literature in German that was written by migrants in Germany. Androutsopoulous’ (2012b) study of the movie Süperseks about Turkish-German inhabitants in Hamburg is a case in point of a telecinematic example. In the context of the United States, especially research on Chicano English in Chicano literature is vibrant (e.g. Callahan 2001, 2002, 2004; Flores 1987; Jonsson 2014; Martin 2005; Martín 2008; Rivera 2010). Migration literature, or diaspora literature, can also be used as a term to refer to the vast body of texts that has been written in the former home language while the authors are part of the new cultural contexts. For example, in the collections Multilingual America (Sollors 1998a) and German? American? Literature? (Fluck and Sollors 2002), the authors offer studies on the rich body of literature created in languages other than English, yet being genuinely American at the same time. These include discussions of texts in, among others, Creole, Norwegian, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, German and Yiddish. While this chapter is not the place to give justice to this rich body of research, it is worthwhile to point out that understanding and exploring fictional multilingualism is among the research aims in this field when scholars study ideologies of difference and belonging. 2.6.

Translating, dubbing and subtitling

The chapters by Valdeón on translation of fiction (Ch. 12) and Guillot on subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic texts (Ch. 13) are of course contributions to this handbook that also deal with multilingualism in fiction. By their very nature these fields of study have a great awareness of the challenges of rendering multilingualism in a text. When multilingual texts are not a simple byproduct but the result of a creative process, decisions on translation are particularly delicate. To give just one example, Queen (2004) explored dubbing into German of US movies that make a linguistic distinction between standard American speakers and African American Vernacular speakers and thus exploit linguistic features to also index social and ethnic differences. Since German dialects index regional rather than ethnic differences, the producers could not use a regional dialect for the AAVE speakers to create a contrast to standard speakers. The solution was to adopt language associated with “urban youth cultures of north-central Germany” (Queen 2004: 515) for the AAVE speakers, as this came closest to the indexicality intended in the original movies. In many dubbed versions, however, the richness of the indexicality of the original is diminished as one-to-one mapping is rarely possible. For example, De Bonis (2014), who compares how thirteen of Hitchcock’s multilin-

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gual movies were translated into Italian, reports that three strategies have been employed: [F]irst of all, the neutralisation of the different languages present in the original version via dubbing the entire film into Italian. Secondly, the preservation of the different lingua-cultural identities through a combination of dubbing with other screen translation modalities such as contextual translation, and interpretation performed by one [of] the film’s characters. Finally, a third strategy is the quantitative reduction of the multilingual situations present in the original version of the film […]. (De Bonis 2014: 169)

Translating multilingual texts thus poses a particular challenge since the indexical fields of the chosen indexical markers and the contrasts created by employing them in the source text, are nearly impossible to match in the translated product. 3. Conclusions This chapter reviewed the ample literature on fictional multilingualism in written and telecinematic texts. The phenomenon described is neither new nor rare and has inspired scholarship in many different disciplines. As a consequence, the review was shaped in such a manner that it can give an introduction to the scope of research without claiming any representativeness. Taking a pragmatics point of view was interpreted as exploring the potential functions of the polyglottal texts. The techniques of incorporating different languages in an artifact range from attempts at presenting authentic multilingual renditions to simplifying the polyglottal situation in processes that draw on the potential of linguistic indexicality, translation and contextual embedding. How much multilingualism is included in a text is of lesser consequence than the effects that its inclusion – and be it only through evocation or signalization – can achieve. Sociolinguistic and pragmatic insights on processes of indexicality and stereotyping in their specific cultural contexts have been shown to be useful and adequate tools for interpretation. The potential functions of multilingual elements in fiction cannot easily be predicted. Scholarship has demonstrated a vast range of functions, though, which are manifest of both the pervasiveness of multilingualism per se in society but also of the importance of this phenomenon in fiction. Polyglottal text (elements) can be used for scene creation/enrichment, character creation, the creation of humor, the display of social criticism, realism and ideological debates of difference and belonging. This list can surely be expanded in future research. Moving beyond such general conclusions, it remains of fundamental importance to interpret fiction as a creative artifact and to give it justice in its own right. It is important to stress that all the fields reviewed here have their legitimation and can equally draw on the texts and approach them with their own unique research questions and methodological angles.

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A potentially rewarding future area of research is the comparison of how authors write about and include multilingualism in their written artifacts and how these works are then adapted for the screen. More research is needed to discover how the audio-visual medium goes its own ways and creatively rises to the challenge of creating polyglottal worlds. Furthermore, of particular interest might be a diachronic comparison that may yield insights into changing indexicalities, language ideologies and tolerances for multilingualism. Acknowledgments My heartfelt thanks goes to Aline Bieri, who was instrumental in compiling the literature reading list and chasing up the texts for my perusal. For feedback on earlier versions of this chapter, I thank Thomas Messerli, Andreas H. Jucker, Philipp Schweighauser and Gaëlle Planchenault. All remaining faults are my own.

References Primary sources Canavan, Trudi 2011 The Rogue. Book Two of the Traitor Spy Trilogy. London: Orbit. Chaucer, Geoffrey 1988 The Canterbury Tales. In: Larry D. Benson and Fred N. Robinson (eds.), The Riverside Chaucer: The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. First published [1470s]. Clear and Present Danger 1994 Dir. Philipp Noyce. Screenplay by Steven Zaillian, John Milius and Donald Stewart. Paramount Pictures. Elysium 2013 Dir. Neill Blomkamp. Screenplay by Neill Blomkamp. Tri Star Pictures et al. Firefly 2002–2003  Dir. Joss Whedon et al. Screenplay by Joss Whedon et al. Mutant Enemy and 20th Century Fox Television. Harris, Eve 2013 The Marrying of Chani Kaufman. Dingwall, UK: Sandstone Press. James, Henry 1877 The American [Online version]. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/177/177-h/ 177-h.htm#link2HCH0001 Love Actually 2003 Dir. Richard Curtis. Screenplay by Richard Curtis. Universal Pictures and StudioCanal. Marías, Javier 1989 Todas las Almas. Barcelona: Anagrama.

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Androutsopoulos, Jannis 2012a Introduction: Language and society in cinematic discourse. Multilingua 31(2–3): 139–154. Androutsopoulos, Jannis 2012b Repertoires, characters and scenes: Sociolinguistic difference in Turkish-German comedy. Multilingua 31(2–3): 301–326. Baxter, Katherine Isobel 2013 Speaking foreign: Conrad and modernist multilingualism. Studia Neophilologica 85: 17–28. Berliner, Todd 1999 Hollywood movie dialogue and the “real realism” of John Cassavetes. Film Quarterly 52(3): 2–16. Bierma, Nathan 2004, March 4  The Jesuit scholar who translated ‘The Passion’. Chicago Tribune. http:// articles.chicagotribune.com/2004–03–04/features/0403040033_1_aramaiclife-of-jesus-christ-latin Bleichenbacher, Lukas 2008a Linguistic replacement in the movies. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 44(2): 179–196. Bleichenbacher, Lukas 2008b Multilingualism in the Movies: Hollywood Characters and their Linguistic Choices. Tübingen, DE: Francke. Bleichenbacher, Lukas 2009 “Ou en français, si vous préférez?”: When Hollywood characters code-switch. In: Carolina P. Amador Moreno and Ana Nunes (eds.), The Representation of the Spoken Mode in Fiction: How Authors Write How People Talk, 171–195. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Bleichenbacher, Lukas 2012 Linguicism in Hollywood movies? Multilingua 31(2–3): 155–176. Blommaert, Jan 2013 Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Bollettieri Bosinelli, Rosa Maria 2001 Joyce slipping across the borders of English: The stranger in language. James Joyce Quarterly 38(3–4): 395–409. Brogan, T. V. F. and Ulrich K. Goldsmith 1993 Macaronic verse [Online version]. In: Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan ­ rinceton, (eds.), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. P NJ: Princeton University Press. http://literature.proquest.com/searchFulltext.do?id=R00793798&divLevel=0&queryId=2915779929281&trailId=152D684A9FE&area=ref&forward=critref_ft Callahan, Laura 2001 Spanish/English codeswitching in fiction: A grammatical and discourse function analysis. 3019607 Ph.D. dissertation, University of California. Callahan, Laura 2002 The Matrix Language Frame model and Spanish/English codeswitching in fiction. Language & Communication 22(1): 1–16.

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Callahan, Laura 2004 Spanish/English Codeswitching in a Written Corpus. (Studies in Bilingualism 27.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Camarca, Silvia 2005 Code-switching and textual strategies in Nino Ricci’s trilogy. Semiotica 154: 225–241. De Bonis, Guiseppe 2014 Alfred Hitchcock presents: Multilingualism as a vehicle for … suspense. The Italian dubbing of Hitchcock’s multilingual films. Linguistica Antverpiensia 13: 169–192. Delabastita, Dirk 2002 A great feast of languages: Shakespeare’s multilingual comedy in ‘King Henry V’ and the translator. The Translator 8(2): 303–340. Delabastita, Dirk and Rainier Grutman 2005 Introduction: Fictional representations of multilingualism and translation. Linguistica Antverpiensia 4: 11–34. Delabastita, Dirk and Ton Hoenselaars (eds.) 2015 Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Diller, Hans-Jürgen 1997 Code-switching in medieval English drama. Comparative Drama 31(4): 506– 537. Eckert, Penelope 2008 Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4): 453–476. Flores, Lauro 1987 Converging languages in a world of conflicts: Code-switching in Chicano poetry. Visible Language 21(1): 130–152. Fluck, Winfried and Werner Sollors (eds.) 2002 German? American? Literature? Bern: Peter Lang. Forster, Leonard 1970 The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, Elizabeth and Mark Williams 1998 Raids on the articulate: Code-switching, style shifting and post-colonial writing. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33(2): 75–96. Grutman, Rainier 2002 Les motivations de l’hétérolinguisme: Réalisme, composition, esthétique. In: Furio Brugnolo and Vincenzo Orioles (eds.), Eteroglossia e Plurilinguismo Letterario: Plurilinguismo e Letteratura, 329–349. Roma: Il Calamo. Hale, John K. 1991 The multilingual Milton and the Italian Journey. In: Mario A. Di Cesare (ed.), Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, 549–572. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Hale, John K. 1997 Milton’s Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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11. The pragmatics of estrangement in fantasy and science fiction Michael Adams Abstract: In this chapter, I examine the theoretical bases of estrangement and its status as a literary illocutionary act essential to the pragmatic foundation of genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction, a foundation distinct from those of other genres precisely on pragmatic grounds. I demonstrate how surplus poeticity at various linguistic levels – onomastic, lexical, and stylistic – contributes to estranging illocutionary force, as well as how invented languages contribute to estrangement but also sometimes interfere with it, because over-investment in invented language can be interpreted as pragmatically uncooperative on an author’s part. Alternatively, metapragmatic discourse within a fiction and metapragmatic awareness it stimulates in readers amplifies estrangement. This is demonstrated in an exemplary text, China Miéville’s novel Embassytown (2011). 1. Introduction The concept of estrangement is central to the pragmatics of fantasy, science fiction, and other literary genres a step or two off the beaten track of “official” literature. Proponents of these genres often insist, far from being odd or intellectually parochial, fantasy and science fiction provide opportunities to examine fundamental human problems of knowing and acting on what one knows or thinks one knows unavailable on the highway of fiction. Those who choose the low road reach the human condition before less adventurous literary travelers. Knowledge of knowing depends on our grappling with difference – rationalizing the unexpected – so fantasy and science fiction narrative must force the issue, and that’s estrangement’s role. In order for readers to examine the epistemological basis of their experience, they must feel to some degree estranged from the fictional world they enter, and while such estrangement is natural to all kinds of fiction, it is a core component of science fiction and fantasy used purposefully to make how we know centrally thematic in works of those genres. Knowledge claims in fiction assume that language represents those claims, and fictional worlds must be coherent enough for us to assess the intratextual truthvalue of claims made within and by the fiction. Knowledge claims are embedded in reality claims. Language is not only the medium of such claims but an object of them, and, in the best examples of the genres in question here, is finally a subject of the literary work. Estrangement is a literary illocutionary force that demonDOI 10.1515/9783110431094-011 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 329–363. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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strates how language itself becomes the subject of reading, too, and that readers as perlocutionary actors determine a great deal of the illocutionry act’s meaning and value, as measured against the narrative and linguistic context. Authors devise more than usually poetic language for fantasy or science fiction, in order to provoke estranged responses, but readers evaluate authorial claims of poeticity and adjust the estrangement accordingly. Estrangement is thus an important concept of literary pragmatics, just because it underscores author/reader cooperation in the construction of narrative speech acts. Estrangement cannot operate effectively in any fiction – including science fiction, fantasy, and other genres relevant here – without a countervailing authorial and sometimes narrative bid for affiliation with the reader (see also Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume, on the participation framework in fiction). Successful estrangement cannot be over-estrangement, let alone total estrangement, or readers lose any stake in the narrative. While estranging readers, an author can invite belief and engage sympathy. In “Darmok” (1991), an episode of the American television series Star Wars: The Next Generation, viewers may be alienated by the alien bodies of the Tamarians, but are further estranged by the strangeness of Tamarian language, which deals only in metaphor and is, at first, incomprehensible to the captain and crew of the Starship Enterprise. Nevertheless, viewers can only sympathize with the frustrated attempts of both humans and Tamarians to communicate in good faith across an apparently impassable linguistic boundary. Each work of fiction finds its balance of estrangement that challenges and affiliation that reassures those participating in the fiction that the challenge is worth bearing. In this chapter, in Section 2, I examine the theoretical bases of estrangement and its status as a literary illocutionary act essential to the pragmatic foundation of genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction, a foundation distinct from those of other genres precisely on pragmatic grounds (for a discussion of genre, see Giltrow, Ch. 3, this volume). In Section 3, I demonstrate how surplus poeticity at various linguistic levels – onomastic, lexical, and stylistic – contributes to estranging illocutionary force. The role of invented languages in estrangement is explored in Section 4, while Section 5 suggests how metapragmatic discourse within a fiction and metapragmatic awareness it stimulates in readers amplifies estrangement in an exemplary text, China Miéville’s novel Embassytown (2011), after which, in Section 6, I briefly conclude. 2.

Estrangement in science fiction and fantasy

Science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and related genres like utopian and dystopian fiction estrange readers on terms different from those of other fiction genres. The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky invented the idea of literary estrangement at the outset of the First World War, which one scholar argues was foundational to

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the concept (Tihanov 2005). According to Shklovsky ([1925] 1990: 9), estrangement’s original formulation, all literature involves estrangement to the extent that it is art. Art by its nature is “de-automizing”. Mostly, our responses to what we read are unconscious, but an author can intervene with something “strange” and our automatic response converts to a perceptually heightened response (Shklovsky 1990: 5). As Holquist and Kliger (2005: 616) observe, “language was not always conceived as basic to perception”, but, they argue that after Kant it was, and thus estrangement, which depends on reader perception and cognitive grasp of estranging signs, is a fundamentally linguistic experience. There is a lot at stake in the concept for Shklovsky (1990: 5), for “[i]f the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s as if life had never been”, a position Jakobson (1987) echoed much later: The reason this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatized. Activity comes to a halt, and the awareness of reality dies out. (Jakobson 1987: 378)

In their unreality, by means of estrangement on terms particular to the genres, science fiction and fantasy paradoxically attempt to save reality. Darko Suvin (1979: 6) derives his version of estrangement from Shklovsky’s ostranenie and Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (from which their authors expected quite different effects; see Tihanov 2005: 686–691), which leads to his definition of the genre: “S[cience] F[iction] is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin 1979: 7–8). The interaction is true of all estrangement, but the formal device is specific to science fiction – and fantasy, as well, I argue, though Suvin (1979: 8–9) denies it because he sees it as “a genre committed to the interposition of anti-cognitive laws into the empirical environment”. Suvin’s description of fantasy would exclude many works we take as exemplary of the genre, and we can put his objection aside for this reason. Within Suvin’s alternate “imaginative framework”, many linguistic features – from invented names to extensively invented languages – contribute to the estranging effect and mark its poeticity, as Jakobson (1987: 378) defines it: “Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named […] when words […] acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality”. Shklovsky (1990: 2) argued much the same: “the artistic quality of something, its relationship to poetry, is a result of our mode of perception”, and a work is artistic “if it has been created by special devices whose purpose is to see to it that these artifacts are interpreted artistically as much as possible”. Poeticity need not rely on an “imaginative framework alternative […] to the author’s” – and one might add, the reader’s – “empirical reality”

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(Shklovsky 1990: 2). As language is not merely inventive but invented, stylistic elements of science fiction and fantasy bear a surplus of poeticity. This is a principle of the genres, such that they are self-consciously hyper-estranging, which leads us beyond Suvin to something both more complex and more significant. In The Fantastic in Literature (1976), Eric S. Rabkin argues for an epistemologically focused theory of fantasy. He begins by distinguishing the genre fantasy from episodes of the fantastic. “The fantastic”, he writes, is a direct reversal of ground rules and is therefore determined by those ground rules. The truly irrelevant has nothing to do with ground rules and therefore can be no more fantastic than it is realistic. One may define the fantastic in part as ‘conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination’ only so long as we remember all imaginations are restrained at least by the perspectives necessary to create a work of narrative art. (Rabkin 1976: 14–15)

By contrast, Rabkin (1976: 37) proposes, “a true fantasy […] continues to reverse its ground rules time and time again. […] [F]antasies may be generically distinguished from other narratives by this: the very nature of ground rules, how we know things, on what bases we make assumptions, in short, the problem of human knowing infects Fantasies at all levels, in their settings, in their methods, in their characters, in their plots”, and, one adds, in their language. Unlike Suvin, Rabkin (1976: 133) argues that science fiction and fantasy often share this thematic and structural preoccupation with coming to know in spite of changing ground rules. Though superficially similar to Suvin’s, Rabkin’s definition of science fiction emphasizes the epistemological problem: “a work belongs in the genre of science fiction if its narrative world is at least somewhat different from our own, and if that difference is apparent against the background of an organized body of knowledge” (Rabkin 1976: 119). All epistemologists know that an organized body of knowledge includes ground rules that do the organizing and constitute the knowledge. When we read science fiction or fantasy, we become epistemologists, whether we like it or not. The speech of characters – indeed, on occasion the very languages they speak – the objects and forms of life described, these can all stimulate wonder as well as frustration, and sometimes frustrating wonder or wondrous frustration. This is crucial if readers are to invest in the fiction: wonder and frustration constitute belief. As Berlina (2016a: 14/a) quips, “[b]eing estranged from, say, one’s wife is the emotional opposite of the reconnection through wonder that is ostranenie”. Such estranging features imply challenges to readers, challenges about epistemological awareness and agility, about open-mindedness and commonsense and imagination, about the capacity for wonder and the morality that accompanies contact with estranging world structures and world views. These challenges have illocutionary force and drive a generalized perlocutionary response to the whole fiction, which can be understood as an authorial speech act. As Miller (2005:

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152) puts it, “[a] novel is like a statement, legal deposition, or diegesis”, in this regard. Thus, I propose estrangement as a literary illocutionary act that invites epistemological doubt or wonder or both, or more, any of which demands a corresponding readerly perlocutionary act. Estrangement is a complex act comprising a bundle of illocutionary forces, from which different readers will select different meanings, according to what they perceive in the act (cf. Adams 2009), but the act will likely include some sort of refamiliarization, as readers struggle emotionally with what estranges them and seek to regain an epistemological footing (Gavins 2014: 198). As Shklovsky insists, estrangement is a cognitive engagement and varies from person to person as each person’s cognitive make-up differs. Some will dismiss this proposition because, following Austin (1975: 22), they exclude literary utterance – because it is “parasitic” on ordinary language use – from speech act explanations, but since the 1970s, many have disagreed with Austin and other speech act theorists on this point (for a summary of such dissent, see Miller 2001: 219–220). Indeed, as some illocutionary forces are in a narrative but not of it, it is possible that an illocutionary act of narrative – one central to literary experience – need not apply to or even be available in ordinary speech. 3.

Mechanisms of estrangement: Names, words, style

Science fiction, fantasy, and related genres achieve a surplus of poeticity by deploying various mechanisms; these introduce estranging material into the literary utterance, such that a narrative or section of a narrative can convey estrangement as an illocutionary meaning and thus constitute an estranging act. The mechanisms discussed here are frequent in science fiction and fantasy, or historical fiction, and variously effective, but they may not exhaust the repertoire of such mechanisms. 3.1. Names Names are a potent site of pragmatic meaning in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. Their value is not obvious, however. Kripke (1972: 270, 289) insists that names are “rigid designators” that identify a referent in all possible worlds. When we call people by one or another name, we reiterate an established convention (Kripke 1972: 302 and passim), and we do not worry about whether the name fits into our epistemological schemata. As such, they seem beyond estrangement. Many linguists take Saeed’s (2003: 27) view: “Names after all are labels for people, places, etc., and often seem to have little other meaning” – it is a textbook maxim. Yet it reduces meaning to processes of reference or to relational schemes of lexical semantics, whereas beyond designation names are most meaningful pragmatically.

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Fictional names, such as Squire Allworthy from Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, can carry lexical meaning, and such names can be mildly estranging, because names in real life are not usually similarly meaningful, though if your real-life lawyer’s surname is Costley, you have felt an estranging shiver – suddenly, the real world is stranger than fiction. In science fiction and fantasy, however, names comment indirectly on the unstable epistemological ground. A world populated by beings with unusual names makes a reader wary of the unfamiliar world and its rules. And so, as Richard Mathews (2002: 14) says, “[a] deep concern for language and for the act of naming is nearly universal in fantasy”. Names in fantasy and science fiction are often invented and thus possess a heightened poeticity. Estrangement “is astonishment at the world, its acute experience”, wrote Shklovsky (Berlina 2016a: 14/b), and names both create and mark that acuteness. Pragmatically, readers have something like a limbic response: names that cannot be decoded easily in natural languages induce doubt or wonder, and which of them depends in part on an author’s illocutionary strategies, in part on a reader’s perlocutionary disposition and, of course, both can be sufficiently complex to accommodate doubt and wonder, perhaps even other affective responses, such as fear. For instance, in H. P. Lovecraft’s work (see, for example, Lovecraft 2001), which one might classify as “horror fantasy”, the names of the Old Ones – Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, Nog, Yeb, Shub-Niggurath, and, of course, Cthulu – are especially strange to English-speakers. In English, Cthulu is phonotactically impossible – the sounds cannot occur in the given sequence – but appropriately names a god that fuses human, octopus, and dragon parts. Those who behold Cthulu go insane, and Cthulu indirectly represents that ultimate estrangement without having quite the same effect on readers. Names of rabbits in Lapine, the vocabulary Richard Adams invented for his beast epic, Watership Down (1972) – El-ahrairah, Hyzenthlay, and Hlao-roo – are estranging, too, but not horribly. Still, the rabbit name Hlaoroo is more similar to Cthulu than one expects, because it also reflects an un-English phonotaxis. Of course, names that violate English phonotactic rules may be acceptable in other languages, but those languages provide parallel opportunities to authors of science fiction and fantasy. In any event, the phonetic structure of the names triggers the limbic response. Lovecraft and Adams employ phonetics for pragmatic effects – they invoke the principle of surplus poeticity identified above. Names need not be exotic to be poetic and estranging, however. Familiar names in the right contexts can be just as estranging and perhaps more so, because readers or viewers start with false familiarity only to have their assumptions overturned. The spaceship in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) operates on a HAL 9000 computer. HAL is an anagram of sorts for ‘Heuristically programmed Algorithmic computer’, and the HAL is familiarly known as Hal, itself a familiar nickname, which humanizes the machine. The extent to which the HAL can be

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humanized is a central theme of the novel and the Stanley Kubrick film (also 1968) based on it. Hal is a familiar name, but HAL is an opaque abbreviation that clips worrying things away from our awareness, and it is doubly estranging – estranging in itself and estranging when we realize that Hal is HAL, but HAL is not necessarily Hal. In fictions like Lovecraft’s and Clarke’s, names are at least partly designed to provide “flavor” of the sort James Portnow (2011: 140) argues invented language, including names, provides in video games – massive multiplayer online role-playing games or those in more traditional formats – another science fiction/ fantasy medium. In the games Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011), GLaDOS is the treacherous artificial intelligence. The name GLaDOS ‘Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System’ is pragmatically close to HAL, as Gladys is to Hal. GLaDOS is similarly significant thematically; it adds a scientific impersonality to the story. Like Hal, GLaDOS seems friendly, but everything about GLaDOS – especially her written name – is estranging. Not only names themselves but naming rituals can estrange readers. The naming system of Suzette Haden Elgin’s Ozark Trilogy (1981) – a sort of hybrid science fiction/fantasy that takes place on the planet Ozark – is numerological and magical; bad naming has consequences and a character like Responsible has to live up to her name (Lillian and Logsdon 2014). In Morgoth’s Ring (1993), Tolkien describes “the elvish ceremony of Esselccimë or ‘Name choosing’ … which would only take place when a child has developed ‘lámatyávë … individual pleasure in the sounds and forms of words’ – a propensity which the Elves considered more important as a mark of individuality even than facial features” (Gilliver, Marshall and Weiner 2006: 55). We expect adults to name children, and, in the Kripkean account, any pragmatic meaning attached to “the initial baptism” is quickly bleached from the name. In Esselccimë, self-naming is – in illocutionary terms – declarative, but it is also verdictive: all within the diegesis who hear a personal name must wonder about the aesthetics that led to it. Readers must wonder, too, once they know about the naming ritual, and the estrangement becomes metapragmatic. The forms of Elvish names are strange to Tolkien’s readers because they are more beautiful – proposed by Tolkien as more beautiful (see Weiner and Marshall 2011: 106–107) – than our workaday names: Galadriel, Lothlórien, Elbereth Gilthoniel. In an account of the history of Númenor (Tolkien [1955] 1965b: 315), the ancient kingdom of Men in Middle Earth, Tolkien declares, “[t]hese are the names of the Kings and Queens of Númenor: Elros Tar-Minyatur, Vardamir, Tar-Amandil, Tar-Elendil, Tar-Meneldur, Tar-Aldarion, Tar-Ancalimë (the first Ruling Queen)”, and the list goes on. The hobbits, once confined to the Shire, encounter wonderful and disorienting things throughout their quest. The pragmatics that applies within the diegesis extends outside of it to define readers’ estrangement. Watching the hobbits, we observe our own perlocutionary responses to language facts of Middle-Earth from an ironic distance.

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In the interests of estrangement, or art as device, Shklovsky wanted “‘new, live words’ and ‘the restitution of the former glitter to the olden diamonds of the words’” (Tihanov 2005: 673). The Elvish and Númenorean names are new and live to readers, and the new narrative englitters old names in new poeticity. Insofar as Tolkien expected his works to invite wonder and promote estrangement of the kind particular to fantasy, names were essential to his project: “The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse”, he wrote in a letter to his publishers dated 30 June 1955. “To me a name comes first and the story follows” (Tolkien 1981: 219) which, given the sort of name he means, proves that names can be the seeds of narrative estrangement. Tolkien treated names philologically: he developed rules by which they could be explained or derived, rules that imitate the processes of natural languages. Historically, philology was a necessary antecedent to estrangement (Holquist and Kliger 2005: 615). Tolkien treated his fictional languages as though they were real, as though he were discovering rather than inventing them. In his scholarship, reconstruction of the sound system or grammar of languages like Old English and Old Norse was routine. His “Appendix I: The Name ‘Nodens’”, however, in the Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Sites in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, published by the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London (Tolkien [1932] 2007: 178), reads very much like a passage from one or another appendix to The Lord of the Rings, and if you read it without knowing that it deals with a matter of linguistic and historical fact, you might well think it was fiction. The fiction reads like fact; the fact reads like fiction. How can that be? And where is the epistemological ground on which one can accommodate such shifts in value? The estrangement is metalinguistic and something like Philip Pullman’s conceit in the His Dark Materials trilogy (1995, 1997, 2000). One inserts the subtle knife into the membrane separating two worlds and opens a way between them. The world on either side is “authentic” – both characters and readers feel this. In fact, though the worlds strongly resemble each other, they are also unnervingly distinct, and what one assumes to be true on one side of the membrane may not be true on the other. Pullman’s trilogy is Rabkin’s ideal epistemological ground-shifting work of fantasy. Lyra Belacqua, Pullman’s hero, discovers that her world is the alternative one, but, really, how does one know? Tolkien’s and Pullman’s worlds are like our own, surprisingly close in character but also distant in time or dimension. Paradoxically, it is the very closeness that is estranging. In Tolkien’s fantasy and in other works of fantasy and science fiction, names that amaze us or tease us with their not-quite-familiarity are points of estrangement at which we must engage, because of their surplus poeticity. The power of names to sustain estrangement is limited, however. Names provoke estrangement – in the most fully imagined alternative worlds, repeatedly – but still other linguistic mechanisms are required to further intensify it.

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3.2. Words When we read, we receive words automatically, and this is intellectually and aesthetically deadening unless new language or language used newly estranges us. Invented names are useful mechanisms of estrangement. Reorientation of words in general use to fictional purposes can also be estranging, but between names and words there may be differences of degree and kind of estrangement. Different genres and media bear different weights of estrangement. Popular culture science fiction on television and film, such as Star Trek and Star Wars, must appeal to a mass market and, as a result, must minimize language-based estrangement. Works like George Orwell’s 1984 – which represent the real-world at a future time, rather than an alternative world imagined as having antecedents different from our own – must estrange within a narrative frame of historical and cultural plausibility. In most science fictions and fantasies, names and lexical items cooperate within a text; it is best not to see them as self-sufficiently estranging. In Star Trek, personal names are not overly challenging and are even confusingly familiar. For those alive in the 1960s, when the original series aired, viewers were surprised to discover that there was a Vulcan Spock as well as a best-selling American pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock. The poeticity of such a name is relatively low. Viewers were introduced to new types of non-human being with new names: Klingon, Vulcan, and Romulan. Later, Star Wars introduced Jedi and Sith and Obi-Wan Kenobi, planet names that sounded like they belonged to a galaxy far, far away, such as Alderaan, Naboo, Tatooine. Descriptive names that lead us back into our own lexis, like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, de-estrange, or are at best ham-handedly poetic. Oddities like Jar Jar Binks aside, names are less important mechanisms of estrangement in these iconic television series and films than in print fiction. Lexical items more or less unique to Star Trek and Star Wars are similarly few and only lightly estranging. Origins of both concept and word-form dilute the potential estrangement. The words in question may be newish but some were in restricted use before they appeared in television series or film, and their forms are largely derivative, a far cry from Tolkien’s Númenorean names. Star Trek introduces items such as stardate, warp speed, holodeck, transformer, tricorder, mindmeld, and tribble to viewers, of which only the last is truly invented. The rest are compounds (stardate, warp speed, mind-meld), blends, (holodeck ‘hologram deck’, tricorder ‘tri-recorder’), and semantic shifts (transformer). From Star Wars we get the similarly minimally estranging lightsaber and womp rats, the latter a sort of rat that womps or lives in womps or something else undesignated. What attracts viewers to science fictions of this kind is the constant visual spectacle of difference from their own experience. It is the idea of transforming – breaking down to a molecular level and then sent as something like digital data across space only to be reconstituted as oneself – that challenges automized perception. It is the idea of walking around with a handheld computer that can

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solve all sorts of problems that matters, not that it is called a tricorder. Tribbles are endearing furry alien animals that multiply exponentially and consume all available resources, eventually killing the humans and humanoids that cannot resist their charms. Tribble is a fairly trivial coinage, demeaned by the title of the episode in which tribbles first appear, “The Trouble with Tribbles”. Tribbles look like chinchilla or cuddly toys. They aren’t any more estranging than the word used to designate the species. The lexicons of Star Trek and Star Wars are not fully poetic. We are amazed and troubled epistemologically not primarily by the words but by the things to which they refer. Their meaning is thus lexical semantic rather than pragmatic, both within the diegesis and without it. This is not quite anti-Shklovskian, for the estrangement occurs, but it is less the product of verbal than visual signs. Our cognitive faculties are awakened from the atrophy of automization by the ships, the laser weapons, and amazing alien life forms, the iconic instance of which is surely and most memorably the tavern scene at Mos Eisely in the film formerly known as Star Wars (1977) and now known as Episode IV: A New Hope. Of course, fantasy and science fiction prose writing has its Klingons and tribbles and such – Ents, hobbits, the Old Ones, talking rabbits – but they are depicted exclusively in language. In mass media, principles of poeticity and estrangement test each other and diverge. Shklovsky saw poeticity as literary but estrangement as a more general aesthetic characteristic of all art constructed of signs. Thus, the role of language in estrangement becomes a metapragmatic problem, a matter of illocutionary force in the authorial construction of narrative and perlocutionary interpretation of authorial or narrative meaning, a matter of science fiction or fantasy’s commitment to estranging and its readers or viewers’ commitment to being estranged. People who think that science fiction is about futuristic advances in science and technology are likely to approve high rates of visual significance; those who think that science fiction is about estrangement revealing fundamental problems of the human condition – like knowing and identity – prefer verbal signifcance. The tendencies, again, tend to align with media and their audiences, as much as with any literary theory or ideological commitment. George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, by contrast, shows how estranging vocabulary alone can be. Newspeak is the limiting, planned, and controlled language of the fictional totalitarian state Oceania. Items of Newspeak – including Newspeak – are more interesting as words than those of Star Trek or Star Wars. Their estranging power is quite different, too, partly because they are words for things that cannot be pictured, and we rely wholly on language for our sense of what they are. In order to survive in Oceania, one must be adept at doublethink, the sort of concept a word cannot easily capture:

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[Winston’s] mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink. (Orwell [1949] 1977: 120)

As far as Orwell and many of his readers were concerned, we do not naturally think in doublethink. It is an imposition. The concept is estranging, and coming to understand the word is thus estranging, both because the possibility of such thorough paradox is amazing or wonderful and because we are not prepared to know on those terms. Comprehending doublethink, doublethink, Newspeak, and Oceania requires that the epistemological ground to which we are accustomed must shift beneath our cognitive feet. If one is good enough at doublethink, one won’t commit – or at least won’t be caught out in – what is called crimethink ‘thoughts contrary to Party orthodoxy’, but will cleave instead to goodthink ‘opposite of crimethink’, and never commit a facecrime ‘expression that reveals crimethink’. Proficiency in doublethink leads to what is called duckspeak ‘speaking without thinking’, characterized by abbreviation and euphony (Jackson 2011: 53–54), the very best at which are called doubleplusgood duckspeakers. Not only are the concepts estranging – especially in their interrelations – but the words are formed to ensure a higher rate of poeticity than counterparts in the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises. English – no language I know, in fact – indicates emphasis in a compound adverb like doubleplus and the compounds are unusually ADJ + V and N + V constructions. Almost all Newspeak words are crammed with more meaning than we usually give to single words in natural language. It is one of the ways in which Newspeak transforms the thought and behavior of its speakers, but it also prompts a higher degree of reader engagement than automized language, and it is worth noting that it would do so even in television or film, because the estranging quality resides in language that cannot be translated into another medium. The purest words for purposes of estrangement are the ones one can learn exclusively from the narrative contexts in which they appear, such as the words Tolkien invented for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Words like mithril – for the impenetrable material from which Bilbo’s and ultimately Frodo’s mail shirt is made – lembas for the hyper-nutritious and durable foodstuff which sustains the Fellowship of the Ring after they leave Lothlórien, where they received it as a gift from Galadriel, the elvish queen – and palantíri – for the crystal balls through

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which fortified cities in the ancient kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor were able to communicate – are verbal objects whose printed forms and spoken sounds enchant readers, who in wonder give themselves over to Tolkien’s imagined world. But there is a middle ground between Orwell’s fairly transparent invented words and Tolkien’s pure inventions, represented by David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004). In this complex novel, a section titled “Sloosha’s crossin’ an’ ev’rythin’ after” is nested between two parts of one titled “An orison of Sonmi-451”, which are nested between two parts of “The ghastly ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”, which are nested between two parts of “Half-lives: The first Luisa Rey mystery”, which are nested between two parts of “Letters from Zedelghem”, with all parts thus surrounded by the outer narrative, “The Pacific journal of Adam Ewing”. The whole work is like a matryoshka doll, a figure mentioned several times across the novel’s several sections. Robert Frobisher, the unpleasant hero of the Zedelghem passages, composes the Cloud Atlas Sextet from which the novel takes its name: Spent fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? (Mitchell 2004: 445)

The sextet sets the pattern for the novel – or perhaps it’s the other way around. But the various narratives intersect unexpectedly at points like this one, which only complicates the interruptions. As with the sextet, they are distinct but ultimately all of a piece. Each narrative has its own language, and the key, scale, and color of that language are more or less estranging, running the gamut of possible effects over the course of the whole work, just as the narratives operate across global distances and through time, from the era of the California Gold Rush to a time many centuries into the future. In Frobisher’s letters, from the early twentieth century, the only linguistically estranging elements are abbreviations – v. ‘very’ and b. ‘expletive bloody’ – with which readers quickly become familiar. Adam Ewing’s tale of the Pacific islands in the time of the Gold Rush, includes mildly archaic words, like ere ‘before’ and words reflecting contact with the Maori and others. Though filtered through Ewing’s perspective, these items only temporarily challenge readers. The late twentieth-century story of Luisa Rey, though it offers suspense, is no more estranging than the average work of fiction. While taken altogether, Cloud Atlas is science fiction, but some of its components taken on their own are not. The futuristic sections are most closely aligned with science fiction and are also the most estranging on linguistic terms. Lexis plays a central role in the estrangement of “An orison of Sonmi-451”. Most superficially, words that begin with the Latin prefix ex- in our time have presumably undergone spelling reform in the future, yielding xamine, xquisite, xtracted, xiter ‘clone who is allowed to leave

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servitude’, for instance. The respellings are all the more strange when one realizes that terminal unvoiced e is retained or encounters xhorted with its vestigial h. The future world in question in Sonmi’s story is a version of Korea after the world has become dominated by a totalitarian form of government called a corpocracy, run by people called corporocrats, maintained by compulsory consumerism on the part of people whose value is exactly what they buy. What is called their soul is actually their capacity to spend, which is stored in soulrings, which they are required to wear. The government bombards them with AdV ‘advertising’ so that they can fulfill their citizen responsibilities. The economy is supported by people who aren’t recognized as people – people without souls or soulrings – called fabricants ‘clones’, who are born in wombtanks. Observed through this section of Cloud Atlas, the future looks very bleak. In this corporocratic future, brand names have become generic terms, thus rolex ‘watch’, nikes ‘sneakers’, ford ‘car’, sony ‘computer, smart phone’, nikon ‘camera’, and even disney ‘film’ – this future doesn’t distinguish things from brands. Such terms are productive, in the lexicological sense, which hints at the history of English from now until then: ford yields fordjams ‘traffic jams’, both a morphological and semantic development; nikon can mean the verb ‘photograph’ as well as refer to the camera taking it, and sony can mean the verb ‘call’ as well as refer to the phone on which the calling is done. Alternatively, the most generic words have been raised to the status of names: media is now the all-encompassing organization Media, and Unanimity doesn’t depend on unanimity for its legitimacy. Supposedly, when fabricants have served long enough, they are freed and sent to a place called Xultation. These forms are reminiscent of some of Orwell’s in 1984. Miscellaneous items such as judas ‘betray’, upstrata ‘classes above yours’, yellow-up ‘sunrise’, and clippings like approx ‘approximately’ resemble the slangy inventions that characterize Nadsat (see Jackson 2011: 67–70), the language introduced in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange ([1962] 2011), or even more closely those of Belinda Webb’s feminist alternative to Burgess’ work, A Clockwork Apple (2008), which lacks the Russian substratum of Nadsat. Like names, words can only go so far in establishing and maintaining estrangement. Since roughly the beginning of the Star Wars franchise and the rise of Trekkie fandom, elements of the fictions have been appropriated by fans and consumer culture generally, as a result of aggressive merchandising. Nowadays, we all know the word lightsaber, even if we cannot recognize a womp rat to save our lives. 1984 gave English and other lexicons Big Brother and Thought Police. Catch phrases are even more commonly appropriated than words per se: Beam me up, Scotty and Live long and prosper, from Star Trek; May the force be with you and These aren’t the droids you’re looking for, from Star Wars. As language invented for fictional purposes leaves fiction for the innumerable contexts of lived experience, words and phrases become automatic and de-defamiliarized, after which de-estrangement affects our experience of the fiction. What happens outside the

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fiction affects the pragmatic resilience of the supposedly estranging narrative. This process even afflicts some of the language of The Lord of the Rings: Frodo lives! No one, however, has put Tar-Ancalimë lives! on a t-shirt yet, and it seems unlikely that anyone ever will. Some estrangements are more resilient than others. 3.3. Style Strange names and words contribute to estrangement, but their effect is tentative and inefficient – there have to be a lot of them, and they have to be used frequently, and they have to be sufficiently strange to foster wonder and epistemological doubts, at least in the aggregate, if not individually. It is not easy to see, though, how one exceeds their effects without moving from invented onomasticons and lexicons to invented languages, because inventing syntax, for instance, without it rising to the level of a language, is difficult to conceive. After all, space aliens and the inhabitants of fantasy lands probably do not speak languages any earthbound human speaks, so unknown and estranging languages are implied if not always realized in science fiction and fantasy. Before considering the estranging power of invented languages, however, we might entertain the possibility that style – what one might call an invented narrative voice – can be estranging. Of course, all narrative voices are invented, but here we have in mind one that calls attention to its inventedness, a voice of surplus poeticity, at least as perceived by some set of readers.1 We can find an example of such a voice in historical fiction, a genre closely aligned with fantasy, which is often cast as history, though of an unfamiliar place. Linguistically and thematically, much historical fiction suffers from the Uniformitarian Principle, recently re-articulated by Nevalainen (1999: 499): “human languages in the past were not in any principled way different from those spoken today”. Fantasy can avoid some of the principle’s effects. Tolkien (1996: 20) explained to his literary friends, the Inklings, “[i]t is said that Hobbits spoke a language, or languages, very similar to ours. But that must not be misunderstood. Their language was like ours in manner and spirit; but if the face of the world has changed greatly since those days, so also has every detail of speech”, and the devil is in the details. But within English, for instance, the difference between Tudor English and Present-Day English is historically minimal; thus it is hard to depend on names, words, or syntax per se to estrange readers, unless they introduce an unusual level of poeticity into the historical narrative. For instance, in the television historical drama, The Tudors (2007–2010), characters sometimes use modern auxiliaries to express negation but sometimes construct negation without

1



For the concept of voice, see Hoffmann (Ch. 6, this volume). For style, see Busse (Ch. 7, this volume).

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do – “I like her not”, says Henry VIII, upon meeting Anne of Cleves (The Tudors 2009: S3E7). Given the variability of this feature, the estranging effect is mild and intermittent. Many a reader has cringed at methinks or Zounds! ‘God’s wounds!’ sprinkled among otherwise ordinary twenty-first-century English. This use of obsolete forms is like verbal linguascaping – for instance, the occasional billboard in an as-yet-unmade film of 1984 that reads “Big Brother is watching you. Remember, only goodthink, no facecrime” – and it provides the mild flavor of difference, rather than strong, let alone overwhelming estrangement. In fact, it is not a very effective technique and many writers of historical fiction, notably the best-selling and critically acclaimed Hilary Mantel – for instance, in Wolf Hall (2009) – avoid archaism altogether, perhaps in order to project the similarity between Tudors and all of us reading about them now, rather than to estrange beyond the degree to which all fiction must estrange. This lack of commitment to poeticity is a signal difference between much historical fiction, on the one hand, and science fiction and fantasy, on the other. Yet our experience of literature can be “acute” above the level of “live, new words”, even in historical fiction. In his novel, The Men of Ness (1933), Eric Linklater attempted to capture the style of the Icelandic sagas, especially Orkneyinga Saga, in the novel’s style, which is plausibly laconic, deadpan truthful but also wry at times, and proverbially wise. Prose that contains all of these elements is distinct from all others and very distinct from modern writing, so it is inevitably estranging, except for those descendants of Vikings – in Orkney and Shetland, the Faroes, and Iceland – for whom they are essentially epic rather than mere story. But this is just to reinforce the point, for as Erich Auerbach (1953) argued in his famous essay, “Odysseus’ Scar”, epics of different peoples reflect their ways of knowing – while the Ancient Greeks would have found the Old Testament deeply estranging, the Ancient Hebrews would have had the same response to The Odyssey. Needless to say, if you are not a Viking, Viking style will force you, while reading, to think like a Viking, which is both a wonderful and troubling experience. The patterns of thought are objectified in the language of the narrative, which in turn constitutes the style. It will help to consider a fairly extensive passage from Linklater’s The Men of Ness: Signy asked what had been happening.   “It comes to this,” said Gauk, “and there is no need to make a long tale about it, for all can be explained in few words as well as in many, that Geira has been walking.”   “That was to be looked for,” said Kol.   “May be it was,” said Gauk. “Yet I am he whom it most concerns, and I did not look for it. Nor do I like it now that it has happened. It is easy to be wise about another man’s troubles, but if you were in my place I do not think you would take things so calmly. Geira was a good wife as such women go, but she was often ill to argue with, and now

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that she is dead her ghost seems worse in temper than ever. She rode the roof last night and the night before, cracking rafters with her heels, and came down to thunder on the door. I was in dread lest I see her, for she was never fair to look at, and for my wife’s sake as for my cow’s I judged it best to leave Calfskin for a while till she grows quieter or till a champion can be found to deal with her. It would be a matter of some fame to overcome such a woman.”   “You have found the right house if you want champions,” said Signy. But Kol was silent. (Linklater 1933: 101)

Gauk packs a lot into his short tale, and Linklater even more, as well as into its brief context. Linklater thought such passages showed how Vikings were unabashed by social obligation, undeterred by moral prohibition, and they could be quite contemptuous of economic advantage and the safety of their skins. But they saw clearly a difference between right and wrong, and the difference was aesthetic. If what they did became a story that would please the ear, then it was right and beautiful. (Linklater 1955: 8)

They were, Linklater (1955: 11) decided, “artists in conduct”. Their speech was part of their conduct – there is no relevant distinction between speech and other acts – and it is easy to identify illocutionary acts in the passage, because Linklater’s Vikings, like those of the sagas generally, speak as though they had a chart of illocutionary acts at hand: assertives like “That was to be looked for”; verdictives like “I am he whom it most concerns, and I did not look for it”; and comissives like “You have found the right house if you want champions”. All speech may be act, but the act-ness of Viking speech in Linklater’s narrative is exposed because it is especially salient in the speech act of the narrative. Acts within the diegesis are understood as such by the interlocutors, but they are always also speaking to an audience outside it – performing their aesthetic is part of their conduct. They trade in wise sayings: “It is easy to be wise about another man’s troubles”. They propose narrative theory within the course of the narrative: “It comes to this … and there is no need to make a long tale about it, for all can be explained in few words as well as in many” – we only say what we need to say, and shorter is better. They are direct in their ethical and aesthetic evaluations: “It would be a matter of some fame to overcome such a woman”, especially once she’s dead. They joke wryly about the two great priorities in a man’s life: “for my wife’s sake as for my cow’s I judged it best to leave Calfskin for a while till she grows quieter or till a champion can be found to deal with her” – the wife comes first in the sentence, but she’s actually considered second, as in “for my wife’s sake [as much] as for my cow’s”. Words are mostly short and basic; the structure is essentially paratactic. Every utterance is efficient and laconic, until the limit is reached in “But Kol was silent”. Since Pratt’s (1977) foundational text, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, we have understood that literary speech acts adhere to Grice’s Co-oper-

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ative Principle and associated maxims, both narrative acts and the acts of fictional speakers: While only the latter are required to decode what the fictional speaker is saying and implicating as well as what the author is saying, both sets of appropriateness conditions [those for speakers and narrative] are required to decode what the author is implicating. Readers of fictional literary works, of course, automatically distribute their expectations in this way. (Pratt 1977: 203)

And it is perfectly reasonable that readers would in cases of mainstream fiction, but the case may be different with texts like The Men of Ness, in which narrative style and character style align in their kind and degree of poeticity – “Signy asked what had been happening” and “But Kol was silent” (Linklater 1933: 101) – and together satisfy Gricean maxims in a surprisingly self-conscious way – just the right quantity – no less, but certainly no more. The narrative voice of The Men of Ness was undoubtedly difficult to maintain and certainly challenges readers – the novel was less well received than most of Linklater’s others, and he was disappointed: “The Men of Ness was a good story”, he wrote, but so far as I am aware only five people in the Old World really liked it: Edward Garnett, a professor of English literature, a mountainous warrant officer in the Royal Navy, an Icelandic reviewer, and a schoolboy who for a whole week-end divided his attention between it and stump-cricket. (Linklater 1941: 228)

Later, translated, it sold well in Scandinavia (Parnell 1984: 130) where perhaps readers found it cognitively less stressful. To the rest of us, the novel was one big estranging speech act – perhaps too estranging, though it involved not even language invention on an Orwellian scale. 4.

Invented languages and estrangement

The most estranging linguistic effects in science fiction and fantasy depend on invented languages. There is, of course, a scale of relative estrangement, and, again, estrangement is not quite a textual property, but a cognitive response to textual experience, so it varies from text to text for reader to reader. Invented languages in fiction are beyond experience prior to reading the text and will naturally induce wonder but also discomfort – the text calls the usual ground-rules of world-knowing into question. Even in the real world, when among obviously real people speaking an unfamiliar language, we react cautiously, not just to what we hear but to our surroundings – we generalize the unfamiliarity and assume less about our grasp of social phenomena. In science fiction and fantasy, even rules about the natural order seem less dependable. It may not be rational for us to doubt

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everything because we doubt some things, but science fiction and fantasy set out to disrupt rationality, at least temporarily. So, David J. Peterson, inventor of Dothraki, a language in the television adaptation of Game of Thrones (Peterson 2015:1–2), among other languages, observes: “Probably 0.001 percent of films and television shows would benefit from including one or more created languages”, perhaps for the reason mentioned above, that in visually-oriented mass media, estrangement is provoked by non-verbal signs. “Almost 100 percent of fantasy works, and maybe a healthy 45 percent of science fiction works, would benefit from including one or more created languages” (Peterson 2015: 262), and perhaps yet more science fiction would benefit from the flavor that invented names and vocabulary provide to texts in which surplus poeticity is not an authorial priority. Intuitively, invented languages belong in science fiction and fantasy, which is just to say that a certain intensity of estrangement is expected and desired of those genres. Inventing a language requires linguistic skill and philological insight, as well as incredible stamina. Few authors have attempted it. Science fiction as early as Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone ([1638] 2009) included samples of one or another supposed language, but never bothered to articulate the language extensively. Tolkien did. As Weiner and Marshall (2011) note: If there are two purposes for invented language – communicative function and art – Tolkien is (so far) the master of the art form. He […] created a self-consistent and technically convincing group of languages […] and set them within a fictional world which they suit perfectly, with names, words, snatches of discourse and pieces of verse embedded authentically in a narrative that is widely regarded as a masterpiece of fantasy. (Weiner and Marshall 2011: 107)

Tolkien understood that, however intuitively obvious the value of invented languages in fantasy, using them entails pragmatic risks. “I should have preferred to write in ‘Elvish’” (1996: 219), he wrote in a letter to his American publisher, the Houghton Mifflin Company, on June 30, 1955: But, of course, such a work as The Lord of the Rings has been edited and only as much ‘language’ has been left in as I thought would be stomached by readers. (I now find that many would have liked more). There is a great deal of linguistic matter (other than actually ‘elvish’ names and words) included or mythologically expressed in the book. It is to me, anyway, largely an essay in ‘linguistic aesthetic’. (Tolkien 1996: 219–220)

In terms of pragmatics, this is an important statement. Weiner and Marshall (2011: 96, 107) observe that Tolkien does not see language invention as enabling or improving communication. More important, however, he does not see use of his languages within the fiction principally as a simulacrum of communication – of course, it is, but that is not what interests Tolkien and most of his readers first and foremost. Tolkien’s statement in the letter and Weiner and Marshall’s verdict focus on the languages as art; Peterson (2015: 9–10) also sees Tolkien as the earliest writer

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of “artlang”. Tolkien (2016: 6) noted in his famous essay on inventing languages, “A Secret Vice”, that the essay is effectively “a plea for a New Art”. And even though Tolkien, as far as I can determine, did not study Russian or Czech Formalism, this unexpectedly brings him very close to Shklovsky and Jakobson on the question of art as device and what I have called the surplus of poeticity. He was well aware of the estranging power of his languages; he expected them to engender wonder, though his favorite term for the effect was “pleasure”. So, he wrote, “[c]ertainly it is the contemplation of the relationship between sound and notion which is a main source of pleasure” (Tolkien 2016: 16) in an invented language. Language understood this way is a fascinating object of readers’ awareness, and knowing what words mean lexically is unnecessary to finding them meaningful in pragmatic terms. Invented languages “sharpen” the pleasures of poetry “by making them more conscious”, that is, by making us conscious of them (Tolkien 2016: 105). “It is an attenuated emotion, but might be very piercing – this construction of sounds to give pleasure” (Tolkien 2016: 105). At the Council of Elrond, when the Fellowship of the Ring is formed, Frodo and Bilbo step over a threshold in Elrond’s house, and “a single clear voice rose in song” (Tolkien [1954] 1965a: 250): O Elbereth Gilthoniel, silivren penna miriel o menel aglad elenath! (Tolkien 1965a: 250)

The estranging power of Elvish on the hobbits and the reader is in close proximity to Tolkien’s attenuated emotion: Frodo halted for a moment, looking back. Elrond was in his chair and the fire was on his face like summer-light upon the trees. Near him sat Lady Arwen. To his surprise Frodo saw that Aragorn stood beside her; his dark cloak was thrown back, and he seemed to be clad in elven-mail, and a star shone upon his breast. They spoke together, and then suddenly it seemed to Frodo that Arwen turned towards him, and the light of her eyes fell on him from afar and pierced his heart. He stood still enchanted, while the sweet syllables of the Elvish song fell like clear jewels of blended word and melody. (Tolkien 1965a: 250)

Frodo has reacted to language as estranging before. When he looks at the One Ring after Gandalf flings it into the fire to expose the script and prove its provenance, he sees fine lines, finer than the finest pen-strokes, running along the ring outside and inside: lines of fire that seemed to form letters of a flowing script. They shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth [the Elvish letters are displayed on two lines] ‘I cannot read the fiery letters,’ said Frodo in a quavering voice. (Tolkien 1965a: 59)

Frodo seems to be quavering from estrangement, from feeling an attenuated emotion when pierced by the beauty of Elvish script, the language objectified. Again,

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we feel the same way. Tolkien teaches us his theory of language through alignment of readerly perlocutionary responses with those of certain characters. Tolkien was aware that some of his audience could bear more estrangement, but he wisely considered the problem of how much would be enough and how much would be too much, at least in works like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Arguably, authors are responsible for a literary version of Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle (Pratt 1977: 152–200). Tolkien, without having read a word of Grice, took him into account and thus maximized the estranging effect of the invented languages used in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings without alienating readers. Surplus poeticity should not be excess poeticity, in other words, because the latter interferes with estrangement. Tolkien’s languages are integral to his fantasy. Klingon is not similarly integral to Star Trek. It began as a flavor language in Star Trek films (see Okrand et al. 2011: 111–121) and estranges viewers about as much as you would expect – that is, not much – given the quantity of language and the medium. Klingon’s phonaesthetic characteristics arrest viewers much as those of Elvish do, but the phonetics are harsh, off-putting – reflecting characteristics of Klingon history and culture – rather than enchanting. Like Tolkienian linguists, some fans of Klingon cannot leave the language alone. Members of the Klingon Language Institute (KLI) codify and create Klingon, often in conjunction with translation projects. So far, members of KLI have translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Much Ado about Nothing, Gilgamesh, and the Tao Te Ching into Klingon (Adams 2011a: 256–260). A translation of the Bible is under way. You do not have to be a Trekkie to enjoy a bit of Klingon in a film, and you do not have to be a linguist to be a Trekkie. In this respect it is a language, not of a fiction, but of a franchise, a problem that parallels that of Tolkien’s legendarium. Where the franchise begins and ends is currently at issue in Paramount Pictures v. Axanar Productions, Inc. in the United States District Court, Central District of California. Paramount claims copyright to the language, and one argument against their claim is that Klingon, though a constructed language, or conlang, is a living language, rather than an artlang, like Elvish – people speak it to communicate (Okrand et al. 2011: 127–133; see also Okrent 2009: 264–281), and it is not possible to copyright a living language (Adams 2011b: 227–233). Of course, one can achieve poeticity within Klingon as well as in any natural language; but it may not be possible to achieve the surplus poeticity on which science fiction and fantasy so regularly depend for their specific estranging effects. It is difficult to imagine anyone first learning and then communicating in Klingon, though, admittedly, this is Shakespeare’s Klingon – the beginning of the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy – not the sort spoken on Star Trek or on streets in the real world:

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taH pagh taHbe’. DaH mu’tleghvam vIqeInIS. quv’a’, yebDaq San vaQ cha, pu’ je SIQDI’? (Shakespeare, Nicholas, and Strader 1996: 80)

Imagine the whole play – a very long play – in Klingon. The experience is overwhelming rather than estranging, or at least, it would be for most readers. Usual approaches to estrangement do not apply in a translation. Readers cannot determine whose speech act they are reading, that of the original author or the translator. Or they can assume that the translation is an act of cultural appropriation beyond the constraints of authenticity, such that the pragmatics of an original need not and probably are not preserved in translation (Kazimierczak 2010). But it is also not clear that a text in which everything is surplusly poetic can really estrange, because one cannot “contemplate”, as Tolkien (2016: 16) put it, the poeticity of language within a work of literature without some steady, less poetic ground from which to do the contemplating. So, Klingon in the translations – Klingon as the only language of the fiction in question – highlights the wisdom of Tolkien’s decision to employ invented languages in works like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings strategically. There was little point of including them within those works if they would interfere narratologically and obstruct or obscure the overarching speech act each comprises. As Hostetter (2007: 2) notes, Tolkien usually translates Elvish and other languages within the narrative, which I suggest is a narratively cooperative gesture towards readers, who are thus enchanted but need not thereby feel disconnected from the narrative, not so focused on the poeticity of names and words and dialogue – the trees – that they miss the narrative forest of which linguistic objects are signally estranging constituents. Rarely indeed has an author attempted to write an original work wholly in an invented language. “Sloosha’s crossin’ an’ ev’rythin’ after”, the central section of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, is a sustained attempt to write a sort of post-apocalyptic dialect of English containing unique items but also blending features of various dialects into something new and therefore unfamiliar to every reader, at least to some extent: The barterin’ took place in the Commons. Prescients spoke in a strange way, not ­lazy’n’spotty like the Hilo but salted’n’coldsome. By the time they’d landed, the yibber’d been busy an’ most dwellin’s was ‘ready rushin’ baskets o’ fruits’n’veggies’n’meats’n’all to the Commons. Also the Prescients filled spesh casks with fresh water from the stream. In return, Prescients bartered ironware what was better’n any made on Big I. They bartered fair an’ never spoke knuckly like savages at Honokaa, but politesome speakin’ it draws a line b’tween you what says, I respect you well ‘nuff but you an I ain’t kin, so don’t you step over this line, yay? (Mitchell 2004: 248, emphasis in original)

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Language like this certainly estranges readers, as they struggle with new items like Big I ‘Big Island = Hawaii’, new forms with new meanings like knuckly ‘agressively’, old fashioned forms like politesome, and the stylistic tendency to mash listed items together by reducing conjunctions and treating pairs or lists as words rather than phrases. The elements of this dialect are all to be found in English, however, and the dialect is more inventive with those elements than invented, like Elvish or Klingon. The most recent and very impressive example of a wholly invented language is found in Frédéric Werst’s Ward (2011). Ward is a collection of mythological, religious, and folkloric texts of the Ward, a people whose language is Wardwesân. The following opening of a liturgical hymn to the Wards’ supreme god, Parathōn, illustrates the language: parman thōn bard altōn Parathōn jar ak mazh aw waltor ar narthar aphar zhab zam ar war arpathan. (Werst 2011: 109)

Ward is not a continuous narrative but a fictional anthology of culturally significant and revealing documents discovered and presented by a fictional editor. In other words, each text is a fiction suggesting a yet larger fiction, all of it contained in the discovery and presentation fiction, a well-worn narrative mode. The last, overarching narrative stratum is in French rather than Wardwesân, so it is not quite accurate to say that all of Ward is composed in Wardwesân, for the scholarly apparatus – including a detailed grammar of Wardwesân and glossary of the texts (Werst 2011: 353–408) – which forms a necessary part of the fiction is not in that language. Nevertheless, Ward is ambitious and a remarkable achievement of language invention. Like Tolkien’s invented languages, Wardwesân implies an invented culture. Indeed, Werst’s ambition exceeds even Tolkien’s, and Ward may suffer from its extremity. Arguably, presenting a text in nothing but invented language constitutes a face-threatening act, because it can be construed as uncooperative (in a Gricean sense) and as a sort of dare (a politeness issue; see Brown and Levinson 1987: 65–66) conveyed from author to readers in the text-level speech act. Following this line of argument, the author doubts the intelligence, commitment, and resilience of readers – or at least all but a few readers – in presenting the text so that it provokes alienation rather than estrangement. This is exactly the risk Tolkien identified and the result he carefully avoided in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, though students of his posthumously published legendarium, from The Silmarillion (1977) onwards, find the challenge of grappling with the linguistics of Tolkien’s languages and filling structural and historical lacunae face-affirming. The alternative line of argument, that presenting a text completely in an invented language communicates confidence in readers, is also possible; in fact,

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the conversion to a face-affirming act is implicit in the face-threatening act – a dare always admits the possibility that the dared can succeed, even if the darer finds it unlikely. Of course, given the communicative and aesthetic risk total immersion in an invented language entails, authors avoid it as a narratological strategy. It is not a risk that presents itself often, however, because few authors are willing to undertake the project of an invented language. Ward and Werst are the exception, and the result is not unequivocally successful. Among other things, French readers will find Wardwesân estranging but the French apparatus familiar and a re-grounding of awareness, while readers who do not read French may find Ward doubly alienating. 5.

China Miéville’s Embassytown and metapragmatic estrangement

If writing a narrative wholly in an invented language goes too far, in essence alienates readers rather than estranges them, what might serve as an alternative narrative strategy, one that pushes estrangement as far as it can go without constituting a face-threatening act? China Miéville’s remarkably linguistic novel, Embassytown (2011) suggests such a strategy. The story includes an invented language called Language, spoken by an alien race called the Ariekei, but by almost no one else, neither the characters who represent the population of Embassytown diegetically, nor anyone outside of the narrative. Miéville provides snippets of Language, so that we have an idea of what it is, but it is too difficult to transcribe it into print – for reasons that will become clear momentarily – for him to do so extensively. Contemplating the nature of Language, which a reader must do on engaging Embassytown, entails contemplating the nature of estrangement, which metapragmatically contributes estranging illocutionary force to the novel as speech act. Embassytown is an imperial outpost dedicated to engaging with the Ariekei – known as the Hosts, because Embassytown is on their planet – who cultivate biomechanical apparatus that can be used for all sorts of things, from housing to machine tools. For the humans, biorigging, as it is called, comes with some difficulty and at some risk. The planet’s atmosphere is inhospitable to humans, who live in an air-bubble supported by the Hosts, out of which they can venture safely only with aeoli, personalized air-manufacturers. As an additional challenge, Hosts cannot understand the speech of other life forms, and humans cannot easily understand Language – some academic linguists within the diegesis have a less than secure grasp of it, and some people, like the novel’s protagonist, Avice Benner Cho, pick up a bit of it, but not much. This mutual unintelligibility has exactly to do with the nature of Language, for the Ariekei speak simultaneously from two mouths – something humans cannot do – and any speech spoken with one mouth sounds like background noise to them. Further, Language raises questions about the nature of language as we know it, or think we know it.

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Bremen, the empire of which Embassytown is an outpost, developed a program to breed the Ambassadors, twins who are brought up as native speakers of Language from birth and physically modified – they are connected at the neck by a cybernetic link, as it is called – so that they can, as one person in tandem, speak Language. Embassytown has a governor, but the Ambassadors are the true political and social elite, because without them there would be no relations between Bremen and the Ariekei. The nature of the Ambassadors is reflected in their names, for instance, EzRa, JoaQuin, LoGan, MagDa, and HenRy. At first, one might think the internal capitalization indicates stress – what the Ambassadors are and how they speak Language is only gradually revealed. One of the pair provides what is called the cut and the other the turn in articulation of Language, but they are not individuals – they are Ambassadors. The names look familiar, but they cover a completely estranging concept, more estranging than that covered by HAL. What do we know – or think we know – about human nature; what do we know – or think we know – about language? And how do we not pause in wonder over the names once we realize what barely imaginable things they are meant to convey? From a morphological point of view, separation of Ambassadors’ names into two continuously written but simultaneously performed parts does not depend on any natural or etymological division of the names on which they are formed. The names divide to indicate two parts the Ambassadors must speak simultaneously to identify themselves, and that Hosts would speak simultaneously to address them – cut and turn. The name-formative process is as estranging as the names; when one thinks about it, it is indirectly a metapragmatic comment on estranging illocutionary forces. Avice’s special relationship with the Ariekei is mediated by a man known as Bren, who was once an Ambassador – he has been cleaved, in the diegetic jargon.   “Where do you live, Avice?” I told him.   “Do you know my name?”   I’d heard it, of course. I was unsure of the etiquette of speaking it to him. “Bren,” I said.   “Bren. That isn’t right. You understand that? You can’t say my name. You might spell it, but you can’t say it. But then I can’t say my name either. Bren is as good as any of us can do. It …” he looked at the Host, which nodded gravely. “Now, it can say my name. But that’s no good: it and I can’t speak anymore.” (Miéville 2011: 15)

Later, Avice mentions her contact with Bren to one of the adults who cares for her:   “How do I spell Bren’s name? I asked Dad Shemmi, and he showed me.  “Bren,” he said, running his finger along the word: seven letters, four he sounded; three he could not. (Miéville 2011: 17)

That is, he cannot speak as though with two mouths. The answer to the question raised in every reader’s mind is Brendan ˂ BrenDan. What Dad Shemmi reads is BrenDan, not a word form typical in natural language.

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While the Ariekei and the Ambassadors speak Language, everyone else speaks just language filled with estranging, futuristic jargon. Some of the words are not greatly estranging – they do not have much surplus poeticity. But this is in fact further metapragmatic commentary, in this case about language rather than Language. Children in Embassytown are raised communally, not by their birth parents, so they have shiftfathers, shiftmothers, and shiftsiblings, not the most adventurous words, but the ones to which readers are introduced first. Others are more adventurous, however. People in Embassytown need aeoli to breathe; things are made of plastone, plasmings, and biorigging. The variety of exoterres ‘beings from non-Bremen planets’ are familiarly exots. Spaceships without crews are miabs. Avice becomes an immerser ‘one who goes into the immer’ and immer designates the spacetime warp through which one travels great distances. Most people cannot handle it – immersers are unusual. Immersers are especially good at floaking. As Avice explains in her narrative, “[i]mmersers, I think created the term. Everyone has some floaker in them. […] Some people think it mere indolence but it’s a more active and nuanced technique than that” (Miéville 2011: 18–19). Over the first couple of chapters, the estranging quality of words changes, from unimpressive shiftfather, to words clearly anchored in English, like biorigging, to truly invented words for new concepts, like immer and floaking. Readers are forced to confront varieties and intensities of estrangement because of contrasts they detect in the course of reading. When Avice introduces her fourth husband, a linguist who becomes obsessed with Language, to her hometown, they run across – for him and us – some very unfamiliar things. Some way from the animals a clumsy little biped was edging away, its rear a fringe of blood.   “It’s injured,” Scile said.   “Not exactly.” Like every Embassytowner child, I knew what this was. “Look,” I said. “That’s the hunter.” A ferocious little altbrock, its black-and-white fur splattered. “What it’s fighting’s called a trunc. As is that thing running away. I know they look like different animals. You see how the tail end of that one over there’s all ragged? And the head of the one getting into it with the altbrock’s torn, too? That’s the brainhalf and that’s the meathalf of the same animal. They tear apart when the trunc’s attacked.” (Miéville 2011: 70)

Items like altbrock, meathalf, and brainhalf are all invented and are estranging enough, especially given their referents. The word of metalinguistic significance, however, is trunc, for just as both parts of the trunc are truncated from the whole, trunc is truncated from truncated. If trunc has a strong measure of poeticity, and if words of such poeticity contribute estranging illocutionary force to the novel, then the pun on truncation here makes readers aware, not only of the word-formative process and its relationship to what the word describes, but of the process of estrangement itself – its metapragmatic value adds poeticity to the word and estrangement to our encounter with it.

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Thus, Language is estranging in Embassytown, but so is language, and in surprisingly self-conscious ways. Both are overt subjects of the novel, and the resulting awareness on readers’ parts of language and its operations, its possibilities and impossibilities, is proposed as a substitute for large-scale language invention. Because readers regard the invented linguistic components of Ward and The Lord of the Rings with wonder, those books are about language, of course. But Embassytown is about the intersections of language and knowledge and the doubt engendered by contact with language that operates by estranging rules, such that both the language and the rules contribute to estrangement. The Hosts’ Language provides several lines of sustained metapragmatic inquiry. One of these is especially interesting because it addresses the truth-value of utterance and how we trust what we think we know. Because the linguistic experience of the Ariekei is so different from our own, considering the difference shifts the epistemological ground on which we stand. For instance, in Language, all speech acts are direct speech acts – locutionary and illocutionary acts are perfectly aligned – which is another way of saying that in Language there is no lying, no prevarication, no metaphor. When Embassytown children want an assurance of truth, they demand, “Say it like a Host”. This quality of speech is inextricable from Language: The Hosts woke in their third instar suddenly fluent, Language a direct function of their consciousness. “Millions of years back there must have been some adaptive advantage to knowing that what was communicated was true,” Scile said to me […] . “The evolution of trust …” I started to say. “There’s no need for trust, this way,” he interrupted. (Miéville 2011: 129)

From our perspective, there is no need for Grice, this way, either. The Ariekei are by no means satisfied with what seems to them a limitation of Language, and so they hold an occasional lying competition, a Festival of Lies. At one of these, a Host manages to get a “lie out into the world, a vomit of phonemes, against its own mind” (Miéville 2011: 130). The relationships among lies, prevarication, and narrative perspective bears directly on the novel: “This is a true story I’m telling”, Avice insists, “but I am telling it, and that entails certain things” (Miéville 2011: 129), or, a Gricean might correct her, that carries certain implicatures. Estrangement brings our sense of what we know and how we know it into the foreground. What sort of language lacks all metaphorical indirection? Even if we are not trapped in metaphor like the Tamarians, isn’t language inevitably metaphorical? The Ariekei find Language’s truthfulness limiting because, in principle, it is always and only literal. “Does it ever occur to you that this language is impossible?” Scile asks Avice. “It makes no sense. They don’t have polysemy. Words don’t signify: they are their referents. How can they be sentient and not have symbolic language?” (Miéville 2011: 80). The Ariekei are aware of the problem and they infuse Language with similes which are strangely not linguistic – not at first. They

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conceive the simile’s target in advance – what they need – and then enact it, so that it starts as a sort of fact, after which it can be absorbed into Language. Avice explains, “[a] long time ago I performed a strange unpleasant ritual in the shell of a restaurant” (Miéville 2011: 96). As a result, she became a simile, she became part of Language. Soon after the ritual, the Ambassadors let her know what it had all been for: The Ambassadors spoke to me in the language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me. They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading. There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time. “It’ll be shortened with use,” Bren told me. “Soon they’ll be saying you’re a girl ate what was given her.” (Miéville 2011: 26; emphasis in original)

In Language, we are left to conclude, metaphor comes at a cost. The simile – a girl ate what was given her – is estranging enough, but the grammar of Bren’s comment, which makes the person and the simile one and the same, is estranging, too. It raises a disturbing question about language and ontology that linguists believe we solved roughly a century ago. Embassytown addresses estrangement yet more directly. Ambassadors were expensive and complicated, and Bremen eventually decided to do what all empires without a sure grasp of their outposts do. They cut and turned a corner and decided to teach two people who weren’t twins and weren’t born into Ambassadorness the unteachable – Language. The arrival and subsequent conduct of the first of these new-style Ambassadors, CalVin, and what happens as a result, is the central plot-line of the novel. Bremen’s plan doesn’t work. CalVin speaks something very close to Language that works on the Ariekei like a drug. It intoxicates them; they become addicted. Some Ariekei find it all so debasing that they mutilate themselves and others, so that CalVin has no hold over them. “It’s unfair to insinuate that all Hosts cared about was Language, but I can’t fail to do so”, says Avice (Miéville 2011: 129). The great self-mutilation, then, is that some Ariekei would prefer to be Language-less than addicted to intoxicating non-Language. I don’t want to spoil the book for those who haven’t read it, but I will say it doesn’t end as horribly as it could. Obviously, we know something about how the Ariekei feel. Intoxication is stronger than Tolkien’s enchantment, but one might read intoxication as hyperbole for enchantment, which, in the contrast, is potentially clarifying. Addiction is stronger than the impulse to read, though as one who would forego a daily beer before a daily book, I wonder how much stronger. Surplus poeticity shifts the ground on which we know and value. In the case of the Ariekei – thankfully not of us reading about them – perversion of or ultimate separation from the language that makes them who they are forces them in either case to become something less. Estrangement is wonderful, but it is also dangerous, Miéville’s allegory implies. From a safe, ironic distance, we

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have sensed the danger all along in Embassytown – danger in Language or language – which proposes it as a component of illocutionary estrangement. 6. Conclusion Embassytown is a tour de force of estrangement, an example of how an author of talent and linguistic insight, one who essentially performs his estrangement in metapragmatic maneuvers, can achieve a nearly perfect balance of reader wonder and epistemological doubt. In this, Embassytown is remarkable but not unique for, at points, Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is similarly metalinguistic and metapragmatic. A crucial character in the “Sloosha’s crossin’” section is Meronym, whose very name makes the section an allegory of the relationship between parts and whole. In her orison, Sonmi rejects an assertion by the archivist taking down her story: “Your version of the truth is the only one that matters” (Mitchell 2004: 185), he says. “Truth is singular. It’s ‘versions’ are mistruths”, she replies (Mitchell 2004: 185). Meronym doesn’t tell those she visits, including the narrator, the whole truth; she represents a partial truth, just as each section of the novel is but a part of whatever truth the whole novel conveys. As with Embasssytown, readers become aware of the novel’s awareness of its own pragmatic effects. As Rabkin (1976: 37) insists, “a true fantasy” and science fiction, too, in “continues to reverse its ground rules time and time again”, as both Embassytown and Cloud Atlas surely do. Rabkin (1976: 28–29) “would like to suggest that we can profitably consider narratives as arrayed along a continuum, ordered in terms of increasing use of the fantastic, with true Fantasies at the polar extreme. […] the fantastic has a place in any narrative genre, but that genre to which the fantastic is exhaustively central is the class of narratives we call Fantasy” (capitals in original). We might look at estrangement in a similar way, with narratives arrayed on a continuum from estranging to fully estranged – the fully estranged texts are most likely examples of genres under consideration here, at least, the best examples of those genres. The fantastic and fantasy, however, are significantly unlike any variety of estrangement, because while characteristics of narrative, they are not literary illocutionary acts. Estrangement is established and fortified by linguistic strategies at all levels – onomastic, lexical, stylistic, and even those of metapragmatics and invention of whole languages – in the interest of surplus poeticity, the narrative use of language as device, something at which science fiction and fantasy at their best are better than any other sort of fiction. Each science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, dystopian fiction, etc., includes some or all of these components, emphasizes some over others to engage readers’ perlocutionary intelligence with an illocutionary act recognizable as a type but specific to the fiction in question. Some fictions will settle for a soupçon of estrangement, which is the serving some readers prefer. For others, authors and readers alike, estrangement is a

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veritable illocutionary feast, an experience inseparable from its pragmatic assumptions. Linguistically-oriented literary theory, like that of Shklovsky and Jakobson, infused with classic pragmatic theory, such as that of Austin and Grice, allow us to discover the fundamentally pragmatic characteristics of science fiction and fantasy, the very characteristics that underlie descriptive theories of the genres, as in the cases of Suvin and Rabkin, cited frequently above. The argument about estrangment as an illocutionary force has been latent in this general and generic literature for some time, and it seems useful to draw it out into the open as an explicit proposition. This seems all the more desirable – perhaps even necessary – given the emphases of current scholarship about science fiction and fantasy, as well as linguistic inquiry into those literary texts with invented languages. The latter body of research, so admirably summarized by Hostetter (2007), for Tolkien, and practiced in the Klingon Language Institute’s journal, HolQeD, for Klingon, tends to be technical and focused on all linguistic levels except pragmatics. Surveys of one or another language may identify some of its pragmatic features (e.g. Okrand et al. 2011: 123–124), but such surveys are not thick upon the ground. Works like Farah Mendlesohn’s (2008) Rhetorics of Fantasy and Rosemary Jackson’s (1981) psychoanalytic Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion do not consider the pragmatic motives underlying fantasy or its pragmatic reception by readers. Similarly, there is relatively little written about pragmatics of language spoken within one or another diegetic framework. Victoria Myers (1983) discussed conversational techniques in the works of Ursula Le Guin some time ago. More recently, Susan Mandala (2007, 2008, 2011) has touched more or less directly on pragmatic issues in articles on various fantastic or science fiction television series – Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Star Trek: Voyager – the most recent of which focuses squarely on politeness and characterization. The language of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has received considerable attention (e.g. Adams 2003; Medendorp 2013), and some of it has focused on pragmatics (Jenkins and Stuart 2003; Masson 2006; Overbey and Preston-Matto 2002; Ruddell 2006). Given the number of texts in question, however, pragmatic inquiry has not scratched the genres’ surfaces, neither text by text, nor among them, towards some sort of general theory of pragmatics as it operates across narratives in either or both genres. That pragmatics of science fiction and fantasy – pragmatics both in and of texts – has been too overlooked might seem unfortunate, but it is also certainly an opporuntity for linguists and linguistically-minded literary critics to explore the subject further – more broadly, more deeply, more rigorously – than ever before. This new attention will promote better understanding of individual texts, as well as the genres in question, of course. But those texts and genres test pragmatic theory, too, and they may provoke new and welcome linguistic questions.

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References Primary sources 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968 Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Adams, Richard 1972 Watership Down. New York: Scribner. Buffy the Vampire Slayer 1997–2003  Dir. Joss Whedon et al. Screenplay by Joss Whedon et al. Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television and 20th Century Fox Television. Burgess, Anthony 2011 A Clockwork Orange, Mark Rawlinson (ed.). New York: W. W. Norton. First published London: Heinemann [1962]. Clarke, Arthur C. 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: New American Library. Godwin, Francis 2009 The Man in the Moone, William Poole (ed.). Peterborough, ON: Broadview. First published [1638]. Elgin, Suzette Haden 1981 The Ozark Trilogy. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press. Fielding, Henry 1973 The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. London: The Folio Society. First published [1749]. Firefly 2002–2003  Dir. Joss Whedon et al. Screenplay by Joss Whedon et al. Mutant Enemy and 20th Century Fox Television. Linklater, Eric 1933 The Men of Ness. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Linklater, Eric 1941 The Man on My Back. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Linklater, Eric 1955 The Ultimate Viking. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Lovecraft, H. P. 2001 The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, S. T. Joshi (ed.). New York: Penguin. Mantel, Hilary 2009 Wolf Hall. New York: Henry Holt & Company. Miéville, China 2011 Embassytown. New York: Ballantine Books. Mitchell, David 2004 Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House. Orwell, George 1977 Animal Farm/1984. New York: Harcourt. Portal [Video game] 2007 Screenply by Chet Faliszek, Marc Laidlaw and Erik Wolpaw. Valve Corporation.

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Portal 2 [Video game] 2011 Dir. Joshua Weier. Screenplay by Chet Faliszek, Ted Kosmatka, Jay Pinkerton and Erik Wolpaw. Valve Corporation. Pullman, Philip 1995 The Golden Compass. New York: Knopf. Pullman, Philip 1997 The Subtle Knife. New York: Knopf. Pullman, Philip 2000 The Amber Spyglass. New York: Knopf. Star Trek: Voyager 1995–2001  Dir. David Livingston et al. Screenplay by Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor et al. Paramount Pictures. Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 5 Episode 2: Darmok 1991 Dir. Winsich Kolbe. Screenplay by Gene Roddenberry, Joe Menosky and Philip LaZebnik. Paramount Pictures. Star Wars VI: A New Hope 1977 Dir. George Lucas. Screenplay by George Lucas. Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox. The Tudors. Season, 3 Episode 7: Protestant Anne of Cleves 2009 Dir. Jeremy Podeswa. Screenplay by Michael Hirst. CBC and Peace Arch Entertainment. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1937 The Hobbit. London: George Allen & Unwin. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1965a Fellowship of the Ring. In: The Lord of the Rings, Collector’s Edition. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. First published London: George Allen & Unwin [1954]. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1965b The Return of the King. In: The Lord of the Rings, Collector’s Edition. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. First published London: George Allen & Unwin [1955]. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1977 The Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien (ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1981 The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter (ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1993 Morgoth’s Ring. Christopher Tolkien (ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Tolkien, J. R. R. 1996 The Peoples of Middle-Earth. Christopher Tolkien (ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Tolkien, J. R. R. 2007 The name Nodens. Tolkien Studies 4: 177–183. First published Appendix I: The name of Nodens. Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Sites in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London 9: 132–137 [1932].

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Tolkien, J. R. R. 2016 A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages. Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins (eds.). London: HarperCollins. Webb, Belinda 2008 A Clockwork Apple. London: Burning House Books. Werst, Frédéric 2011 Ward: Ier – IIe Siècle. Paris: Seuil. Secondary sources Adams, Michael 2003 Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon. New York: Oxford University Press. Adams, Michael 2009 Power, politeness, and the pragmatics of nicknames. Names 57: 81–91. Adams, Michael 2011a Advanced Klingon. In: Michael Adams (ed.), From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, 256–260. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Adams, Michael 2011b Owning language. In: Michael Adams (ed.), From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, 227–233. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Auerbach, Erich 1953 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Willard R. Trask (trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Austin, John L. 1975 How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Berlina, Alexandra 2016a, March 11  Make it strange, make it stony. The Times Literary Supplement: 14–15. Berlina, Alexandra 2016b Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader. London: Bloomsbury. Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gavins, Joanna 2014 Defamiliarisation. In: Peter Stockwell and Sara Whiteley (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics, 196–211. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund C. S. Weiner 2006 The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Grice, Herbert Paul 1975 Logic and conversation. In: Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Grice, Herbert Paul 1989 Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holquist, Michael and Ilya Kliger 2005 Minding the gap: Toward a historical poetics of estrangement. Poetics Today 26(4): 613–636.

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Hostetter, Carl 2007 Tolkienian linguistics: The first fifty years. Tolkien Studies 4: 1–46. Jackson, Howard 2011 Invented vocabularies: The cases of Newspeak and Nadsat. In: Michael Adams (ed.), From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, 49–74. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Jackson, Rosemary 1981 Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Routledge. Jakobson, Roman 1987 Language in Literature, Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (eds.). Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jenkins, Alice and Susan Stuart Extending your mind: Non-standard perlocutionary acts in Hush. Slayage 3(1). http://www.whedonstudies.tv/uploads/2/6/2/8/26288593/jenkins_stuart_ slayage_3.1.pdf Kazimierczak, Karolina 2010 Adapting Shakespeare for Star Trek and Star Trek for Shakespeare: The Klingon Hamlet and the spaces of translation. Studies in Popular Culture 32(2): 35–55. Kripke, Saul 1972 Naming and necessity. In: Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language, 253–355. Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel. Lillian, Donna and Lorelei Logsdon 2014 Girl characters’ names–numbers in The Ozark Trilogy. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Name Society, Minneapolis, MN, January2–4. Mandala, Susan 2007 Solidarity and the Scoobies: An analysis of the -y suffix in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Language and Literature 16(1): 53–73. Mandala, Susan 2008 Representing the future: Chinese and code-switching in Firefly. In: Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran (eds.), Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier, 31–40. London: I. B. Tauris. Mandala, Susan 2011 Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven of Nine: A case study of language and character in a televisual text. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 205–223. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Masson, Cynthea 2006 “Is that just a comforting way of not answering the question?” Willow, questions, and affective response in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In: Michael Adams (ed.), Beyond Slayer Slang: Pragmatics, Discourse, and Style in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Special issue, Slayage 5(4). http://www. whedonstudies.tv/ uploads/2/6/2/8/26288593/masson_slayage_5.4.pdf Mathews, Richard 2002 Fantasy: The Liberation of Imagination. New York: Routledge. Medendorp, Liz 2013 The internal and external impact of slayer slang. In: Jennifer K. Stuller (ed.),

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Fan Phenomena: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 64–73. Chicago, IL: Intellect Books. Mendlesohn, Farah 2008 Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Miller, Joseph Hillis 2001 Speech Acts in Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Miller, Joseph Hillis 2005 Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. New York: Fordham University Press. Myers, Victoria 1983 Conversational technique in Ursula Le Guin: A speech-act analysis. Science-Fiction Studies 10(3): 306–316. Nevalainen, Terttu 1999 Making the best use of ‘bad’ data: Evidence for sociolinguistic variation in Early Modern English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100(4): 499–533. Okrand, Marc, Michael Adams, Judith Hendricks-Hermans and Sjaak Kroon 2011 Wild and whirling words: The invention and use of Klingon. In: Michael Adams (ed.), From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, 111– 134. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Okrent, Arika 2009 In the Land of Invented Languages. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Overbey, Karen Eileen and Lahney Preston-Matto 2002 Staking in tongues: Speech act as weapon in Buffy. In: Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery (eds.), Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 73–84. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Parnell, Michael 1984 Eric Linklater: A Critical Biography. London: John Murray. Peterson, David J. 2015 The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words behind World-Building. New York: Penguin. Portnow, James 2011 Gaming languages and language games. In: Michael Adams (ed.), From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, 135–160. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Pratt, Mary Louise 1977 Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rabkin, Eric S. 1976 The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ruddell, Caroline 2006 “I am the law”; “I am the magics”: Speech, power, and the split identity of Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In: Michael Adams (ed.), Beyond Slayer Slang: Pragmatics, Discourse, and Style in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Special issue, Slayage 5(4). http://www.whedonstudies.tv/uploads/2/6/2/8/26288593/ ruddell_slayage_5.4.pdf Saeed, John 2003 Semantics, 2nd Ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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Shakespeare, William, Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader 1996 The Klingon Hamlet. New York: Pocket Books. Shklovsky, Viktor 1990 Theory of Prose, Benjamin Sher (trans.). Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. First published [1925]. Suvin, Darko 1979 Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tihanov, Galin 2005 The politics of estrangement: The case of the early Shklovsky. Poetics Today 26(4): 665–696. Weiner, Edmund S. C. and Jeremy Marshall 2011 Tolkien’s invented languages. In: Michael Adams (ed.), From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, 75–110. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Part III Pragmatic themes in fiction

12. Pragmatics and the translation of fiction Roberto A. Valdeón Abstract: This chapter presents an overview of the research concerning the interface between Translation Studies and Pragmatics, with particular reference to the translation of fiction. The first section discusses how the main reference books of the discipline have dealt with the topic and highlights the work of authors who have given prominence to the crucial role of pragmatics in translation theory and practice, focusing on the translation of fictional works. Section 2 summarizes the seminal approaches by authors such as Gutt (1991) and Hatim and Mason (1990). The next section discusses the translation solutions of the features of conversation identified by translation scholars, both in literary texts and in audiovisual material. Section 4 approaches (im)politeness in general and the translation of swearwords in particular, as this area of research has been particularly productive among translation researchers. The final section considers the use of multilingualism, codeswitching and translation in fiction and the difficulties these phenomena pose for translators. 1. Introduction Translation scholars have been interested in the study of pragmatics since the establishment of Translation Studies as an academic discipline. The first edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998), edited by Mona Baker, devoted a section to “Pragmatics and translation” (Hatim 1998a: 179–183), which was changed to “Pragmatics” in the second edition (Hatim 2009a: 204–208), while the Handbook of Translation Studies (2010–2013), a four-volume series edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, includes a chapter on “Relevance and translation” (Alves and Gonçalves 2010: 279–284) in volume 1, and a section on Relevance Theory in volume 2 (Malmkjær 2011: 66) within a longer chapter devoted to “Linguistics and translation”. On the other hand, the Routledge Companion to Translation Studies (edited by Jeremy Munday in 2009) contains a chapter entitled “Translating text in context”, where Basil Hatim stresses the importance of context during the production of a translated text, and reviews some of the approaches to the study of language that have had an impact upon Translation Studies over the years, including text linguistics, functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis. From a Translation Studies perspective, Hatim (2009b: 39–40) argues that skopos theory has been particularly attentive to the pragmatic purpose of the source and target texts. Hatim DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-012 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 367–396. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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(2009b: 41) adds that the notion of register “enriched by pragmatics, radically changes the way we approached the translation process” and mentions the translation quality model proposed by Juliane House as an example. Drawing on a functional approach to language, this model, Hatim (2009b: 41) continues, “captures how language is used to convey information, express feelings, persuade, etc”. The efforts to connect the two disciplines can be traced back to the 1990s. In the introduction to the edited collection The Pragmatics of Translation, Leo Hickey (1998: 3) saw parallelisms between the developments of pragmatics on the one hand and Translation Studies on the other, such as the fast growth of the disciplines, the multiplicity of approaches and the importance of the study of texts and contexts. Most importantly, Hickey (1998: 4) stressed that pragmatic approaches to translation attempt to explain procedures, processes and products “from the point of view of what is (potentially) done by the original author in or by the text, what is (potentially) done in the translation as a response to the original, how and why it is done in that way in that context”. The special emphasis on “potentially” hinted at the importance of interpretation in order to convey the source text into a target language. The study of the pragmatic function of source and translated texts has led Juliane House (1997, 2013) to propose a functional-pragmatic model of translation quality assessment. In her view, the text must be considered from the perspective of “the particular situation enveloping it” (House 2013: 542). House (2013: 542) has suggested the study of dimensional and non-dimensional mismatches in order to assess the quality of a translated text. Dimension mismatches are “pragmatic errors that have to do with language users and language use”, while non-dimensional ones refer to the denotative meanings of elements. House (1997: 29) underlined that in translation we rarely deal with isolated lexical items, but rather with utterances and, for this reason, “it is both possible and necessary to aim at equivalence of pragmatic meaning at the expense of semantic meaning”. Bearing in mind the German-English language pair, House (1997: 84–88) proposed a model based on five dimensions whose validity should be tested by involving bicultural experts. This led House to speak of overt and covert translations. The latter would apply a cultural filter capable of adapting the source text to the target culture. Formulaic expressions, for example, vary across languages and need to be translated considering the peculiarities of the target language (House 1997: 81). This falls in line with the recent call for a socio-cognitive approach to intercultural communication (Kecskes 2014). However, in the case of fictional texts, House (1997: 67) stressed that the peculiarities of the original need to be preserved to some extent, as they “have independent status in the language community through belonging to the community’s cultural products” and concluded that

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Fictional texts describe a kind of “fictive reality”, which is, in every reception by an individual reader, newly related to the specific historic reality in the concrete situation on which the reader finds himself. The message in a fictional text is text-contained, which gives the text is independent value. (House 1997: 67)

The peculiarities of fictional and/or literary texts (including poetry, see Dahlgren 2000; Higgins 1998; Mateo 2009) with regards to the pragmatic function of language have been documented by translation researchers, who have emphasized the need to interact with other disciplines and methodologies (Boase-Beier 2014: 241), including linguistics (Kvam 2014; Richardson 1998; Zlateva 1998) and corpus linguistics (Baños, Bruti and Zanotti 2013; Remael 2010). Thus, the importance of carrying out linguistic analysis in order to study the pragmatics of translated fiction has been underlined by a number of authors. For instance, Zlateva (1998) highlighted the problems that arise when dealing with texts in English, Russian and Bulgarian. In her view, these problems are often caused by a lack of understanding of the very different ways in which utterances function in these languages. Explicitation may be necessary when, for example, in the source language, information is taken for granted. Zlateva mentioned a number of fictional dialogues in which information needs to be introduced because the situations involved pragmatic or situational references rather than structural ones. She claimed that, given the very different nature of the three languages, “the translators often have to help their readers and supply for them part of the implied information in the original texts” (Zlateva 1998: 167). On the other hand, Richardson (1998: 138), who studied the use of pronouns in English and Spanish, has indicated that, before translating, it is necessary to apprehend the content-dependent conceptual space of the original text. This includes historic space and the need to adapt older or archaic texts to the new readership. Richardson (1998) quoted J. M. Cohen’s translation of Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha, where the words of the protagonist are rendered as follows: Example (1) Nunca tengo buen rato en mi casa sino aquel que vos estáis escuchando leer; que estáis tan embobado, que no os acordáis de reñir por entonces. (Cervantes, 1964: 234) Clearly, the mark of the 17th century is on this text, in particular in the use of the verbforms employed for addressing the inn-keeper (estáis, os acordáis).   The following extract (1b) is from a twentieth century translation by J. M. Cohen: Example (1b) I never get any peace in my house except when you’re listening to the reading. You’re so fascinated then that you forget to scold for once. (Richardson 1998: 128)

Richardson (1998) reminded us that in the target text, the archaic forms were eliminated to adapt the language to the expectations of the new readership. However,

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this decision may somehow differ when translating Las meninas. In this twentieth-century Spanish play, playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo imitated the archaic forms of seventeenth-century Spanish, which should be taken into account if the translator aims to achieve the same effect upon the target readers/audience as the original author intended for the source one (see also Adams, Ch. 11, this volume). Thus, a multitude of factors needs to be considered when translating a fictional work. Translation theorists and translator trainers like Andrew Chesterman (2002) and Douglas Robinson (2003) have indeed acknowledged the significance of pragmatics in the study and practice of the translational activity. For Chesterman (2002: 8), Translation Studies is a truly interdisciplinary field of study that engages with other disciplines such as literary studies and applied linguistics, but also with sociology, communication studies, psychology and pragmatics, while Robinson (2003: 208) has given prominence to the study of the pragmatics of the text in order to carry out the translatorial task adequately. For his part, Theo Hermans (2014: 299) believes that, as we move away from the fixation on taxonomies and formal grammars, “the combination of pragmatic and cognitive insights in both linguistics and poetics foregrounded the activity of readers as participants in meaning-construction”. Let us now turn to examine how the German translator Ernst-August Gutt approached this interdisciplinarity in a model that was to become controversial. 2.

Pragmatic approaches to Translation Studies

In 1991, Ernst-August Gutt, a translator and a translation scholar, published Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. The book, based on his Ph D. thesis, which he had written under the supervision of Deirdre Wilson, caused some controversy among translation scholars. Gutt claimed that he had started working on his thesis guided by the belief that Relevance Theory could be of some use to formulate a theory of translation, but “it became increasingly clear that Relevance Theory alone is adequate – there seems no need for a distinct general translation theory” (Gutt 1991: viii). Gutt added that much of the work previously published had not contributed to advance Translation Studies as a discipline, which was gradually facing disintegration. One of his main arguments was that the descriptive-classificatory approach that had dominated the discipline was not really effective, as translators do not deal with generalizations but rather with very individual problems (Gutt 2000: 19–20) and, therefore, it was necessary to have resources that contribute to move the field forward. Relevance Theory was the solution, he believed (2000: 21). Gutt emphasizes the importance of context, which should not be only understood as the external situation in which the participants are involved, but also as their assumptions about the world (or cognitive environment). Thus,

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his approach takes into account various external and internal factors in order to place “emphasis on the information they provide and its mental availability for the interpretation process” (Gutt 2000: 27). Gutt claims that this model has a great potential for translation practitioners as it considers the cultural knowledge available to the participants. Although Gutt does not specifically deal with the translation of fiction, he does use a small number of literary texts to support his theoretical approach. He mentions the case of Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir, where the translation of the French pronoun tu (as opposed to the more formal vous) was realized in Scott-Moncrieff’s English translation by means of thou rather than you (Gutt 2000: 107–111). Gutt’s lengthy discussion of this choice aims to show that Relevance Theory can explain the choices made by the translator rather than merely describe them. His arguments are judicious and point to the fact that “Scott-Moncrieff’s rendering here falls short both in closeness of resemblance and in adequate relevance” (Gutt 2000: 111), although in the end one may wonder whether Gutt’s (2000: 111) own explanations are worth the “considerable processing effort” which, in his view, the readers of the translated text would have to make to reach his conclusion. Among those who strongly raised their voice against Gutt’s model, Kirsten Malmkjær (1992) was the most outspoken. However, in 1998 both Gutt and Malmkjær contributed to the edited collection by Leo Hickey mentioned above. In the chapter entitled “Cooperation and Literary Translation”, Malmkjær discussed Grice’s theory of cooperation in conversation as found in literary texts. In her view, although Gricean concepts such as implicatures, the cooperative principle and the four maxims cannot be straightforwardly applied to non-translated literature, there are “orthographic measures” (1998: 31) that can help to convey semantic nuances. Drawing on Lyons (1977), she posited that even if utterances in fiction are dissociated from prosodic elements (Malmkjær 1998: 26), certain features of authentic dialogue (i.e. tone of voice, stress and intensity) can be somehow compensated in fiction: there are various orthographic measures, such as punctuation and variations in font, available to a writer wishing to convey different degrees of emphasis and other semantic nuances (besides such obvious devices as various reporting verbs –‘exclaimed’, ‘shouted’, etc – and adverbs – ‘emphatically’, ‘happily’ etc) which skilled readers make use for interpreting the text. (Malmkjær 1998: 31)

In her view, other problems of interpretation can be solved by the co-text or by the reader’s ability to infer what the author means. Malmkjær (1998: 32) also stressed that, although there is no way to ascertain whether the reader has managed to understand the message of the text, it can be assumed that the writer “would like the reader to grasp the basic, literal meaning of his or her written utterance”. Thus, she concluded that the Gricean model can be applicable to the study of fiction (Malmkjær 1998: 33).

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However, as we turn to translated texts, difficulties increase. In translation, the connection between the writer’s intentions and the reader’s recognition of them is severed by the mere act of transferring the text into another language (Malmkjær 1998: 33). As the ability to understand the possible intentions of the writer cannot be taken for granted, Malmkjær continued, it is doubtful whether Gricean theory can be applied to all types of translation, as in this case we are dealing with “two languages and there is intervention by a translator” (1998: 34, emphasis in original). To illustrate her point, Malmkjær used Barbara Haveland’s English translation of a Danish novel by Peter Høeg, and showed that no matter how good the translation could be, English readers would not be able to generate the implicatures of the original texts, because they are not familiar with pronoun use in the source language and culture. In fact, Malmkjær (1998: 35) claimed that, following Grice’s accounts, the text cannot even be called a translation because it is not truly equivalent to the original. And, yet, she added “what else, indeed, are we to call it?”. However, Malmkjær admitted that this does not mean that “there is not a great deal in a literary translation which can be described and explained in its [the Gricean’s model] terms” (1998: 37), and, although “it cannot, on its own, serve as a theory of literary translation (…) many translational phenomena can be described fairly systematically using concepts and descriptive terms borrowed from it” (1998: 39). On the other hand, Boase-Beier (2006: 43) has noted that, while Gutt’s aims are commendable, as he focused on translation as communication, his model is often dense and disorderly. However, Boase-Beier finds that some of his proposals can be applied to literary translation, particularly when integrated into translation theory. Thus, Relevance Theory could complement translation theory, but not replace it. Boase-Beier (2006: 44) mentions a number of insights of the former that could benefit the latter, such as the study of the cognitive state of the author, which the translator will need to interpret and recreate, the view of style as weak implicatures that would promote the translator’s freedom and creativity, and the intuition that preserving style can help recreate the effects of the source text in the target culture. Boase-Beier has indeed applied Relevance Theory to the study of translated poetry, particularly in Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust (2015), where she studies the textual and contextual features of Holocaust poetry and suggests an approach to translation that enables engagement and creative reading (2015: 101). Despite the criticism of authors like Malmkjær and, to a lesser extent, Boase-Beier, Relevance Theory and pragmatic approaches have had considerable impact on some translation scholars. The work of Searle (1969) and Austin (1982) had already influenced translation theory before the publication of Gutt’s book. In Discourse and the Translator, Hatim and Mason (1990: 100) proposed a pragmatic approach to translation in order to move away from “atomistic speech-act analysis towards a more dynamic concept of the text as an evolving entity”. In this sense, they believed that we should consider three dimensions of context: communica-

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tive, pragmatic and semiotic (1990: 57). Drawing on Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), Hatim and Mason (1990: 93, 2005: 170) argued that translators can make assumptions about what the receptors may know and, on that basis, they make translational decisions, which will be regulated by the principles of effectiveness and efficiency, that is, by transmitting relevant information and by doing it in the most economical way. In this sense, they have stressed that the translator needs to have a number of processing skills of the source text (including recognizing intertextuality, locating situationality, inferring intentionality, organizing texture, and judging informativity) and of the target text (including establishing intertextuality, establishing situationality, creating intentionality, organizing texture, and balancing informativity), which can be achieved by means of transfer skills: effectiveness, efficiency and relevance (Hatim and Mason 2005: 171). Most importantly, translators need to be able to decipher the illocutionary implications of texts. Hervey (1998) concurred that the illocutionary functions of the source text are worth analysing in order to know what the speakers do with their utterances. However, when it comes to translating those utterances, the translator might require to paraphrase them, and, this might entail some loss (1998: 12–13). Hervey highlighted the differences between spoken and written language1 and mentioned three major categories that are relevant in translation: (1) illocutionary particles (as the word “please” in “Please come home”), (2) intonation, and (3) sequential focus (as the word order in “Home he came” (1998: 15). In written language the second category, he argued, is poorly substituted by punctuation. Additionally, languages vary in the illocutionary function attached to these three categories. To illustrate this, he compared languages like Chinese, English, German and Hungarian and noticed, for example, that Compared to both English and German, Hungarian has a strong tendency for conveying subtleties of illocutionary function by the use of sequential focus. Again this is not to say that the sentential level of the Hungarian language (Magyar) is not rich in illocutionary particles and in the means for intonational nuancing of sentences. (Hervey 1998: 17)

However, this does imply that in translation it is necessary to pay attention to the different patterns of the language and, therefore, the translator needs to consider the most appropriate way to compensate possible losses when translating dialogues. Additionally, in the translation of fiction, translators are faced with greater difficulties, particularly in the case of written texts, where some of the intonational implications may not be adequately rendered in the target text, or where the translator may not be fully aware of the value of the punctuation elements that substi-

1



See also Bublitz (Ch. 8, this volume) on oral features in fiction.

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tute them. Indeed, as Marta Mateo (2014: 113) has recently underlined, phonetics has received little attention in Translation Studies. Mateo believes that If we take Hatim & Mason’s three dimensions of context in their pragmatic approach to translation (1990: 58), in two of them we will find several areas which could clearly be related to Phonetics and Phonology when dealing with spoken texts: briefly, speech acts, implicatures, presuppositions and text acts, included in their “pragmatic action”, interrelate with intonation (the tonic syllable and tones) and sentence accentuation; and in their “communicative transaction”, idiolect and dialect (social, regional or temporal) have to do, for instance, with vowel and consonant articulation, word stress, rhythm, intonation … . (Mateo 2014: 114)

This points to the fact that translators need to receive adequate training in order to identify the features of the source language as well as their implications if they want to effectively transfer them into the target language. 3.

Fictional dialogues and their translation

3.1. Literature The study of the features of spoken language and their pragmatic functions have become an object of study in reference grammars (Biber et al. 1999; Carter and McCarthy 2006) and in research studying more specific elements (Romero-Trillo 2008; Schiffrin 1987; see also Bublitz, Ch. 8, this volume). On the other hand, classical works of fiction attempted to reproduce markers of informality, including authors like Shakespeare. Shakespearean dictionaries, though, tend to ignore categories such as interjections, hesitations phenomena and discourse markers (Culpeper 2011c) despite their important pragmatic function. For their part, contemporary fictional dialogues, particularly in audiovisual products, imitate the features of the more conversational registers of the language (Baños 2013; Quaglio 2009). From Hollywood movies to television series, writers attempt to introduce features of conversation in order to portray close relationships between their characters. Before we proceed, however, it is important to mention some of the ways in which the term “orality” has been used in the literature. To begin with, orality, an umbrella term encompassing any manifestations of language in its spoken form (Crystal 2003: 329), is often used in connection with the non-written literary traditions of some cultures (Marcone 1997) or with the incorporation of quasi-oral elements in a literary work (Hertel 2005: 84). In fact, orality may refer to a wider range of text-types, from religious sermons to political speeches: The scripts for most political speeches, sermons, lectures and academic papers, and all news bulletins and commentaries on the news on radio and television are also written with their vocal delivery in mind. (Gregory and Carroll 1978: 43)

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In fiction, particularly in contemporary texts, the priority is to imitate the conversational variety of the language. Speaking of plays, films and television, Gregory and Carroll (1978: 42) argued that it is language “written to be spoken as if not written”, but they also believed that the most salient feature of this type of texts is not its origin (or creative process) per se, but the elements that provide them with the illusion of naturalness: Great playwrights, such as Shakespeare, Shaw or Pinter, for example, give the effect of spontaneous speech rather than the reality of it (…) [They] make use of the favourite grammatical patterns of spontaneous speech such as elision, exclamatory units and ‘tag repetitions’. (Gregory and Carroll 1978: 43)

Gregory and Carroll (1978: 43) stressed that the difference between, say, political speeches, on the one hand, and fictional conversations on the other, is that while the former are “written to be spoken”, the latter are “written to be spoken as if not written”. That is, both products have been written before they are spoken, both are intended to be spoken, but only the latter aim to provide an illusion of naturalness. The main difference, then, is that these texts imitate or fake authentic spontaneity to some degree or other. Thus, attempts at creating life-like effects in dialogue are not new. Besides, they tend to reflect the features of conversation, the idiosyncrasy of the authors and the restrictions imposed by the times (Cadera 2012: 37). For instance, William M. Thackeray had to make sure that the characters of Vanity Fair did not offend his middle-class readers if he wanted to maintain his novel in print (Fromonot 2013: 122), although he was able to incorporate “civil and discourteous voices” in a work that “illustrates the paradoxical figures of impoliteness” (2013: 132). More recently, in the late 1950s, playwright Arnold Wesker had more freedom to use features of working-class language in the speech of his characters, i.e. by deleting subjects (“You already here?) and by introducing discourse markers (“Well!”) and colloquial forms (“Nah!) (Wesker 1960: 36). Translation scholars have studied the features of fictional dialogue and their transfer into other languages, such as the translation of interjections in drama from English into Arabic (Farhoudi 2012), the translation of requests from English into Thai (Deepadung 2009) and the translation of swearing from English into Spanish (Fernández Dobao 2006) and from Italian into English (Maher 2012). Conversational phenomena have implications and pose problems that translators need to take into account both at macro and micro levels (Merino 1994), as they do not reproduce real speech, but they tend to imitate it. Brumme and Espunya (2012: 8) use the terms feigned, fictive and fictional orality to refer to the adaptation of spontaneous conversation to the requirements of fictional works. Other authors have spoken of prefabricated orality (Baños-Piñero and Chaume 2009; Chaume 1999: 217, 2002: 9), and simulated dialogue (Biber et al. 1999: 1039). In other words, we are dealing with dialogues created to sound as if they were spoken.

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Brumme and Espunya (2012: 7) recall the terms used in other languages, i.e. fingierte Mündlichkeit in German, oralidad fingida in Spanish, oralité feinte or oralité simulée in French and simulazione di parlato in Italian, and argue that translators need to consider the connection between fictional and authentic language on the one hand, and the authorial connection on the other. Drawing on Koch and Oesterreicher, Brumme and Espunya (2012: 10) posit that fictive dialogues attempt to reproduce three features of natural conversation: spontaneity as opposed to the higher degree of reflection of written communication, a high degree of familiarity between the participants, and the privacy of the communication between the participants as opposed to the more public nature of, say, a political speech. Immediacy, which is related to the last feature, also plays a key role in casual conversation and, therefore, in simulated dialogue. Additionally, in fiction, although conversational exchanges take place between the characters of a novel, play, television programme or a movie, the interpretation of the utterances depends on the audience, even if the characters do not address the readers, viewers or listeners directly. As Adams put it, this second aspect of meaning is “the pragmatic foundation to the interpretation of fiction” (1985: 41), which poses additional difficulties when rendering the text into another language, perhaps because even though meaning is context-bound, context is boundless (Adams 1985: 46–47). A number of case studies has demonstrated the validity of pragmatics for the analysis of translated texts. Morini (2007: 6) has analysed Jane Austen’s Emma and three Italian translations, paying particular attention to dialogues with implicit and explicit meanings and to “the strategies used by speakers to convey unpleasant and offensive meanings in their speeches without encoding them in their actual words”. Morini (2007: 17–18) found that the complexities of the original text were not always conveyed by the translators and stressed that, although translation analysis and pragmatic analysis are not the same, the latter could complement the former both during the production process and during translator training. Bourne (2002) has studied the directive class of speech acts and their translation into Spanish. Drawing on Haverkate (1994) and Ballesteros Martín (2001), Bourne (2002: 242) acknowledges that the use of impositive directives vary in the two languages, “the English favouring indirect forms and the use of hedges, while the Spanish prefer more direct forms and employ solidarity markers”. This difference poses problems for translators as the wrong choices may have undesired pragmatic effects. Bourne illustrates his point by analyzing The Men and the Girls, a novel by Joanna Trollope translated into Spanish as Un amante joven. Bourne (2002: 249) found that the translator had used a wide variety of report verbs to render “to say” into Spanish, which, in his view, “can sometimes have the pragmatic effect of directing the reader’s interpretation of the reported utterance”. Thus, he claims that “to say is an imprecise verb (…) because it offers little information about the spirit in which the reported utterance was intended” (2002: 249). On the

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other hand, “a certain attitude is conveyed by report verbs (…): aconsejar, exclamar, insistir, lamentarse …” (2002: 250). For her part, Marta Mateo (2014) has recently engaged with Bourne’s study and conclusions. After acknowledging the solid arguments in his work, Mateo (2014: 113) stresses that he makes “no reference to the different accentual and intonational behaviour of reporting clauses in English and Spanish, which, to my view, might have explained – even in literary discourse – some of the data observed by the author”. Prosodic elements are so relevant that they can alter the implications of the utterance. In writing, this needs to be conveyed in other ways. For instance, Culpeper and Haugh (2014: 228) note the use of capitals to indicate sarcasm in “Thank you SO VERY MUCH”. Although in the case of Bourne’s study, the choice of the reporting verb could affect the interpretation of the utterance, as he claims, Mateo (2014: 114) stresses that the changes in the target text can also derive from “the fact that the final reporting clauses in English are commonly deaccented”. The representation of these and other phonetic and phonological features of a language (see also Planchenault, Ch. 9, this volume) and their pragmatic implications is clearly problematic in fiction and its translation. Cadera (2012) believes that authors usually have recourse to specific phonetic features for three reasons: 1. To reflect dialect, ethnolect, sociolect or a special accent in order to portray a realistic and/or critical fictional world. 2. To reflect spontaneous and dynamic everyday speech in order to create realistic fictive dialogue. 3. To create idiolect with the aim of characterizing a specific character.

(Cadera 2012: 290)

Some of the difficulties the above pose will be commented below, but the point to be made at this stage is that these features have not generated much research among translation scholars. Authors need to develop certain graphic representations in order to reproduce the implications those features conveyed in order to “evoke in the reader the associations with phonetic characteristics of oral speech” (Cadera 2012: 290). Cadera, who has studied the translation of Latin American novels into German and English, found that translators often resort to three strategies: a) the use of particular spellings of certain varieties to portray dialectal variation in the target language. For example, word contractions, elisions and neutralizations in the Cuban dialect used by some of the characters in the novel Tres tristes tigres by Cabrera Infante were translated by using spellings representing the phonetic features of lower class speakers in the English and German versions, b) the use of equivalent forms of the target language. For instance, the many Spanish onomatopoeias used by Mario Vargas Llosa in Los cachorros were transferred using similar German and English forms (e.g. “pam pam” became “paff paff” in

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German, Cadera 2012: 296), and c) omission of the phonetic features. For example, the translators of the Ecuadorean novel Huasipungo found it difficult to render the Quechua and Quechua-influenced words and expressions present in the Spanish text into German and English. Translators resorted to compensation strategies whenever omission was their preferred strategy, such as including other indigenous words that the readers could be familiar with (Cadera 2012: 299–300). This aimed to preserve the ethnic, social and linguistic origin of the characters. Finally, Brumme (2008: 9) has indicated that one of the most difficult areas in this respect is the translation of children’s literature. In this case, the author tends to establish a close relationship with his or her young readers by incorporating colloquial and informal elements. In this sense, the translation of figurative language in children’s books is particularly demanding. Epstein (2014: 70), who has studied the choices made by the Swedish translators of Alice in Wonderland, reports that from the 1940s until the 1970s the most common strategy was the deletion of figurative language such as idioms. However, translation solutions may change, as the choices made by the translators depend largely on the historical moment and the specific language community they are mediating for (Brumme and Espunya 2012: 12). This is particularly true in the case of colloquial phenomena such as swearing, which will be explored below. 3.2.

Audiovisual products

As we have seen, both source texts and translated versions have gradually incorporated some of the features of conversation. However, in order to be effective, writers of fictive dialogues need to be selective. Conversational elements need to be refined and, to some extent, idealized (Morini 2007: 6): natural turn-taking needs to be reorganized and overlappings need to be avoided, not only to allow the audience to comprehend the exchanges, but also because there is a need to be economical: scripts have fewer overlappings, repetitions and interruptions than natural conversation, partly to avoid misunderstandings by the audience (Quaglio and Biber 2006: 716–717), but also because of the time constraints characteristic of the movie and television industries. Thus, some of the features identified by linguists, such as hesitations and repeats (Biber et al. 1999: 1053–1057) as well as reformulations, incomplete sentences and syntactic blends (Biber et al 1999: 1062–1065), tend to be avoided, particularly in classical literary works. More recently, authors have attempted to provide fictive dialogues with a touch of authenticity by resorting to some of these features, though. This has become common in screen dialogues (see Bublitz, Ch. 8, this volume), as the work by Quaglio (2009) has shown. In his analysis of the scripts of the situation comedy Friends, Quaglio demonstrated that colloquial discourse markers and interjections (2009: 94–94), lexical bundles (2009: 99–100) and expletives and slang (2009: 109–112) were common. This is highly relevant to achieve naturalness in conversation because, as Kecskes

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(2014: 111) has underlined, formulaic lexical items play an important pragmatic role, and have implications in intercultural contexts. Kecskes is, of course, referring to a context in which the participants in a linguistic exchange belong to two or more cultures, but it can also be applied to translation contexts where at least two languages and cultures are involved. Simulated spontaneous conversation has indeed been singled out as the key element in the production of audiovisual fiction, which in turns affects its translation into other languages (Freddi and Pavesi 2009; Pavesi, 2005; Pérez González 2007: 6–7; see also Guillot, Ch. 13, this volume). The Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue (PCFD) has been particularly useful for the study of the linguistic and pragmatic features of Italian dubbed language vis-à-vis the original movies, and also with respect to original Italian audiovisual material. Pavesi, for instance, has studied dislocations (Pavesi 2005), interjections (Bruti and Pavesi 2008) and personal pronouns (Pavesi 2009) in Italian dubbed programmes. These studies have shown that some peculiarities of dubbed texts are specific to translated Italian language (Freddi 2013: 500) rather than to spontaneous Italian conversational exchanges. In her study of the pragmatic effect of the use of subject pronouns, Pavesi (2009: 91) claims that “in Italian, like in other southern Romance languages, personal pronouns not only perform deictic and anaphoric functions but also express pragmatic values of emphasis and contrast, and are used for reference identification”. By contrast, in English personal pronouns tend to be mandatory and cannot be dropped, even though in some conversational contexts they can be omitted. For her part, Forchini (2013) has analysed the translation of familiarizers into Italian. She found that words like “man” and “guys”, which have important pragmatic functions in face-to-face conversation, also play a central role in translated movie scripts (Forchini 2013: 521), particularly as markers of informality. In her corpus-based approach to the study of the translation of movie dialogues, she noticed that these words tend to collocate with inserts, discourse markers and swear words, which corroborates the findings by Biber et al. (1999). However, the Italian dubbed versions tend to omit most familiarizers, although Forchini (2013: 522) notes that this tendency may have changed in the films dubbed after the year 2000. Thus, in spite of the importance of linguistic elements with pragmatic functions, many tend to be omitted for a number of reasons that are specific to either dubbing or subtitling (Mason 2001: 24). Hatim and Mason (2005: 70) believe that the constraints of these translation modes force the translators to make difficult choices and, consequently, elements of meaning may have to be sacrificed. Bartrina, for her part, argues that other elements such as sounds and gestures can compensate those losses (2004: 162), although, in her view, technical issues should be prioritized no matter the loss these omissions entail (Bartrina 2004: 163). In her study of the translation of compliments in Italian subtitles, Bruti (2009: 238) has also noticed the marked preference for omissions and reductions.

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Let us now turn to a very productive area of research in pragmatics, which is also central in the production of fictive dialogue and its translation. 4. (Im)politeness Politeness (see also Kizelbach, Ch. 14 and Dynel, Ch. 15, this volume) cuts across disciplines such as social psychology, sociology, cultural studies, literary studies and, of course, pragmatics (Culpeper 2011a: 393). Combining an interest in the linguistic conventions of English and in Translation Studies, and drawing on the first academic writings about the issue (Brown and Levinson [1978] 1987; Goffman 1967: 11), Juliane House (1998: 54) defined politeness “as showing, or appearing to show, consideration of others. Politeness can thus be seen as one of the basic social guidelines for human interaction”. Thus, politeness is an essential part of everyday human communication, even though it varies across languages and cultures (Culpeper 2011b: 12–13). Politeness is intimately related to impoliteness. The notion of face, as introduced by Goffman (1967) and developed by Brown and Levinson ([1978] 1987), is of great importance here. Culpeper (2005: 38) has defined impoliteness along these lines: “(1) the speaker communicates face attack intentionally, or (2) the hearer perceives and/or constructs behaviour as intentionally face-attacking, or a combination of (1) an (2)”. In his analysis of impoliteness in the film Scent of a Woman, Culpeper (1998) notes that in fiction the reasons to show impoliteness differ from those we encounter in real life. While in real life impoliteness can be perceived as unexpected behaviour, in fiction impoliteness is “the motivated choice of the writer” (1998: 87, emphasis in original) as a form of aggression that ultimately entertains the audience. This falls in line with Hatim’s (1998b: 85) view that, in literary texts and their translation, the study of impoliteness has often been limited to the interaction between the “world of mimesis between personae and characters” rather than between the writer and the reader. Research into politeness and impoliteness in intercultural communication in general is scarce (Kecskes 2014: 200), and tends to be Anglo-centred (Garcés-­ Conejos Blitvich 2010). This may have influenced the relative lack of research in (im)politeness in Translation Studies. Kecskes (2014: 206) suggests that we should consider three factors when studying intercultural encounters (such as translational practices) where (im)politeness is involved: 1) intention, 2) norms and cultural models, and 3) the role of context. These factors can help understand the situations created in a sitcom like Fawlty Towers, where misunderstandings occur as a result of the various cultures involved (English, Spanish, French, German …). As with exchanges in real life (Kecskes 2014: 206), in fiction we need to take into account the macro and microcosm (Jobert 2013: 75–76) and the context (Pillière 2013: 62) to understand the situations and translate them into other languages.

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Studying impoliteness in translation requires the study of the audience as well (Jobert 2013: 75) and, therefore, of intercultural communication, since interlocutors tend to function under the influence of their own cultural and linguistic conventions. For example, Germans have little small talk (House 2010: 570), which may be perceived as impolite in other languages, but translators need to consider this difference when rendering English fictive dialogue into German. House, who has compared German and English politeness conventions, mentions the case of A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond, where the following exchange was omitted altogether: “‘Hallo Mrs Bird,’ said Judy ‘It’s nice to see you again. How’s the rheumatism?’ ‘Worse than it’s ever been’ began Mrs Bird”. It was simply considered unnecessary in German. In Translation Studies, most research into impoliteness has explored the use of taboo language in the source and target languages. This is probably not fortuitous, as the function of swearwords as intensifiers (Culpeper 2011b: 141) allows them to feature prominently in contemporary fictional dialogues. In addition to this, they are related to controversial topics such as sex, religion and race, they can cause greater offence in other cultures. For this reason, it has been argued that we cannot understand the translation of literature as the transfer of purely textual elements (Boase-Beier 2014: 242), as translators need to consider the effect that lexical items and phrases can have in the target culture. It has been argued that the interlinguistic transfer of original texts tends to avoid offending the political power (Sturge 1999, 2002; Vandaele 2002). In the case of taboo words, self-censorship is often reflected in the omission of offensive words and expressions. Ziman (2008), for instance, discusses the self-censorship of taboo words in the Chinese version of The Color Purple. Stapleton (2010: 289) argues that “swearing is a linguistic practice based on taboo, or that which is forbidden”, and, as such, it carries the risk of censure. Thus, using an offensive word or expression typically involves breaking a linguistic taboo. For Andersson and Trudgill (2007: 195), swearing is characterised in three ways: (1) it refers to something that is forbidden, (2) the lexical items are not to be taken literally, (3) it reflects the strong feelings and emotions of the speaker. Some translation scholars and practitioners have argued that the translator needs to take into account the intended effect of the original in order to make choices about the target text. Peter Newmark, for instance, posited that in the case of communicative translations, that is, texts that attempt to reproduce the exact contextual meaning of the original (1988: 47), it was essential to achieve an equivalent effect (1988: 48). In order to do this, Newmark provided trainees with a simple stylistic scale ranging from the more formal, which he termed officialese, to the more informal or taboo:

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Officialese The consumption of any nutriments whatsoever is categorically prohibited in this establishment The consumption of nutriments is prohibited Official Formal You are requested not to consume food in this establishment Neutral Eating is not allowed here Informal Please don’t eat here Slang Lay off the nosh Taboo Lay off the fucking nosh (Newmark 1988: 14)

In Translation Studies, the transfer of slang and swearwords into other languages has been related to a translation universal whereby translation produces the standardization of the informal features of the source text (Toury 1995: 267–274). Laviosa mentions a few studies of literary translations where normalisation processes are the norm (2002: 54–57), although she also underlines that the amount of research in this area does not allow us to speak in terms of a universal proper (Laviosa 2002: 57). In any case, a standardization norm would affect the translation of taboo terms since they are probably the most informal of all the colloquial features of any language. One factor to be considered is that the translation of taboo words usually depends on the political situation of a culture in a given historical moment. For instance, Santaemilia underlines that the strict censorship in dictatorial regimes such as those of Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy (2008: 220) imposed severe restrictions on the use of taboo words in translated literary works (2008: 222). He mentions the case of the 1978 Spanish translation of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, where most swearwords were eliminated (2008: 225–226). As regards audiovisual fiction, Chaume (2004: 168) recalls the guidelines for dubbing foreign programmes into Catalan, which, in the case of fictional works (e.g. films, series), recommend the use of the colloquial variety. However, Chaume (2004: 181) also stresses that translators are advised to avoid the use of “palabras ofensivas, groseras o malsonantes. Se prefiere la sustitución de las mismas por eufemismos, según el registro del personaje que las enuncie”. In other words, offensive words are to be avoided and, depending on the register used by the speakers, euphemisms should replace them. Sheng-Jie Chen (2004) makes a similar claim for the Chinese case. In fact, some translation scholars have provided evidence that translators tend to neutralize colloquialisms when rendering an audiovisual text into a target language (e.g. Chiaro 2009: 148), and, more precisely, when translating the features of informal English into languages like Latvian (Zauberga 1994), Slovenian (Kovanic 1998), Spanish (Fraile Vicente 2003), French (Vandaele 2001), Swedish (Karjalainen 2002) and Finnish (Jääskeläinen 2003). In her study of the television drama Six Feet Under, Bucaria (2010) has found that there are considerable differences between the Italian dubbed and subtitled versions. For example, in the pilot episode, the dubbed version only maintained

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nine of the 43 swearwords of the original, while the subtitled text kept 39. This includes strong words like “fucking” and blasphemous expressions such as “Jesus Christ!” and “Christ!” Bucaria (2010: 228) claims that the dubbing scriptwriters may have imposed this reduction in order to make sure that the programme was shown on national rather than cable television. This type of self-censorship was maintained in the DVD release, while the subtitled version remained uncensored, but, as Bucaria (2010: 235) claims, it is unlikely that the Italian version had a similar pragmatic effect as the source text had on its audience. Those findings fall in line with Bucaria’s own analysis of the dubbed pilot episodes of twelve American series, including international hits such as The Sopranos, Californication and House M.D., although the results showed some inconsistency in the censoring of swearwords found in the original texts. Thus, “the most evident censorial intervention as far as swearing and blasphemy were concerned was found in series such as Six Feet Under, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies and House M.D., whereas the number of swearwords was left almost intact in Weeds and The Sopranos” (Bucaria 2009: 27). Similar strategies seem to be adopted in Chinese versions of western audiovisual products. In a study of several Hollywood movies shown in Hong Kong, Chapman Chen (2004) demonstrates that cultural differences may be at the base of the important changes in the subtitles, which tend to omit swearwords, use more formal words or euphemisms, while Sheng-Jie Chen (2004) claims that subtitles in Taiwan tone down most swearwords in compliance with the expectations of the target audience, who are less inclined to use offensive language, particularly women (2004: 122). More recently, Han and Wang (2014: 14–15) have reported that this tendency is still applicable, although they believe that, from the perspective of Relevance Theory, the communicative goals of the original utterances are generally maintained even if taboo words are censored. Conversely, other authors believe that this is not a universal rule. Pavesi (2005: 46) has pointed out that the Italian dubbed version of E. R. replaced, in fact, neutral words by strongly colloquial ones, whereas Jacob (2006: 105) has shown that the English translators of French erotic narrative, such as the 1966 version of Sade’s Les cents vingts journées de Sodome and the 1977 version of Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil, used “coarser” words. For his part, Azevedo (2011: 153) stresses that the two Portuguese translations of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury handle profanity in a straightforward manner, while Fernández Dobao (2006) shows that the choices made by the translators of the Spanish version of Pulp Fiction increased the strength and blasphemous nature of many of the religion-related swearwords of the original. Also in connection with the translation of audiovisual material, particularly in comedy programmes and movies, Valdeón has pointed out that the Spanish version of the American series Will & Grace replaced a number of neutral to moderate expressions by swearwords (for example, the recurrent expression of sur-

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prise Wow! was frequently replaced by ¡Joder! [Fuck], Valdeón 2008: 210), as it happened with the Spanish version of the British sitcom The I.T. Crowd (Valdeón 2015). In the former, the changes had even serious ideological implications, as the target text replaced neutral or positivized terms referring to the gay characters in the series by more offensive ones, which could be indicative of a homophobic bias in the target culture (Valdeón 2010). For her part, Denise Filmer (2012) has analysed the Italian version of Gran Torino, a 2008 film by Clint Eastwood replete with slurs and swearwords. Filmer (2012: n.p.) found that the derogatory racial utterances of the source text were replaced by “the overwhelming presence of homophobic dysphemism”. Santaemilia’s (2008) own discussion of the Spanish and Catalan translations of Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequel do not seem to support the tendency towards standardization either. Although Santaemilia (2008: 244) claims that the translators may have restrained themselves, or “self-censored” their version, the fact remains that most taboo language is reproduced in the target versions, even if the Spanish one does it in a more “mechanical way” than its Catalan counter-part, which seems to be more inventive. For her part, Fernández Fernández (2009) has examined the strategies used by the Spanish translators of the adult cartoon series South Park and not only does she find that swearing is maintained in the target text, but also that the dubbed series provides examples of great solutions to preserve the “pragmatic intention” (2009: 225) of the original. 5.

Multilingualism, codeswitching and translation

Finally, let us turn to the use of multilingualism (see also Locher, Ch. 10, this volume), translation and codeswitching, which are a rich source of humour in fiction (Delabastita 2010), usually in combination with negative stereotyping of intercultural encounters (Greenall 2009). The use of multilingualism, translation and codeswitching tends to have ideological implications (Heiss 2004; Toda 2005), and to pose additional challenges for translators (Chaume 2013; Davies 2005: 147–148; Delabastita 2002, 2005, 2010; Meylaerts and Serban 2014: 10; Valdeón 2005). Delabastita (2005) has specifically studied what he terms the “pragmatics of translation” (emphasis in original), where he refers to the ways in which the practice of translation is represented in a source text in order to produce humorous situations. In Delabastita’s (2005: 175) own words, “pragmatic rules associated with the ‘normal’ translation script are not fulfilled, this creating a clash between what happens in the dramatic scene (…) and the spectators’ expectations of what translation really ‘is’ or ‘should be’”. Delabastita (2005: 175–176), who analyses scenes from Shakespeare’s plays where the characters act as interpreters, believes that five factors define an interpreter’s work: an awareness that translation is taking place, the identification of the pair of languages involved, a realistic communicative sit-

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uation that requires translation, the translator’s loyalty to the source text and sufficient language skills on the part of the translator. Delabastita (2005: 181) notes that, in fact, one or more of these factors are not fulfilled in most of the examples, and, consequently, the fictional interpreters in Shakespeare’s plays fail “miserably but humorously”. The representation of multilingualism in Shakespeare’s time has been recently covered in an edited collection (Delabastita and Hoenselaars 2015), where contributions such as those by Saenger and Oakley-Brown highlight the pragmatic and ideological functions of multilingualism at the time. Additionally, the translators of these plays into other languages are likely to find the use of bogus translation a real challenge (Delabastita 2005: 182–183). The translation solutions range from simply leaving the “gibberish intact” (Delabastita 2005: 182) to rewriting the utterances in order to preserve the effects of the original. On the other hand, multilingualism has been a rich source of humour in movies and on television, where the production process, the finished products and the reception are often characterized by translation and multilingualism (Meylaerts and Serban 2014: 2). The classic BBC situation comedy ‘Allo ‘Allo depicted the adventures of a French bar owner in a German-occupied French village during the Second World War. French, German, English and Italian characters mingled in this popular comedy. This posed a problem for scriptwriters, which was solved by using English with various accents. Delabastita (2010: 197–205) has summarized the various phonological features used by the actors and has compared them to similar media products, such as the Pink Panther movies. In his view, the introduction of various accents to represent national differences allows the viewers to understand the “intentions and effects” of failed communicative attempts (Delabastita 2010: 210), and is at the base of the comic effects of the programme. The multilingual settings and fictional situations of the programme can make the viewers laugh, but, once again, they pose serious problems for the translators. Delabastita has also studied the translation solutions in the Dutch subtitled and the French dubbed versions, and found out that there was a notable reduction of accents in the former and an important change in the latter: the Dutch text replaced the original words by “neutral and correct, accent-free written Dutch” (2010: 212), while in the French version the “lines of linguistic and cultural inclusion/exclusion are redrawn” (2010: 217). In Delabastita’s view, this implies that the power balance based on the use of certain distinctive features of each language was tilted towards the French. Domesticating and neutralizing strategies also characterized the dubbing into French of multilingual exchanges in Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (Sanchez 2014) and in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Labate 2014), which affects the relationships between the characters vis-à-vis their national origin. Ideology may partly explain these translation solutions. Ideological issues are indeed central to understand the use of two or more languages in a movie or series, and the way in which they are translated. Carol O’Sullivan (2011) has analysed the

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inclusion of Native American languages in Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), where subtitled Lakota Sioux featured in long sequences. This, O’Sullivan claims, was a turning point in cinematic representations of Native Americans, as these scenes managed to convey a full range of expressions and emotions (O’Sullivan 2011: 131) that had not been seen on the screen before. For her part, in a study of multilingual films portraying contemporary situations, Heiss (2004) found that scriptwriters have had recourse to a higher number of colloquialisms than it is usual, which contributed to characterizing the social and cultural background of the protagonists. As the characters speak a number of languages (including German, Italian, Croatian and broken English), Heiss (2004: 212) believes that it is “particularly important not to unify the language in cases of bilingualism” in the translated versions, because multilingualism defines the characters as well as their social position. However, the dubbed versions of these movies, while attempting to retain some of the peculiarities of the original scripts, reduced the differences of the original product considerably. Finally, codeswitching (such as the use of American English and American Spanish by the same characters in some Hollywood movies) is also problematic when translated into other languages. Monti (2014) has studied the Italian dubbed versions of British and American movies where codeswitching is used by Pakistani, Mexican and Hmong characters, and has pointed out that in the original films codeswitching is used in three ways: (1) turn-specific codeswitching occurring between the turns of different speakers, (2) intersentential codeswitching within a single turn, and (3) intrasentential codeswitching occurring within the same sentence (Monti 2014: 137). These three types aim to convey the social, cultural and linguistic peculiarities of the characters in the source culture. The solutions encountered in the Italian dubbed versions range from non-translation in Spanglish and Gran Torino, thus maintaining the “cultural nuances” of the American contexts, to a higher degree of dubbing in Bend it Like Beckham and Ae Fond Kiss, which dilute the “ethno-cultural and linguistic features” of the original films (Moint 2014: 165). On the other hand, Jiménez Carra (2009) has analysed the use of codeswitching in the representation of Hispanic characters in US movies (including Spanglish) and television programmes and found that the original products resort to a variety of ways to convey the Spanish messages to English-speaking audiences (such as by means of subtitles, interpreting and even by using gestures) (2009: 68), while the dubbed versions often neutralize the intended effects of the original as the Spanish versions use European Spanish accents and replace Spanish American words by European Spanish ones (2009: 69), thus domesticating and altering the pragmatic effects of the source material.

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6. Conclusion This chapter has attempted to summarize the publications that have explored the connection between the translation of fiction and pragmatics, with an obvious emphasis on Translation Studies research. Before concluding I would like to make two final points. First, it should be noticed that a number of authors have argued that translation activities should be incorporated into the foreign language classroom in order to explore, teach and become familiar with the pragmatic differences between two languages and cultures (Neves 2004: 133; Valdeón 2015). Since foreign language text books tend to ignore certain lexical fields such as slang and taboo language (Fernández Gavela 2015), which usually have highly relevant pragmatic functions, audiovisual translation can contribute to familiarize students “with areas of the language that they had taken for granted, as well with their pragmatic force” (Valdeón 2015: 382). Second, Boase-Beier, Fawcett and Wilson (2014: 7) have claimed that the best way for a discipline to survive is “both to take from elsewhere and to give elsewhere”. In fact, we could add that the best way to move forward is also to be able to draw inspiration from other fields that have much to say to Translation Studies, and also to be able to offer something in return. As a profession and as an academic discipline, Translation Studies is in a unique position to do both, as it studies the cultural and linguistic negotiations between text producers and their respective audiences, between authors and translators who use at least two languages, between two or more cultures, between various historic moments and the peculiarities of the languages and cultures involved. References Adams, Jon-K. 1985 Pragmatics and Fiction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Alves, Fabio and José Luiz Gonçalves 2010 Relevance and translation. In: Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies: Volume 2, 279–284. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Andersson, Lars-Gunnar and Peter Trudgill 2007 Swearing. In: Leila Monaghan and Jane Goodman (eds.), A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication, 195–199. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Austin, John L. 1982 How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Azevedo, Milton M. 2011 The Sound and the Fury in two translations into Portuguese. Luso-Brazilian Review 48(2): 150–163. Baker, Mona (ed.) 1998 Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. London: Routledge.

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Ballesteros Martín, Francisco J. 2001 La cortesía española frente a la cortesía inglesa: Estudio pragmalingüístico de las exhortaicones impositivas. Estudios ingleses de la Universidad Computense 9: 171–207. Baños-Piñero, Rocío and Frederic Chaume 2009 Prefabricated orality: A challenge in audiovisual translation. Intralinea [Special issue]. http://www.intralinea.org/specials/article/Prefabricated_Orality (accessed on July 10, 2015) Baños, Rocío 2013 ‘That is so cool’: Investigating the translation of adverbial intensifiers in English-Spanish dubbing through a parallel corpus of sitcoms. Perspectives 21(4): 526–542. Baños, Rocío, Silvia Bruti and Serenella Zanotti 2013 Corpus linguistics and audiovisual translation: In search on an integrated approach. Perspectives 21(4): 483–490. Bartrina, Francesca 2004 The challenge of research in audiovisual translation. In: Pilar Orero (ed.), Topics in Audiovisual Translation, 157–168. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Beaugrande, Robert de and Wolfang U. Dressler (1981) Introduction to Text Linguistics. Harlow, UK: Longman. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan 1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow, UK: Longman. Boase-Beier, Jean 2006 Stylistic Approaches to Translation. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome. Boase-Beier, Jean 2014 Using translation to read literature. In: Jean Boase-Beier, Antoinette F ­ awcett and Philip Wilson (eds.), Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries, 241–252. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Boase-Beier, Jean 2015 Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust: Translation, Style and the Reader. London: Bloomsbury. Boase-Beier, Jean, Antoinette Fawcett and Philip Wilson 2014 Introduction. In: Jean Boase-Beier, Antoinette Fawcett and Philip Wilson (eds.), Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries, 1–10. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourne, Julian 2002 ‘He said, she said’: Controlling illocutionary force in the translation of literary dialogue. Target 14(2): 241–161. Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. First published [1978]. Brumme, Jenny 2008 Introducción In: Jeremy Brumme (ed.), La Oralidad Fingida: Descripción y Traducción. Teatro, Comic y Medios Audiovisuales, 7–14. Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Brumme, Jenny and Anna Espunya 2012 Background and justification: Research into fictional orality and its transla-

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tion. In: Jenny Brumme and Anna Espunya (eds.), The Translation of Fictive Dialogue, 7–31. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Bruti, Silvia 2009 The translation of compliments in subtitles. In: Jorge Díaz-Cintas (ed.), New Trends in Audiovisual Translation, 226–238. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Bruti, Silvia and Maria Pavesi 2008 Interjections in translated Italian: Looking for traces of dubbed language. In: Aurelia Martelli and Virginia Pulcini (eds.), Investigating English with Corpora, 207–222. Milan: Polimetrica. Bucaria, Chiara 2009 Translation and censorship on Italian TV: An inevitable love affair? Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics 6(1): 13–32. Bucaria, Chiara 2010 Laughing to death: Dubbed and subtitled humour in Six Feet Under. In: Delia Chiaro (ed.), Translation, Humour and the Media, 222–237. London: Continuum. Cadera, Susanne M. 2012 Representing phonetic features. In: Jenny Brumme and Anna Espunya (eds.), The Translation of Fictive Dialogue, 289–304. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Carter, Ronald and Michael McCarthy 2006 Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chaume, Frederic 1999 La traducción audiovisual: Investigación y docencia. Perspectives 7(2): 209– 219. Chaume, Frederic 2002 Models of research in audiovisual translation. Babel 48(1): 1–13. Chaume, Frederic 2004 Cine y Traducción. Madrid: Cátedra. Chaume, Frederic 2013 Research paths in audiovisual translation: The case of dubbing. In: Carmen Millán-Varela and Francesca Bartrina (eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, 286–302 London: Routledge. Chen, Chapman 2004 On the Hong Kong Chinese subtitles of English swearwords. Meta 49(1): 135– 147. Chen, Shen-Jie 2004 Linguistic dimensions of subtitling: Perspectives from Taiwan. Meta 49(1): 115–124. Chesterman, Andrew 2002 Pragmatics in translation studies. In: Irmeli Helin (ed.), Essays in Translation, Pragmatics and Semiotics, 7–32. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Chiaro, Delia 2009 Issues in audiovisual translation. In: Jeremy Munday (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies, 141–165. London: Routledge. Crystal, David 2003 English as a Global Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Culpeper, Jonathan 1998 (Im)politeness in dramatic dialogue. In: Jonathan Culpeper, Mick Short and Peter Verdonk (eds.), Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context, 83–95. London: Routledge. Culpeper, Jonathan 2005 Impoliteness and entertainment in the television quiz show: The Weakest Link. Journal of Politeness Research 1(1): 35–72. Culpeper, Jonathan 2011a Politeness and impoliteness. In: Gisle Andersen and Karin Aijmer (eds.), Pragmatics of Society, 393–438. (Handbook of Pragmatics 5.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Culpeper, Jonathan 2011b Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, Jonathan 2011c A new kind of dictionary for Shakespeare’s plays: An inmodest proposal. In: Mireille Ravassat and Jonathan Culpeper (eds.), Stylistics and Shakespeare’s Language, 58–83. London: Continuum. Culpeper, Jonathan and Michael Haugh 2014 Pragmatics and the English Language. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dahlgren, Marta 2000 A relevance-based approach to poetry in translation. Perspectives 8(2): 97–108. Davies, Christie 2005 European ethnic scripts and the translation and switching of jokes. Humor 18(2): 147–160. Deepadung, Sujaritlak 2009 Requests and translation into Thai. Babel 55(1): 20–39. Delabastita, Dirk 2002 A great feast of languages: Shakespeare’s bilingual comedy in King Henry V and the French translators. The Translator 8(2): 303–340. Delabastita, Dirk 2005 Cross-language comedy in Shakespeare. Humor 18(2): 161–184. Delabastita, Dirk 2010 Language, comedy and translation in the BBC sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo! In: Delia Chiaro (ed.), Translation, Humour and the Media, 191–221. London: Continuum. Delabastita, Dirk and Ton Hoenselaars (eds.) 2015 Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Epstein, B. J. 2014 The conservative era: A case study of historical comparisons of translations of children’s literature from English to Swedish. In: Jean Boase-Beier, Antoinette Fawcett and Philip Wilson (eds.), Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries, 64–78. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Farhoudi, Mona 2012 Translation of interjections in drama. Babel 58(3): 327–338.

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House, Juliane 2013 Quality in translation studies. In: Carmen Millán-Varela and Francesca B ­ artrina (eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, 534–547 London: Routledge. Jääskeläinen, Riita 2003 Who said what? A pilot study of the hosts’ interpreting performance on Finnish breakfast television. The Translator 9(2): 307–326. Jacob, Benjamin 2006 Dirty words and ‘fancy trash’: Translating French obscenity. French Studies Bulletin 27(101): 103–106. Jiménez Carra, Nieves 2009 The presence of Spanish in American movies and television shows: Dubbing and subtitling strategies. Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics 6: 51–71. Jobert, Manuel 2013 Domestic and professional impoliteness in Fawlty Towers: Impoliteness as a dramatic device. In: Denis Jamet and Manuel Jobert (eds.), Aspects of Linguistic Impoliteness, 75–93. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Karjalainen, Markus 2002 Where have all the swearwords gone? An analysis of the loss of swearwords in two Swedish translations of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. MA thesis, Department of English, University of Helsinki. Kecskes, Istvan 2014 Intercultural Pragmatics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kovanic, Irena 1998 Six subtitlers – six subtitling texts. In: Lynne Bowker, Michael Cronin, Dorothy Kenny and Jennifer Pearson (eds.), Unity in Diversity? Current Trends in Translation Studies, 75–82. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome. Kvam, Sigmund 2014 Text linguistics and the translation brief: On the relevance of conversation analysis as an operational tool in a pragmatic text linguistic approach to translation. Perspectives 22(1): 21–38. Labate, Simon 2014 Translating French into French: The case of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Linguistica Antverpiensia 13: 193–210. Laviosa, Sara 2002 Corpus-based Translation Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lyons, John 1977 Semantics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Maher, Brigid 2012 Taboo or not taboo: Swearing, satire, irony and the grotesque in the English translation of Niccolò Ammaniti’s Ti prendo e ti porto via. The Italianist 32(3): 367–384. Malmkjær, Kirsten 1992 Review of Translation and Relevance by E. A. Gutt. Mind & Language 7(3): 298–309. Malmkjær, Kirsten 1998 Cooperation and literary translation. In: Leo Hickey (ed.), The Pragmatics of Translation, 25–40. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

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Malmkjær, Kirsten 2011 Linguistics and translation. In: Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer (eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies: Volume 2, 61–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Marcone, Jorge 1997 La Oralidad Escrita : Sobre la Reivindicación y Re-inscripción del Discurso Oral. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Mason, Ian 2001 Coherence in subtitling: The negotiation of face. In: Frederic Chaume and Rosa Agost (eds.), La Traducción en los Medios Audiovisuales, 19–32. Castellón, ES: Universitat Jaume I. Mateo, José 2009 Contrasting relevance in poetry translation. Perspectives 17(1): 1–14. Mateo, Marta 2014 Exploring pragmatics and phonetics for successful translation. Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics 11: 111–135. Merino, Raquel 1994 A framework for the description of drama translation. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 29: 127–138. Meylaerts, Reine and Adriana Serban 2014 Introduction: Multilingualism at the cinema and on stage: A translation perspective. Linguistica Antverpiensia 13: 1–13. Monti, Silvia 2014 Code-switching and screen translation in British and American films and their Italian dubbed version: A socio-linguistic and pragmatic perspective. Linguistica Antverpiensia 13: 135–168. Morini, Massimiliano 2007 Say what you mean, mean what you say: A pragmatic analysis of the Italian translations of Emma. Language and Literature 16(1): 5–19. Munday, Jeremy (ed.) 2009 The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies. London: Routledge. Neves, Josélia 2004 Language awareness through training in subtitling. In: Pilar Orero (ed.), Topics in Audiovisual Translation, 127–140. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Newmark, Peter 1988 A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall. Oakley-Brown, Liz 2015 ‘Have you the tongues?’ Translation, multilingualism and intercultural contact in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost. In: Dirk Delabastita and Ton Hoenselaars (eds.), Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 115–136. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. O’Sullivan, Carol 2011 Translating Popular Film. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Pavesi, Maria 2005 La Traduzione Filmica: Aspetti del Parlato Doppiato dall’Inglese all’Italiano. Rome: Carocci.

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13. Subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text Marie-Noëlle Guillot Abstract: This contribution focuses on audiovisual translation (AVT) and the relatively neglected domain of subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text from a pragmatic perspective, in effect cross-cultural by dint of the interlingual transfer involved. AVT language is fictional language, with the additional twist of mediating text and meaning across languages and cultures in a multimodal context in which source and target remain intertextually linked. The chapter provides an overview of the main aspects involved in engaging with AVT from this perspective, and of the two main domains in which pragmatics has been represented within it: narrative aspects and characterization, and communicative practices in their interlingual representations. Audience design, stance, voice, versimilitude are key features for AVT in the pragmatics of its fiction, as in fiction in general. They are uniquely modulated in AVT by the idiosyncratic features of translation modalities, in ways which are yet to be fully mapped out. 1. Introduction This chapter deals with subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text, and their singularities for pragmatics research as so-called ‘constrained’ translation modalities, i.e. modulated by language-external medium related factors (see next section). Research in the pragmatics of telecinematic discourse requires a multimodal multi-­semiotic approach which pays heed to co-occuring modes of expression that trigger pragmatic inference. One component in this interaction is verbal language, with its own pragmatic specificities and narratively-driven representations of naturally occurring speech in dialogues. With foreign films subtitled or dubbed into other languages, there is an added level of complexity that makes interplays of meaning-making resources and their collective pragmatic import even more intricate. Subtitled and dubbed dialogue texts are fictions twice over, and are de facto cross-cultural from a pragmatics standpoint. Through interlingual transfer, they take make-believe one step beyond the make-believe of the dialogues they represent for audiences with no or limited familiarity with the source languages of original films. This is their main common feature. They are otherwise quite distinct, both in their characteristics as representational mediums and in the strategies they can each deploy to achieve representation within the multimodal film context. These features make them complex to study, yet particularly interesting DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-013 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 397–424. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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for pragmatics, a perspective neglected until recently in audiovisual translation (henceforth AVT), the generic term used in the field to refer to the range of practices relating to language transfer in audiovisual products. AVT studies itself is a relatively new discipline. An EU forum on AVT and language transfer in celebration of the 100th anniversary of cinema set an early milestone in 1995 (Gambier 2003a). There were many challenges to confront in these early days, such as mapping out the field, developing research paradigms and adapting methodologies to its specificities within the broader fields of Translation Studies and Film Studies. AVT research is now maturing into a discipline in its own right (Díaz Cintas and Neves 2015; Pérez-González 2014: 92), with interdisciplinary input from a range of other domains, from IT for technical aspects to cognitive sciences, psychology, sociology or neurology.1 Pragmatics itself has only recently begun to receive more focused explicit attention and develop greater visibility within AVT research. It is of course present implicitly in all studies that consider aspects and features of interlingual transfer, as pragmatics in the general sense in which it is understood for the purpose of this paper, i.e. how language is used in social contexts and how participants in communicative situations generate (convey and manipulate) meaning. In pragmatics research, the presence of AVT is almost negligible: there are few publications on the topic in main pragmatics journals (two in the Journal of Pragmatics since 1995, for example). Subtitling and dubbing are accessibility practices. They give viewers access to film dialogues and other narratively relevant textual matter of telecinematic discourse in languages of which they have no or limited knowledge, and the opportunity to make sense of, and respond to, AV cultural products which they would not otherwise be able to decode linguistically. They are also creative media in their own right, both in the kinds of fansubbing/dubbing amateur practices which have developed at an extraordinary rate with digitization since the mid-80s and are now ubiquitous on online platforms, and in mainstream practices, despite the pressures of conforming to the normative pressures of the industry in mainstream audiovisual translation and guidelines (e.g. time and space; see Section 2). Creative solutions are required to safeguard the coherence of the narrative, while accommodating the specificities of AV modalities/subtitling and dubbing, and to cope with linguistic and cultural mismapping across languages. The enduring link with the source text still present, intertextually at least, through what is seen and heard is a further difficulty.

1



Pérez González (2014: Ch. 4, 91–139) identifies the following models and approaches as contributing to AVT research in his cutting-edge volume on theories, methods and approaches in AVT: psycholinguistic, cognitive, neurolinguistic, pragmatic for process models; shift-based and corpus-driven for comparative models; systems and normbased, discourse and ideological for causal models.

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The tension between accessibility and creativity has been an ever-present theme in AVT research. It has received increasing prominence and momentum from norm-defying fansubbing/dubbing amateur transformational approaches and their challenge to representational ‘fidelity’. It is an overarching theme from the perspective of the pragmatics of fiction in relation to medium constraints, questions of audience design and linguistic and cultural alignment. These questions and aspects are documented in this chapter primarily by reference to mainstream film practices. The opening part of this chapter in Section 2 provides a brief overview of the main features and issues of subtitling and dubbing and work in AVT research, in order to contextualize the two main dimensions of AVT and the pragmatics of fiction considered susbsequently: narrative and characterization in Section 3; and interlingual representations of communicative practices in Section 4. The conclusion in Section 5 considers a way forward for research, in light of the mounting public prominence and influence of the fansubbing/dubbing crowdsourcing amateur practices signposted above and also outlined in Section 2. 2.

Aspects and features of AVT

There is a wealth of material recapitulating features of film subtitling and dubbing which, at regular intervals, take stock of how these modalities keep pace with the extraordinary technological developments of the last 15 years, and unprecedented global dissemination of cultural products on a range of platforms (mobile/hand held devices, catch up or on-demand television, etc.). Key work includes benchmark handbooks on subtitling (Díaz Cintas and Remael 2007), dubbing (Chaume 2012), and audiovisual theories, methods and issues (Pérez-González 2014). Routine updates have also been provided by regular AVT commentators (e.g. Chaume, Chiaro, Díaz Cintas, Gambier, Pérez-González, Remael) in special AVT issues of research journals or translation studies handbooks, such as the landmark special issue of The Translator on Screen Translation (Gambier 2003b), Millán-Varela and Bartrina’s (2013) The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies with articles on the state of AVT studies in general (Gambier 2013), subtitling (Díaz Cintas 2013), dubbing (Chaume 2013), a (2016) Target issue on AVT and its theoretical and methodological challenges edited by Ramos Pinto and Gambier with contributions ranging from multimodal approaches (Taylor 2016) to language policy and planning in AVT (O’Sullivan 2016), and Pérez-González’ (forthcoming) Handbook of Audiovisual Translation with chapters covering all aspects of this new field (see also Chiaro 2009; Díaz Cintas 2010; Gottlieb 1998; O’Connell 2007; Pérez-González 2009; Remael 2010; Taylor 2013; Yau 2014 among others). Readers are referred to these sources for fuller accounts of the main features, issues and strategies of subtitling and dubbing. They are, however, briefly recapitulated below to contextualize subsequent sections.

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Engagement with pragmatic concerns in AVT research has, until recently, been largely implicit and tied in with feasibility and practicability issues: how to deal with culture specific reference, register and the sociocultural diversity of language varieties, orality and naturalness, etc. These questions are discussed in view of linguistic considerations (extent/limits of linguistic and cultural mapping, for example), but in view also significantly on technical factors referred to as ‘constraints’ in most of the literature, and of modality features. Subtitling involves a shift from speech to writing, dubbing does not. Each thus mediates telecinematic discourse interlingually in its own distinctive ways. For subtitling, the central concern is to “render different types of speech in two lines of concise and intelligible writing with a minimal loss of informative content”,2 while simultaneously conveying register, non-standard language, linguistic idiosyncracies, paralinguistic and interactional features of dialogue in writing, all in synchrony with the filmic image and dialogue (Remael 2003: 226). Remael’s concise account encapsulates the main features of subtitling identified in mainstream practices: space and time constraints, and the resulting main strategy – reduction (through omission, condensation, synthesis, modulation, etc.). Readabi­ lity is a priority, and is also contingent from the normative perspective of mainstream practices on syntactic and lexical simplification: the object is to keep the cognitive demands of processing fragmented text sequentially manageable, since subtitles appear one at a time, while also responding to visual and aural signs, and to the multimodality of the film medium, a third core aspect. The resulting language choices and strategies make subtitling linguistically, pragmatically and socioculturally distinctive. For dubbing the main concern and strategy drive is synchrony, isochrony, lip-synchrony, kinesic synchrony, character synchrony -, i.e. rendering lines of speech into lines of speech of the same duration in the target language, with matching lip movements and mouth articulation, and consonant with characters’ body movements, actions and voice. Actors should not be seen to say nothing when dubbing text is heard, or heard to say nothing when their mouths are moving, lip movements from source utterances should as far as possible match the sounds heard in the target, actions should match words (e.g. acquiescence, greetings), and voices voices (males should dub males, females females, children children etc.). As with subtitling, language choices are inevitably affected. Significant adaptations are called for in word order and information flow in order to, for example, align speaker and voice while weaving in the various semiotic codes and creating the illusion of original dialogue in the target language, and what Chaume (2012: 16)

2



Subtitles are normally expected to be one or two lines of 36 to 40 characters at most in mainstream practices, including spaces and punctuation, and shown at the bottom of the screen.

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describes as prefabricated orality (see also Bednarek 2010; Dynel, this volume; also Kozloff 2000). These changes likewise indelibly mark the language of dubbing or ‘dubbese’, the commonly used term that is an index of dubbing’s specificities. These broad differentiating features correlate with preferences for one or the other modality, historically, geographically and culturally, with regards to costs, literacy and exposure to source languages, for example. Pros and cons of one or the other modality have been a staple topic in AVT (see Koolstra, Peeters and Spinhof 2002, for example). Dubbing has been more prevalent in so-called ‘dubbing’ countries, with markets large enough to absorb the higher costs of (labour-intensive) dubbing, limited literacy, at least in the early days of cinema, and/or where it was expedient for censorship in its total replacement of original soundtracks (e.g. Italy, Spain) (see e.g. Díaz Cintas 2012). Subtitling has a niche in contexts with smaller prospective audiences, like Scandinavian countries, which have thrived on its educational value (e.g. for language learning). Advantages and disadvantages are now modulated by the considerable impact of digitization on practices, subtitling in particular, for which the vast community of amateur subtitlers, or fansubbers, has been re-writing the rule books (see below and Section 5). This is a space to watch for research, including pragmatics research. For pragmatics and the pragmatics of fiction, subtitling and dubbing are of interest in two main respects as meaning making resources: – as language registers warranting research attention in their own right: this is a relatively recent stance, but has been gaining ground (see, e.g., Pérez-González 2007a: 8 and Chaume 2004 for early signs; see Pavesi and Guillot in Section 4 for more recent developments); – as a source of data for pragmatics: subtitling and dubbing give a bird’s eye view of how language users perceive and represent their communicative practices in a broad range of contexts, which is an increasingly recognized function of fictional text identified in the introduction in this volume (see also Dynel, Ch. 15, this volume). They have from early on been considered valuable educational tools, for language learning and for promoting intercultural awareness (see, e.g., d’Ydewalle and Van de Poe 1999; Gambier, Caimi and Mariotti 2015; Pavesi 2015). Representation cannot be, and is not, literal. This is an inescapable factor that is sometimes lost sight of in AVT discussions, but it is fundamental for research. Representation is the end-product of the unique three-way relationship between naturally occuring speech, fictional representations of dialogues driven by narrative efficiency and audience design, and interlingual representations conveyed through AVT modalities with different meaning-making capacities as a function of the features outlined above (see also Guillot 2016a). Two further aspects that are of particular bearing in this interaction are audience design and cultural a-synchrony (after Manhart 2000).

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The first aspect relates to the particular relationship in AVT with audience design and the so-called double layerness of filmic dialogues. These notions are derived from Bell (1984) and Vanoye (1985), the staple references in AVT studies for questions of participation structure in telecinematic discourse (see Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume for more recent models; Bednarek 2010; Brock 2015; Bubel 2006, 2008; Dynel 2011). There are tensions, in AVT practices and in research about AVT practices, between the horizontal diegetic plane of communication between the film characters and the vertical level of interpersonal communication between the film makers and recipients. In dubbing, for example, the drive to achieve synchrony is seen to promote a sentence-by-sentence approach and local intra-turn decisions that do not necessarily pay heed to the overall picture of the narrative (Pérez-González 2007a, and next section). Focus on the horizontal at the expense of the vertical is pervasive in research, with discussion of decontextualized text fragments at the horizontal level coming in the way of doing justice to the vertically driven situatedness of language choices and local indexing of pragmatic values (see Sections 3 and 4). The second aspect, cultural a-synchrony, refers to the cultural mismatch between the foreign that is shown and seen on screen (e.g. Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Russian) and the pragmatic expectations and perceptual frames triggered by text in the audiences’ own language in subtitling or dubbing (e.g. English and how politeness is enacted in speech acts, conversational routines, etc.). The mismatch is critical from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective. Like the interaction between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of film dialogues, it is often mentioned but seldom addressed in full (Guillot 2016a). The pragmatic implications as regards communicative practices and their interlingual representations across modalities are taken up in subsequent sections. As regards translation strategy, cultural a-synchrony results in a tussle between adapting the target text to recipients’ linguistic and cultural ways, means and expectations or, conversely, keeping recipients engaged with the source text ways and means. This conflict reflects traditional translation studies debates about ‘domestication’ (or acculturation) vs. ‘foreignization’ (after Venuti 1995: 19–21). In subtitling, with the co-presence of (oral) source and (written) target, the target text can be falsified by reference to its source. With no such residual exposure to the source, dubbing is almost unimpeded in its capacity to adapt to target practices, which is normally the strategy of choice. It is considered a domesticating practice on this count, with subtitling seen as foreignising, though no less liable to being challenged for compliance with target norms or diktats. Nornes (1999: 29, 2007: 178), a prominent rebel voice in AVT studies, has been vigorous in exposing subtitling as ‘corrupt’, i.e. as a practice that “conforms the foreign to the framework of the target language and its cultural codes”. He advocates instead what he describes as ‘abusive’ subtitling, that is subtitling that avoids the erasure of difference and seeks to “intensify the interaction between the reader and the foreign” (Nornes 1999: 29, 2007: 178). This is

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a form embodied in amateur practices like fansubbing, in their target-text resistant disregard of normative guidelines. Fansubbing emerged in the 80s as a reaction by fans of Japanese animated films (anime) to the flattening or domestication in US productions of anything linguistically or culturally Japanese. It has defied standard edicts about number of characters and lines, positioning and layout of text on screen, and made creative use of typography (e.g. to convey emotions), colours, animated writing, headnotes with glossing functions (e.g. to explain culture specific references, untranslatable Japanese terms, cultural connotations of objects or actions shown on screen) etc., in an interplay of diegetic subtitles and non-diegetic materials (Díaz Cintas and Muñoz Sánchez 2006; Hatcher 2005; Kayahara 2005; Pérez-González 2006, 2007b, 2014). With digitization, amateur practices have grown exponentially, well beyond Japanese fan clubs and perhaps not as experimentally, but just as unconventionally, across many languages and genres, including (cult) TV series mediated by devotees for devotees in languages not catered for by the industry, or to gain/give access to new releases (almost) at the same time as source audiences. Amateur subtitling in this sense provides a challenging counterpoint, for mainstream practices, and for re-assessing mainstream practices in terms of their own in-build creativity and capacity to mean. This completes this broad contextualization overview of main AVT features and aspects, and bird’s eye view of the complex issues embedded in dealing with AVT and telecinematic discourse from a pragmatics of fiction perspective. These issues are considered in greater detail with reference to two main angles from which pragmatics has been integrated into AVT research and discussion. The first is narrative aspects and characterization, the second is representation of communicative practices. 3.

Narrative aspects and characterization

Pragmatics’ explicit presence in AVT studies is traced back to narrative aspects and characterization, with a few landmark case studies, notably Hatim and Mason’s (1997) study of subtitling within a politeness framework (Brown and Levinson 1987), Remael’s (2003) analysis of sequential structure and interactive build up in dialogues and their subtitles from a social psychology perspective, PérezGonzález’s (2007a) appraisal of dubbed conversation from a systemic functional perspective, and more recently Desilla’s (2012) consideration of implicature in subtitling within a Relevance Theory framework. Desilla (2012) is one of very few empirical incursions into reception and audience responses. All four studies consider interpersonal dynamics through the vista of different features. These studies cumulatively provide an overview of the main themes related to narrative and characterization in AVT, and the complexities of accounting for them. This kind of work is underrepresented in AVT research.

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Hatim and Mason’s early (1997) study of subtitling focuses on how the interpersonal dynamics between characters is depicted across source dialogues and subtitles in relation to politeness, as an area of meaning identified in Mason’s earlier (1989) work as consistently sacrificed in AVT. The main research question is how this depiction may affect characterization and the narrative. The main conclusion is that “subtitling may create a substantially different interpersonal dynamic from that intended” (Hatim and Mason 1997: 89). Hatim and Mason argue that politeness is underrepresented in this mode of translating. They identify a “systematic loss in subtitling of indicators of interlocutors accommodating to each other’s ‘face-wants’” (Hatim and Mason 1997: 84) that affects how the interpersponal dynamics between characters is depicted. The loss observed is a consequence of related factors: constraints on translation choices and subtitlers’ concern to keep coherence in relation to audience design and guarantee readability and connectivity, the impact of inevitable omissions on target audiences, given that the seriousness of an FTA is a function of culture, and subject to the variables of the social distance and relative power of speakers and addressee. In a study of the French film Un Coeur en Hiver (1992), Hatim and Mason (1997) thus contend that the textual encoding of politeness provides a different picture in the target text, across a set of linguistic features of situation management and interpersonal dynamics in scenes showcasing a conflictual verbal relationship, disagreement, attempted reconciliation, challenge. Lexical choice, grammatical choice (pronouns, site of complex negotiations of face3), sentence form (imperative, interrogative), unfinished utterances, intonation, and ambiguity in reference produce different politeness strategies in the transfer to English. Form and punctuation also play a significant part in producing different politeness strategies in the target language. Examples are shown in extract (1) from Hatim and Mason (1997: 85–86), where the tension between the two characters is observed to undergo a shift. In the scene Camille, a violinist rehearsing a piece for Stéphane, a violin-maker who has improved the sound of the instrument, is seeking to provoke self-effacing and reticent Stéphane. The text on the right shows the subtitles.

3

Pronominal address for languages with a T/V differentiation like French, German, Spanish etc. is a particular conundrum for AVT, particularly when it plays a key role in characterization and narrative. This is the case for the French film Sur Mes Lèvres (2001) (Read my lips in English), for example, in which shifts back and forth between the two forms between the two protaganists underpin the structure of the film and character development, and are critical for the plot. How this is (successfully) handled in the English subtitles for the film through complementary use of features like register shifts and punctuation as cues is discussed in Guillot (2010).

Subtitling and dubbing in telecinematic text  (1) (Sample 5.1 from Hatim and Mason 1997: 71) Camille - Ça vous convient? [Does that suit you?] Stéphane - Oui, m  … [Yes, b  …] Camille - Dites. [Say it] Stéphane - Vous n’avez pas joué un peu vite? [Didn’t you play rather fast?] Camille - Si. Vous voulez l’entrendre à sa vitesse. [Yes. You wish to hear it at its normal pace.] Stéphane - Oui, si ça ne …

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Like it? Yes, but  … Go on. You took it a bit fast. Yes. You want to hear it at the right tempo? If you wouldn’t mind. [Yes, if it’s not …] […]

Preference for brevity and readability produce a concision in the target text that in English would cue solidarity and familiarity (minimizing face-threat, claiming common ground), for example; the strategy is at odds with the strategy observed in the source, where the character Camille does nothing to reduce threat to face and be conciliatory (Hatim and Mason 1997: 88). Remael’s (2003) study also applies to subtitling, but with application to the sequential structure of interactions and their interactive build-up. She, too, contends that subtitling affects characterization and narrative. Normed subtitles are found in her case study to enhance but impoverish characterization in films, and in so doing reinforce their core message or theme and underlying ideology, and cut out voices of dissent (Remael 2003: 225): they heighten contrasts and the dominance of main voices, but can in the process censor the voice of more minor characters and blunt nuances in characterization. Remael’s (2003) analysis draws on social psychology, with concepts from conversation analysis (CA), but places a focus on interpersonal and social relations rather than linguistic analysis. The study takes an interactionist approach that subscribes to Bakhtin and his concept of the dialogism of all communication, and pays heed to the double functioning of dialogues referred to in the previous section. Symmetry and assymetry are central concepts, within and outside the sequentially-built text of (context dependent and context renewing) dialogues. Turns, turn series and exchanges are not just dependent on locally generated dialogues for their representation, their structure reflects the dramatic form of the screenplay at large, as noted elsewhere (e.g. Chaume 2004; Pérez-González 2007a). This point is still frequently overlooked in this and other respects in AVT studies. Remael (2003) considers three interdependent aspects: (1) interpersonal dominance (quantitative, semantic, interactional, strategic, after Linell 1990); (2) the initiative-response (IR) system; (3) verbal and non-verbal and visual signs. She

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concurrently pays heed to the multimodality of dialogues in relation to their narrative functions in film (structuring, narrative-informative and interactional), shown elsewhere to be subject to shifts in film adaptations (Remael 2000). Her case study includes 15 scenes from Mike Leigh’s (1996) Secrets & Lies with Dutch sub­ titles. Her conclusion is that dominance patterns are confirmed and even enhanced, regardless of where they occur and their function in the film (exposition, development or denouement). Semantic dominance is unchanged, patterns of quantitative dominance are kept as well but are enhanced in about two thirds of cases (8) and weakened in one third (3), the pattern for interactional dominance is reversed in one case, confirmed in four, enhanced in ten (Remael 2003: 235). A few patterns are shown to emerge from the analysis. The proactive part of turns that keep dialogue and the story going are usually kept, but there are cuts in their retroactive parts, and cuts in deferring questions and in minimal responses, all performing a cohesive function. A further trend identified is that subtitles start to follow their own sequential logic and deviate from the sequentiality of source dialogues more than is required, to the point in places of turning them into monologues. Cohesion is maintained by visual clues and forward film movement and is not overly affected, but cuts can make characters appear more or less friendly or abrupt, for example, and affect characterization. This extends to rewriting and down-toning substandard language, which is also a by-product of reduction, as noted in the previous section. Example (2) from Remael’s study illustrates effects of reduction further. The scene refers to the sudden appearance of a half-sister in the character Roxanne’s life. Maurice is her mother Cynthia’s husband. The text on the right shows the Dutch subtitles. (2) (Remael 2003: 243–244; Leigh 1997: 92–95) Roxanne: ST 1363 Why didn’t you tell me, Maurice? Waarom ze je me niets? Maurice: I thought you knew. NO SUBTITLTING Roxanne: You used to tell me everything! Jij zei me altijd alles. Maurice: I’m sorry NO SUBTITLING Roxanne: ST 1364 Well, you’ve fuckin’ well let Je hebt me verraden. me down [You’ve betrayed me] Maurice: Oh, don’t say that! – Zeg dat niet!

For Remael, the scene demonstrates how subtitles are shown to give priority to the narratively prominent character (Roxanne). Her aggressive traits are considered to be accentuated in the subtitles, where the source dialogue is rendered as a mono-

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logue, despite the toning down of the non-standard swearword. At the same time, the cuts promote the film’s views on men and women. Remael echoes Hatim and Mason in her conclusions. In both studies, reduction, the core strategy for promoting readability with attendant syntactic and lexical adaptations, is the principal feature affecting verbal exchanges in pragmatic terms. In both, it is seen to affect characterization and the narrative that dialogues drive forward, despite the complementary role of visual clues. Reduction does not apply in dubbing to the same extent, but dubbing has its own pragmatic conundrums to contend with. Pérez-González’s (2007a) study applies to dubbing, i.e. to AVT in its oral medium and as an oral medium. He considers how interactional naturalness is construed in dialogues and their dubbing. The theoretical objective is to develop an identifiable framework to make sense of potential mismatches between source and dubbed dialogues as regards naturalness, and to inform professional practice. A main conclusion is that translation triggers shifts from appraisal to mood purposes, or telos, with the consequence that spontaneous sounding fragments of original dialogues are occasionaly neutralized by the overall artificiality of the interactional dynamics in the target language (Pérez-González 2007a: 34). The research is predicated on the observation that authenticity in dialogues is jointly accomplished by the fictional characters through a combination of prefabricated orality and spontaneous-sounding interaction over stretches of conversations. This is in line with input from stylistics, film studies and corpus-based translation. The success of the narrative and characterization-enhancing resources deployed in a film is thus contingent on the build-up of interpersonal alignments through a combination of both. Pérez-González explores how the dialectic between them is handled in translation, and assesses the impact of translators’ mediation on the authenticity of translated conversations in relation to the source, thus on charaterization and narrative. His framework draws on Martin’s (1992, 2000) systemic functional model of the exchange, and maps out the co-construction of interpersonal meaning through talk by coding moves (knowledge-oriented and action-oriented moves) and interpreting various motifs relating to different functions in the model: serial motif (ideational function), orbital and periodic motifs (textual and meta-functions), and prosodic motifs (the latter were introduced by Martin to tackle the relationship between the other three). These moves and motifs are analysed in relation to their telos, or purposes: mood and appraisal. Pérez-González (2007a) confirms that naturalness is sequentially construed by characters, through interplay of mood and appraisal telos: film dialogues are shown to rely heavily on mood telos, and thus to prioritize the transfer of ideational and textual meanings of interaction (mood) at the expense of the interpersonal aspects (appraisal). In their translation, there are further shifts from appraisal telos in the source text to mood telos in the target, resulting in spontaneous-sound-

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ing fragments in the source being neutralized in the target by artificiality in the interactional dynamics (Pérez-González 2007a: 34). Importantly, and in line with the conclusions in the two previous studies reviewed, Pérez-González (2007a: 34) ascertains that “naturalness in film dialogue is more amenable to systematic description when analysed over extended stretches of interaction rather than by ascertaining the presence/absence of certain linguistics items within the limits of a single turn or clauses”. The tendency to restrict analysis to very short segments of dialogues is pervasive in research in both film theory and dubbing studies, and results in neglect of the sequential dimension of dialogues. From a theoretical perspective, Pérez-González advocates systemic functional models of CA as “the most productive set of tools […] to gain insights into the interactive build-up of credible or realistic conversational dynamics in pursuit of specific narrative needs” (Pérez-González 2007a: 35). He notes the need for significant streamlining to make analyses more manageable, however. With these three studies, two of subtitling, one of dubbing, different aspects of interpersonal dynamics and interaction are represented – politeness, the sequential structure of interactions and dialogues, and naturalness. All converge in their conclusions that AVT has an impact on characterization and narrative, and converge, too, on the need to pay heed to the vertical dimension of dialogues, in practice, as noted earlier, and in research. Few studies have done so, which is a reflection of the methodological difficulties associated with dealing with full length source and target narratives, developing replicable frameworks of analysis, and collecting full-length film source and target dialogue data in the first place. The jury is still out on how compelling these conclusions may be overall beyond the realm of case studies, and indeed on the extent to which the phenomena documented affect audience perceptions and responses. Remael (2003) provides anecdotal evidence of audiences responding quite differently in two different contexts to their viewing of the Secrets & Lies, the Mike Leigh film that is the focus of her case study. Empirical studies of audience responses to full-length films rather than individual scenes are very few. Desilla’s (2012, 2014) work on the comprehension of implicit film dialogue meaning and implicature across cultures is an exception. Desilla draws on pragmatics, Relevance Theory and implicature to address a range of research questions and underlying assumptions about her data: Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) in their full length; and native speaker responses to the original and subtitled version of these films, in English and Greek respectively. She explores the extent to which British and Greek audiences understand implicatures projected by film makers, the extent to which the Greek audience’s comprehension of implicatures is similar to that of the British viewers, the contribution of non-verbal semiotic resources to implicature comprehension by the two audiences and, relatedly, how implicatures are cross-culturally understood. Her methodology involves multimodal transcription and pragmatic analysis of the 44 instances involving implicature in the data,

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and empirical testing of implicature comprehension by SL and TL audiences. She concludes that there is differential access to implicature both across and within source and target audience groups, with allusions challenging for source audiences too and confirming that response to films is not uniform. Implicature recovery is significantly smoother for source audiences, but a great deal of subjectivity and creativity is observed in their response. Significantly, she notes that failure to understand allusions intended by film makers does not always prove (completely) detrimental to film comprehension, and enjoyment. Desilla’s examples of how implicatures fulfil comedic and narrative functions, with reference to word play, intertextuality and metaphor, show complex interplays of all filmic resources, which are too complex to account for here. Just by way of a small example, there is in the film a scene that shows Bridget Jones travelling with her male protagonist in an open-top car and is an intertextual reference to a scene in the film To Catch a Thief (1955), in which romantically involved Grace Kelly and Cary Grant are travelling in a convertible. The reference is a pointer to the kinds of observations that underpin Desilla’s conclusions. It is reinforced with a verbal clue from Bridget’s narration,“suddenly feel like film goddess, in manner of Grace Kelly”, which may or may not trigger recognition of the implied reference. Together the reference and the additional clue add to the narrative texture and humour of the film, in particular for older generations who are more likely to have access to these references, whether from a Greek or English speaking background. But they do not in this instance come in the way of being able to grasp the intended comedic contrast between the romantic elegance and positive outcome evoked and Bridget’s self-confessed clumsiness, humble background and less glamourous relationship upshot. 4.

Communicative practices and representation

We have little research on responses to interlingual representations of communicative practices in films, and know barely anything about the picture of otherness they convey to audiences. Can these representations globally safeguard a link with the linguistic and cultural authenticity of the source? The question is hugely complex in its own terms. It is intimately dependent on description, for which, too, a great deal of work remains to be done. There has been a growing interest in dealing with AVT from the cross-cultural pragmatics perspective that is called for to develop an understanding of the relationship between source and target in the AVT representation of communicative practices within the multimodal film context. The picture is still far from clear. Film dialogues arguably provide us with insights in the way communities of language users perceive their own communicative practices. What story do they give when mediated through AVT?

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Communicative practices in intralingually mediated telecinematic discourse is the second domain with a pragmatics dimension represented in AVT studies. AVT research in this domain has been largely incidental, subordinated to documenting issues and typologizing strategies for dealing with them, with respect to recurrent concerns: culture specific reference, humour, the representation of sociocultural features like accents and non-standard language and orality in the shift across languages, and from speech to writing in subtitling. Research from an explicitly acknowledged pragmatics perspective is more recent. It has become a catalyst for work recognizing AVT modalities as meaning-making resources and registers in their own right, otherwise latent in many case studies and flagged sporadically in earlier work (e.g. Chaume 2004; Pérez-González 2007a). A catalogue of types of topics addressed across both types of study is shown below. It is based on a small-scale survey of work with a cross-cultural pragmatics dimension in main translation studies journals since their inception undertaken as background work for a project on AVT as cross-cultural mediation.4 These publications feature comparatively few articles on AVT, and fewer still with a pragmatic dimension, stated or otherwise.5 Most have come out in the last ten years or so, which is evidence of the mounting interest in the contributions they are making to the field: – Studies dealing with text features with a degree of implicit engagement with cross-cultural pragmatics encompass work on: visualized metaphors; deixis; L3 translation strategies; taboo words and AVT censorship; creativity/ideology issues; domestic culture awareness and translators’ active choice of creative language; comprehension problems or mistran-

4



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AHRC-Funded network project AH/N007026/1, Tapping the Power of Foreign Language Films: Audiovisual Translation as Cross-cultural Mediation (PI Guillot, Univeristy of East Anglia; Co-I Desilla, University College London; March 2016-September 2017). Between 2006 and 2015, there have been 13 papers in Jostran with a pragmatics dimension, 13 in Meta, 10 in Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 3 in The Translator, 1 in Target, 27 explicitly pragmatic in their approach, 13 implicitly. The budding interest in AVT is yet to be in evidence in pragmatics: the Journal of Pragmatics for example has just two (Cuenca 2008; Desilla 2012), Intercultural Pragmatics and Multilingua just one each (Pinto 2010; Petrucci 2012). Information for edited volumes has not been synthesized yet, but they are an important dissemination vehicle for AVT research and also feature a selection of relevant studies. See Pavesi, Formentally and Ghia (2014) for dubbing in particular, and Díaz Cintas and Neves (2015) for recent additions; also Bruti and di Giovanni (2012); Díaz Cintas, Matamala and Neves (2010); Freddi and Pavesi (2009); Şerban, Matamala and Lavaur (2011). See also Mubenga’s (2015) doctoral study of request and apology speech acts in the subtitling of English of five feature films in French.

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scriptions; humour translation in subtitling vs dubbing; relationship between the visual and verbal across source/target in visually expressed humour on screen; dubbing across genres; clichés and emotions; multilingualism; irony; intertextuality and impact on interpretation. – Studies with an explicit cross-cultural pragmatics dimension and approach include work on: pragmatic features of orality/naturalness in particular (familiarizers like ‘man’, ‘guys’, ‘buddy’, ‘dude’; adverbial intensifiers; phrasal verbs; interjections; discourse markers); lexicon; gay terms and identity; non-standard (‘F’) word into Catalan; speech acts (implicit compliments; advice; greetings); degrees of alignment between source/target fictional dialogue and spontaneous conversation (with application to demonstratives, pronouns); linguistic/cultural representation in pronominal (T/V) address, in conversational routines; prototypical sequences or communicative events in crime TV series; rewriting/positive spin on domestication; translation process/creativity in dubbing translation; punctuation as an expressive resource in subtitling; pragmatic errors in dubbing (interjections); creation/perpetuation of stereotypes; choice of high /low variety in diglossic society (asymmetries across English and Italian); implicature; norms; impact of subtitling and dubbing on the perception of films; narrative issues; unidiomatic language. The lists give an idea of the range of aspects covered. It is also indicative of the piecemeal nature of work to date and need for a more concerted approach to develop dependable critical mass across both types of study. In the first type of incidentally pragmatic studies, engagement with language in use is a by-product of dealing with translation, heeding the idiosyncracies of AVT modalities and enduring presence of the source, and attendant strain on the ideal of representational fidelity that has permeated mainstream practices: – how to deal with culture specific reference (or ECR, for extralinguistic culture-bound reference, Pedersen 2007, 2010), relating to socio-political or ethnographic entities tied up with culture, history, geography etc. unfamiliar to prospective target audiences; e.g. references in the Harry Potter series to the public school system, perplexing for most foreign audiences); – how to deal with humour; – how to deal with language variation (e.g. sociolects, idiolects, non-standard language, discussed as critical markers of voice and identity in Planchenault 2015 and this volume); – how to deal with orality.

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All these aspects are more or less an issue as a function of cultural and linguistic specificity and exacerbated in subtitling with the shift to writing. Interlingual transfer strategies range from literal translation to complete recreations, glossing and omissions across all these aspects.6 The reduction that was shown to apply to politeness features in the previous section thus extends in subtitling to all non-essential features from a referential point of view: from mitigating features in face threatening acts, as noted in Hatim and Mason (1997 and previous section) to orality features (filled/unfilled pauses, hesitations, discourse markers denoting particular verbal habits, conversational routines like greetings, leave takings, thanking, etc.), all with important functions for characterization and for representation, as shown in examples below. In dubbing, synchrony-driven local choices, or prefabricated orality relying on set phrases, vocatives etc., more or less calqued, or literally translated, from source to target are likewise a test to linguistic and pragmactic versimilitude. These inevitable adaptations have fed a loss leitmotiv particularly pervasive in studies with short decontextualized text samples or examples handled at the horizontal level, and popularized in public imagination by Coppola’s (2003) film Lost in Translation. This insistence on loss is arguably misguided, at least to some extent, as the second type of studies now demonstrates. Studies explicitly pragmatic in their approach have cast a different light on these phenomena, doing greater justice to the expressive potential that AVT modalities can derive from their specificities and laying the ground for reassessing the impact of cultural a-synchrony. There are different takes on these questions all the same: are the encoding adaptations that are an inevitable by-product of modality constraints conducive to misguided perceptions and stereotyping, or is there a capacity in subtitling and dubbing to activate their own interpretative modes, with selected features indexing internally set pragmatic values? In a study of advice in a corpus of Spanish films with English subtitles, Pinto (2010) observes increased directness in the target text, for example, resulting from recurring deletion of mitigating features and form shifts (questions in the negative offering advice indirectly turn into direct order imperatives, for example). He is, as a consequence, concerned with the stereotyping of Spanish people as rude. There are features other than reduction, however. In studies of the compliment speech act in subtitling and compliments and insults in subtitling and dubbing Bruti (2009a, 2009b) likewise identifies reduction and omission as recurrent strategies in sub-

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For discussion of all these aspects, see Díaz Cintas and Remael (2017); Chaume (2012) for dubbing; for ECRs, see Agost Canós (2004), Gottlieb (2009), Katan (1999/2004), Ramière (2010), Tomaszkiewicz (2001), Wyler (2003) among others; for humour, see Vandaele (2002), Chiaro (2005), Fuentes Luque (2010), Martínez Sierra (2005, 2009), Zabalbeascoa (2003, 2005); for orality, see Chaume (2004), Romero Fresco (2009) etc.

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titling, and notes a domesticating shift in the focus of compliments, thus cultural a-synchrony masking source pragmatic features (performance in English, personal qualities in the Italian rendering, as in e.g. ‘That was great’ vs ‘you were great’ [Sei stata grande] (from Tootsie, Bruti 2009a: 232). Significantly, however, she also points to distinctive uses of language, with locally negotiated and contextualized politeness. Her data features a more diverse set of linguistic expressions for compliments than is observed in sociolinguistic research, for example, and she observes a recurrence of some adjectives like ‘brilliant’, ‘terrific’, an avoidance of vague ones like ‘nice’, explicitness reinforcing visual or paralinguistic features in the source, and translation of overall gist rather than local segments. Evidence of AVT’s distinctiveness as a linguistic medium has been increasing, for both dubbing and subtitling, largely from input from pragmatics-driven work, in case studies and corpus work, the two main methodologies in AVT research. Pavesi (2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2014 inter alia) has been a pioneer for dubbing research, with corpus work that underscores dubbing’s creativity and the capacity of selected features to convey pragmatic meaning symbolically and non-randomly, with various functions: privileged carriers of orality (2009a), markers of otherness in pronominal address (2009b, 2009c), sites of cross-linguistic variation in demonstratives (2014), for example. Guillot identifies comparable mimetic processes in case study work for subtitling (in orality, syntax and punctuation, [T/V] pronominal address, greetings and leave takings, telephone exchanges) (Guillot 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2016a, 2016b). As in Bruti (2009a, 2009b), pragmatic situatedness and indexing is observed: subtitles are shown to set up their own conventions for representing verbal routines or setting communicative preferences, and to evolve their own internal pragmatic settings, in fictional language in which standard routines are in fact present only when they have a narrative function to fulfil. When present at all, they are adapted accordingly. Greeting sequences, for example, are observed to vary from extreme stylization to blatant protractedness for narrative effect. They are established early on as occurring in the films studied,7 in line with politeness expectations, and are thereafter taken as read and omitted. The greeting terms present in the few narratively significant scenes in which they are kept are shown to be subject to stylized pragmatic indexing. Just two terms are used in the English subtitles from French of Haneke’s (2005) film Caché/Hidden, for example, ‘Hi’ and ‘Hello’, the latter only on one occasion, where its occurrence corresponds to a dramatic point in the film (“Hello, Yves.”). The shift has nothing to do with rapport, but signals instead the seriousness of the situation: it is a preamble for an anguished question about the whereabouts of the caller’s son, who disappeared and is presumed to have been with Yves, his school friend, earlier in the day. Prag7



Caché/Hidden (2005), Paris (2008), Volver (2006) (see Guillot 2016b).

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matic indexing is also observed in the source dialogues in all three films in the case study. There is no one-to-one dialogues/subtitling matching of the values assigned to greetings in each, however, which confirms that subtitles evolve their own settings. Bonsignori, Bruti and Masi (2011) make related observations with reference to dubbing, and Bannon (2013) for professional translation practice. What applies to greetings applies to other types of conversational or politeness routines: ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ framings, for example, are often absent in the subtitles for service encounters, as in a market scene in Aldomovar’s Volver, where “Sure.” is established earlier on as evidence that politeness is adhered to. There it flags positive orientation to the foregoing exchange and it then does so in subsequent scenes. Terms of address can likewise be observed to take on internal pragmatic values. In the film Sur Mes Lèvres (2001) referred to earlier, shifts from title+surname to first name are shown to work as a mitigating device, in conjunction with punctuation, in face-threatening acts where the standard mitigating features in evidence in the source have been deleted (Guillot 2010, 2016a). Text stylization itself is critical. In subtitling, text is parred down in the extreme, but this is in itself pragmatically significant. The syntactically and lexically stylized form and paratactic presentation of subtitles in stand-alone units affiliate them to speech, and cue orality. They produce opportunities for heightened contrasts that may cue register shifts, and with other features like pragmatic indexing, of words, locutions or punctuation, produce text with its own brand of make-believe.8 So what is the story told? And where do we go from here? We are a long way away from being in a position empirically to appraise the relationship between source and target varieties of make-believe in telecinematic discourse and the impact of target kinds on recipients’ narrative appreciation and perceptions of otherness. This is an important goal for AVT research. But we are clearer that they are varieties or registers in their own right, and it is clear too that looking further into the pragmatics of AVT’s fictions is a means to this end. 5.

The story beyond

The impact of pragmatics on AVT research has been limited and is still largely piecemeal. Case studies and corpus work with a pragmatics stance have given

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This is in evidence increasingly, including in more recent studies with an incidental pragmatics dimension: studies of dubbing, for example, like Casarini (2012) for ‘Net Lingo’; Forchini (2013) for familiarizers; Matamala (2009) for interjections; Romero Fresco (2009) for orality/naturalness; or Ranzato (2010) for dialects; and studies of subtitling, like De Meo (2012) and Longo (2009) for dialects, for example.

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increasing visibility to its relevance in accounting for AVT practices and for their impact on characterization, narrative and the depiction of communicative practices. There are standard methodological weaknesses that need adressing, theoretical underspecification, underspecification of research questions, generalization on the basis of limited evidence and short decontextualized segments among them. For AVT specifically, they are a function of what research is currently identifying: neglect of the specificities of film language itself, for example, of the multimodal interdependence of resources in producing meaning, micro-level analyses overlooking the vertical plane on which pragmatic indexing and situatedness are contingent. More than anything perhaps, we need more data, combining full-length film dialogues, aligned AVT text encompassing both dubbing and subtitling to be set against corpora of naturally-occurring speech, as in the exemplary but still all too rare examples set in Italy in the Pavia and Forlí corpora (see, e.g., Baños, Bruti and Zanotti 2013; Freddi and Pavesi 2009). A next critical step will be to harness to the specificities of AVT the research into the pragmatics of fiction accounted for in this volume, on participation structure in telecinematic discourse (Messerli, Ch. 2), for example, on stance (Landert Ch. 16), on performed voices and identity (Planchenault Ch. 9), on difficult questions of verisimilitude (Dynel Ch. 15, on (im)politeness). Very little of this material has found its way into AVT studies, where it would provide additional methodological tools for building up the robust picture of its practices that AVT as a discipline in its own right is aspiring to. In this it will also benefit from the challenge of unfettered amateur practices that have thrived with the democratization of access to digital technology. What Pérez-González describes as the ‘demotic’ turn in AVT, with consumers-turned-producers’ or ‘prosumers’ (after Denison 2011) resisting the highly constraining conventions of the industry and cultural standardization, is another landmark. Self-mediated textualities and the transformational translation practices they promote are for him a source of insights into how AVT can be done, as against how the industry wants it done (Pérez-González 2014: 233–234). They bring to light audiences’ resilience and capacity to adapt to multiple forms of AVT despite the greater cognitive information load, and their appetite for access to the ‘otherness’ of source cultural and media products.9 Fansubbing and fandubbing are putting pay to representational fidelity in mainstream practices, freeing them from their normative straightjacket, as they have films already (e.g. in Slumdog Millionaire, with its non-conventional subtitles, the recent UK TV series of Sherlock 9



There are other older examples of less standard forms of subtitling or dubbing, like the voice-over used as a cheap alternative to dubbing in some countries like the Middle East and Asia or former Communist states, that willy nilly retain the authenticity of the source. In Poland, for example, a single (normally male) lektor or voice-over narrator whispers his translation over the audible original voices, in a self-effacing style with no attempt to mimic prosody etc. (Szarkowska 2009).

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with its multiple inner-thought and other visual adjuncts), promoting subjectivity as an alternative option for quality (Pérez-González 2012) and providing scope to reassess mainstream practices from the different angle they provide.

References Primary sources Bridget Jones’s Diary 2001 Dir. Sharon Maguire. Screenplay by Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis and Helen Fielding. StudioCanal, Working Title Films, Little Bird, Miramax and Universal Pictures. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 2004 Dir. Beeban Kidron. Screenplay by Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis, Adam Brooks and Helen Fielding. StudioCanal, Working Title Films, Little Bird, Miramax, Atlantic Television and Universal Pictures. Caché/Hidden 2005 Dir. Michael Haneke. Screenplay by Michael Haneke. Les Films du Losange. Leigh, Mike 1997 Secrets & Lies. London: Faber & Faber. Lost in Translation 2003 Dir. Sofia Coppola. Screenplay by Sofia Coppola. Focus Features, TFC, American Zoetrope and Elemental Films. Paris 2008 Dir. Cédric Klapish. Screenplay by Cédric Klapish. Ce Qui Me Meut Motion Pictures, StudioCanal, StudioCanal Image and France 2 Cinéma. Secrets & Lies 1996 Dir. Mike Leigh. Screenplay by Mike Leigh. Thin Man Films. Slumdog Millionare 2008 Dir. Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan. Screenplay by Simon Beaufoy and Vikas Swarup. Warner Bros., Celador Films, Film 4 and Pathé Pictures International. Sherlock 2010–present  Dir. Paul McGuigan et al. Screenplay by Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen Thompson. BBC, Hartswood Films and Masterpiece. Sur Mes Lèvres 2001 Dir. Jacques Audiard. Screenplay by Audiard and Tonino Benacquista. Sédif Ciné Pathé Image France 2 Cinéma, Canal+ and CNC. Tootsie 1982 Dir. Sydney Pollack. Screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal. Columbia Pictures, Mirage Enterprises, Punch Productions and Delphi Films. To Catch a Thief 1955 Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by John Michael Hayes. Paramount Pictures.

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Un Coeur en Hiver 1992 Dir. Claude Sautet. Screenplay by Claude Sautet, Jacques Fieschi, Jérôme Tonnerre and Yves Ullmann. Film Par Film et al. Volver 2006 Dir. Pedro Aldomovar. Screenplay by Pedro Almodóvar. Canal+ España, El Deseo, Ministerio de Cutura and TVE. Secondary sources Agost Canós, Rosa 2004 Translation in bilingual contexts. In: Pilar Orero (ed.), Topics in Audiovisual Translation, 63–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bannon, David 2013 The Elements of Subtitles: A Practical Guide to the Art of Dialogue, Character, Context, Tone and Style in Film and Television Subtitling, 3rd Ed. Blackstock, SC: Translation Studies Press. Baños, Rocío, Silvia Bruti, Serenella Zanotti (eds.) 2013 Corpus Linguistics and Audiovisual Translation: In Search of an Integrated Approach. Special Issue, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 21(4). Bednarek, Monika 2010 The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London: Continuum. Bell, Allan 1984 Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2): 145–204. Bonsignori, Veronica, Silvia Bruti and Silvia Masi 2011 Formulae across languages: English greetings, leave-takings and good wishes in dubbed Italian. In: Adriana Şerban, Anna Matamala and Jean-Marc Lavaur (eds.), Audiovisual Translation in Close-Up: Practical and Theoretical Approaches, 23–44. Bern: Peter Lang. Brock, Alexander 2015 Participation frameworks and participation in televised sitcom, candid camera and stand-up comedy. In: Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec (eds.), Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions, 27–47. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levison 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bruti, Silvia 2009a The translation of compliments in subtitles. In: Jorge Díaz Cintas (ed.), New Trends in Audiovisual Translation, 226–238. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Bruti, Silvia 2009b Translating compliments and insults in the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogues: Two sides of the same coin? In: Maria Freddi and Maria Pavesi (eds.), Analysing Audiovisual Dialogue: Linguistic and Translational Insights, 143–163. Bologna, IT: CLUEB. Bruti Silvia and Elena Di Giovanni (eds.) 2012 Audiovisual Translation across Europe: An Ever-Changing Landscape. (New Trends in Translation Studies 7.) Bern: Peter Lang.

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Díaz Cintas, Jorge 2012 The manipulation of audiovisual translation. META 57(2): 279–293. Díaz Cintas, Jorge 2013 Subtitling: Theory, practice and research. In: Carmen Millán-Varela and Francesca Bartrina (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, 273–287. London: Routledge. Díaz Cintas, Jorge, Anna Matamala and Josélia Neves (eds.) 2010 New Insights into Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility: Media for All 2. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Díaz Cintas, Jorge and Pablo Muñoz Sánchez 2006 Fansubs: Audiovisual translation in an amateur environment. Jostran: The Journal of Specialised Translation 6: 37–52. http://www.jostrans.org/issue06/ art_diaz_munoz.php [accessed on May 23, 2016] Díaz Cintas, Jorge and Josélia Neves (eds.) 2015 Audiovisual Translation: Taking Stock. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Díaz Cintas, Jorge and Aline Remael 2007 Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling. Manchester, UK: St Jerome. d’Ydewalle, Géry and Marikje Van de Poe 1999 Incidental foreign-language acquisition by children watching subtitled tele­ vision programs. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 28(3): 227–244. Dynel, Marta 2011 ‘You talking to me?’ The viewer as a ratified listener to film discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 43(6): 1628–1644. Forchini, Pierfranca 2013 A diachronic study of familiarizers (‘man’, ‘guys’, ‘buddy’, ‘dude’) in movie language. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 21(4), 504–525. Freddi, Maria and Maria Pavesi 2009 Analysing Audiovisual Dialogue: Linguistic and Translational Insights. Bologna, IT: CLUEB. Fuentes Luque, Adrián 2003 An empirical approach to the reception of AV translated humour: A case study of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. The Translator 9(2): 293–306. Gambier, Yves 2003a Screen transadaptation: Perception and reception. Screen Translation. Special Issue, The Translator 9(2): 171–189. Gambier, Yves (ed.) 2003b Screen Translation. Special Issue, The Translator 9(2). Gambier, Yves 2013 The position of audiovisual translation studies. In: Carmen Millán-Varela and Francesca Bartrina (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, 45–59. London: Routledge. Gambier, Yves, Annamaria Caimi and Cristina Mariotti (eds.) 2015 Subtitles and Language Learning: Principles, Strategies and Practical Experiences. Bern: Peter Lang. Gottlieb, Henrik 1998 Subtitling. In: Mona Baker (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 1st Ed., 244–248. London: Routledge.

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Gottlieb, Henrik 2009 Subtitling against the current: Danish concepts, English minds. In: Jorge Díaz Cintas (ed.), New Trends in Audiovisual Translation, 21–43. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Guillot, Marie-Noëlle 2007 Oral et illusion d’oral: Indices d’oralité dans les sous-titres de dialogues de film. META 52(2): 239–259. Guillot, Marie-Noëlle 2008 Orality and film subtitling: The riches of punctuation. The Sign Language Translator and Interpreter 2(2): 127–147. Guillot, Marie-Noëlle 2010 Film subtitles from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective: Issues of linguistic and cultural representation. The Translator 16(1): 67–92. Guillot Marie-Noëlle 2012 Stylization and representation in subtitles: Can less be more? Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 20(4): 479–494. Guillot, Marie-Noëlle 2016a Cross-cultural pragmatics and audiovisual translation. In: Sara Ramos Pinto and Yves Gambier (eds), Audiovisual Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges, Special Issue, Target 28(2) 288–301. Guillot, Marie-Noëlle 2016b Communicative rituals and audiovisual translation: Representation of otherness in film subtitles. META 61(3): 1–21. Hatcher, Jordan S. 2005 Of otakus and fansubs: A critical look at anime online in light of current issues in copyright law. SCRIPTed 2(4): 514–542. http://www2.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/ script-ed/vol2–4/hatcher.asp [accessed on May 23, 2016] Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason 1997 The Translator as Communicator. London: Routledge. Katan, David 2004 Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators, 3rd Ed. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome. Kayahara, Matthew 2005 The digital revolution: DVD technology and the possibilities for Audiovisual Translation Studies. Jostran: The Journal of Specialised Translation 3: 64–74. http://www.jostrans.org/issue03/art_kayahara.php [accessed on May 23, 2016] Koolstra, Cees M., Allerd L. Peeters and Herman Spinhof 2002 The pros and cons of dubbing and subtitling. European Journal of Communication 17(3): 325–354. Kozloff, Sarah 2000 Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Linell, Per 1990 The power of dialogue dynamics. In: Ivana Marková and Klaus Foppa (eds.), The Dynamics of Dialogue, 147–177. Hemel Hampstead, UK: Harvester & Wheatsheaf. Longo, Abele 2009 Subtitling the Italian South. In: Jorge Díaz Cintas (ed.), New Trends in Audiovisual Translation, 99–108. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

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Manhart, Sybille 2000 ‘When worlds collide’: Betrachtungen über fremde Kulturen im filmtranslato­ ri­schen Handlungsgefüge. In: Mira Kadric, Klaus Kaindl and Franz Pöchhacker (eds.), Translationwissenschaft: Festschrift für Mary Snell-Hornby zum 60. Geburtstag, 167–181.Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. Mason, Ian 1989 Speaker meaning and reader meaning: Preserving coherence in screen translating. In Rainer Kölmel and Jerry Payne (eds.), Babel: The Cultural and Linguistic Barriers between Nations, 13–24. Aberdeen, UK: Aberdeen University Press. Martin, James Robert 1992 English Text: System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Martin, James Robert 2000 Factoring out exchange. In: Malcolm Coulthard, Janet Cottterill and Frances Rock (eds.), Discourse Analysis VII: Working with Dialogue. Selected Papers from the 7th IADA Conference, Birmingham 1999, 19–40. (Beiträge zur Dialogforschung 22.) Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Martínez Sierra, José 2005 Translating audiovisual humour: A case study. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 13(4): 289–296. Martínez Sierra, José 2009 The challenge of translating humour for dubbing: Some problematical issues. In: Angelika Goldstein and Biljana Golubović (eds.), Foreign Language Movies – Dubbing vs. Subtitling, 129–149. Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovač. Matamala, Anna 2009 Interjections in original and dubbed sitcoms: A comparison. META 54(3): 485–502. Millán-Varela, Carmen and Francesca Bartrina (eds.) 2013 The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies. London: Routledge. Mubenga, Kajingulu Somwe 2015 Film Discourse and Pragmatics in Screen Translation. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing. Nornes, Abé Mark 1999 For an abusive subtitling. Film Quarterly 52(3): 17–34. Nornes, Abé Mark 2007 Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. O’Connell, Erin 2007 Screen translation. In: Piotr Kuhiwczak and Karin Littau (eds.), A Companion to Translation Studies, 120–133. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. O’Sullivan, Carol 2011 Translating Popular Films. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Sullivan, Carol 2016 Imagined spectators: The importance of policy for audiovisual translation research. Audiovisual Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges. Special Issue, Target 28(2): 261–275.

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14. (Im)politeness in fiction Urszula Kizelbach Abstract: The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the potential of the linguistic notion of politeness, generally understood as cooperative behaviour, as a tool of literary analysis. Politeness in fiction has so far been used mainly on the intradiegetic level of literary communication as a means of characterization and plot development. Relatively few studies (Jucker 2016) point to and appreciate the role of politeness as a mediator between the narrator and the reader on the extradiegetic level of communication. The chapter provides an overview of critical studies on politeness and impoliteness based on the examples of the works of (mostly) English literature from the Early Modern period through the long eighteenth century up to contemporary times. It demonstrates the transdisciplinary capacity of politeness, since rarely are politeness studies on fiction limited solely to discussions on politeness. Politeness in fiction is analysed in a wider pragma-stylistic context along with Speech Act Theory, Gricean pragmatics, Relevance Theory, and Critical Discourse Analysis. “Politeness … or a culturally induced sensitivity to politeness, is mankind’s patient, sleepless super-ego”. (Sell 1991: 215)

1.

Introduction: Why analyze fiction from a pragmatics perspective

Philip Sidney in his Apology for Poetry (1595) says that a poet “nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth” (Sidney [1595] 1952: 132). Literature is a collection of fictional texts which have no commitment to truth: in literature “to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false” (Sidney 1952: 132). Fiction is any literary narrative, be it prose or verse, which is invented instead of being an account of events that really happened (Abrams 1999: 94). Searle ([1979] 1981: 64–65) argues that a work of fiction may not be an assertion of fact and, thus, may not be subject to truth-value judgements, but fictive utterances are meaningful according to the rules of nonfictional human discourse. Fiction can be and should be analysed pragmatically, because it is a fictive representation of human communication. Believing that fiction possesses different illocutionary acts from nonfiction is a mistake, because if this really was the case we would have to learn new meanings of words contained in the work of fiction to understand it. Speakers of language would have to learn the language anew, since every sentence in the language would have both a fictional and nonfictional meaning. Searle (1981) uses the example of the novelist Iris Murdoch, who, he argues, does not perform the illocutionary act of writing a DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-014 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 425–454. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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novel because such an illocutionary act does not exist. However, she pretends to make an assertion in writing the novel, or she acts as if she were making an assertion (Searle 1981: 64–65). Fictive utterances in all literary genres function “as if” they were real utterances under one condition – the author and the reader have to implicitly share the same set of conventions which Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1920: 52) poetically called “a willing suspension of disbelief”. Section 2 of this chapter first offers a definition of literary communication and politeness, which is understood as interactional cooperativeness. This is followed with an overview of pragmatic studies of fiction and drama from the perspective of politeness and impoliteness theory from the English Renaissance up until the contemporary times in three parts. The overview addresses further pragmatic theories and approaches, since (im)politeness is rarely discussed on its own and tends to be analysed next to other pragma-stylistic studies on literature. This only demonstrates how well politeness and facework combine with other pragmatic disciplines, for example, Speech Act Theory, Gricean pragmatics, Critical Discourse Analysis or Relevance Theory. Most recent studies on (im)politeness in literature rely on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) and Culpeper’s (1996, 2011) frameworks, which can be employed to describe the presented world and the characters in fiction. Few studies (Jucker 2016) draw attention to the role (im)politeness plays in the interaction between the narrator and the audience or how the literary text itself can be “(im)polite” towards its readers. This chapter points to the fact that (im)politeness theory can not only serve as a means of characterization or plot development in fiction, but also reveal its full potential for describing the (im)polite narrator-reader communication (for a similar point see McIntyre and Bousfield 2017). 2.

(Im)politeness in fiction: An overview

Let me begin this overview by defining what I understand as politeness within literary communication. Literary communication is “a communicative process”, in which writers interact with their audience (Hess-Lüttich 1991: 225). I want to argue that the communication between the narrator and the reader in fiction can be compared to human communication, insofar as both are based on politeness, or, to be more precise, on the mutual cooperation of its participants. Brown and Levinson assumed politeness to be a system for the mitigation and softening of face-threatening acts (FTAs), which are verbal acts posing a threat to a person’s face. In order to avoid a breach in communication every threat1 needs a mitigating statement or a kind of “verbal repair” in the form of a polite formula according

1



Apart from instances of emergency, when a direct threat to the other’s face is minimized, and doing an act baldly, without redress, is primarily in the hearer’s interest. For exam-

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to Brown and Levinson’s theory (Brown and Levinson 1987: 69, 95; Mills 2003: 58–59). To follow Leech (1980: 19), politeness is “strategic conflict avoidance … measured in terms of the degree of effort put into the avoidance of a conflict situation, and the establishment and maintenance of comity”. Kasper (1990: 194) sees communication as a “fundamentally dangerous and antagonistic endeavor” with politeness functioning as a set of “strategies available to interactants to defuse the danger and to minimalise the antagonism”. In contrast, Fraser (1990: 233) claims that “[p]oliteness is a state that one expects to exist in every conversation; participants note not that someone is being polite – this is the norm – but rather that the speaker is violating the [conversational contract]”. Watts (2003: 15) notes that politeness should not only be associated with “polished” behaviour or “socially appropriate” behaviour, but rather with “cooperative social interaction and displaying consideration for others”, which he considers to be universal characteristics for human societies. Politeness is similarly understood by Arndt and Janney (1985: 282), who define it as “interpersonal supportiveness”. Politeness can be defined in many ways, but its common denominator for all approaches is the idea of mutual speaker-hearer cooperation in order to avoid friction and make communication work. Sell (1991: 215) sees cooperativeness as “intrinsically polite”. There is another similarity between literary communication and politeness as viewed through Brown and Levinson’s framework. For the purpose of their theory Brown and Levinson construct a Model Person (MP), defined as an ideal speaker of a language, who is fluent in language and willing to communicate and who is equipped with “rationality” (logical reasoning) and “face” (a want to be unimpeded in speech and approved of by other interactants) (Brown and Levinson 1987: 58). The MP can be subject to criticism, because it represents a construct rather than a living person; however, the notion of the MP well reflects the mechanism of the politeness and face theory. Similarly, narrative fiction generates two constructs – that of the “implied author” and the “implied reader”.2 The “implied author” is the author’s “second self” (Booth [1961] 1983: 151), who can only assume the knowledge or (mental, moral, social, etc.) predispositions of their readers (Leech and Short [1981] 2007: 209). The “implied reader” is a “hypothetical personage” who shares with the author the same background knowledge and presuppositions or sympathies and standards of what is good or bad, right or wrong (Leech and Short 2007: 209). Fludernik ([2006] 2009: 26) claims that the “implied reader is constructed by the critic who predicates a particular reader response to the work”, in other words, the author must assume such a reader to exist. Thus, the real reader (for example, Urszula Kizelbach) may perceive the “implied reader” as an “ideal

2



ple, sympathetic advice or warnings, as in: “Your wig is askew; let me fix it for you” or “Careful! He’s a dangerous man” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 69). Both terms coined by Booth (1961).

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reader” or “the perfectly insightful reader who understands the writer” (Selden, Widdowson and Brooker 2005: 48), but she may not necessarily assume this role. The “implied reader” is “a projection from the text” (Fludernik 2009: 23), and it is the role that the real reader may or may not want to embrace. See also Messerli (Ch. 2, this volume) on the complex participation structure in fiction. Turning now to an overview of research on (im)politeness in fiction, I can state that recent studies have shown that pragmatic theories can serve as a mode of characterization of the presented world and/or their characters. Pragmatic analyses of Shakespearean drama involve both qualitative and quantitative methods in the study of politeness and impoliteness (Bousfield 2007; Brown and Gilman 1989; Culpeper 1996, 2001; Kizelbach 2014; Kopytko 1993, 1995; Rudanko 1993, 2006), Speech Act Theory (Kizelbach 2013; Porter 1979; Rudanko 1993), the Gricean Cooperative Principle (Rudanko 2007), and Relevance Theory (Clark 2014). Most studies on Early Modern English drama demonstrate the interdependence of (im)politeness and facework. Kopytko (1993, 1995) notes a shift from positive politeness in Shakespeare’s discourse to negative politeness in present-day British English (see also Taavitsainen and Jucker 2010: 161). Culpeper (1996, 2001) and Kizelbach (2014) discuss the role of power and distance in (im)politeness, showing for example that both the position of high power and greater social distance between characters encourage impolite and manipulative behaviour towards an interactant. Rudanko (2007) points to the role of the Gricean Maxims in recognizing deception as well as the function of some speech act verbs, which are inherently face-threatening and contribute to positive and negative “nastiness” (Rudanko 2006). Bousfield’s (2007) analysis confirms the idea that impoliteness is always intentional and that it is recognized by the offended party, and also that indirect impoliteness can be more face-threatening than an impolite attitude expressed directly (for different views, see Culpeper 2010; Locher and Watts 2008; Terkourafi 2008). The pragmatic studies of English eighteenth-century politeness show that politeness is a product of economic and social changes – the development of commerce and the emergence of the middle class. It is associated with a set of social practices, such as polished manners, or sociability in conversation, thus leading to promoting correct speech and the standardization of English (Watts 2002) through the publication of grammar and spelling books (Locher 2008). The end of the century witnesses a decline of politeness as a social value (education, polished behaviour) and its reduction to a mere form of etiquette (Fitzmaurice 2010). Davidson’s (2004) analysis of Jane Austen’s fiction investigates politeness as tact and civility. She claims that female modesty and tact involved hypocrisy, which was a desirable quality in young ladies who found themselves in the position of social dependence. Jucker (2016) views politeness as a complex set of interactions between the author and the reader on both intradiegetic and extradiegetic levels in drama. (Im)politeness, as has been emphasized above, is rarely discussed in isolation espe-

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cially in modern pragmatic studies on contemporary fiction and drama. Much as these studies acknowledge the influence of Searle, Austin or Grice, their approach is that of “neo”- or “post”-Searle, Austin and Grice, and involves cooperation with modern trends in (literary) pragmatics, for example Relevance Theory (Chapman and Clark 2014; Clark 2009, 2014), Critical Discourse Analysis (Carter and Simpson 2005; Chapman and Clark 2014) and Speech and Thought Presentation (Short 1996; Simpson 2004). 2.1.

(Im)politeness studies of the Early Modern English literature

In “Linguistic politeness strategies in Shakespeare’s plays”, Kopytko (1995) describes the interactional style of the society portrayed in Shakespeare’s plays by means of a quantitative analysis. Based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) and Brown and Gilman’s (1989) politeness studies, Kopytko develops positive and negative politeness strategies in relation to social variables (power, social distance, ranking of impositions) and psychological variables (positive affect, intimacy, cunning, importance, negative affect), believing that Brown and Levinson’s social variables are inadequate to give the full picture of Shakespearean dialogues. Four tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear) and four comedies (The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night) served as the corpus for extracting representative examples of sixteen positive and ten negative politeness strategies. Kopytko (1995: 515) emphasizes that his approach to verbal interaction is social-cognitive and not sociolinguistic, and he demonstrates that the interactional style in Shakespeare is characterized by “in-group positive politeness” rather than negative politeness, the style which is represented by Modern English speakers (see also Jucker 2008). For him the study of politeness involves not only analysing Brown and Levinson’s politeness strategies in communication but also forms of address. Kopytko’s own study lacks a quantitative account of forms of address in the plays and only focuses on positive and negative politeness strategies for “practical and methodological reasons” (Kopytko 1995: 538). He makes it evident that address forms can often function as “ritualised openings of discourse” and “pragmatically empty instances of pure form” (Kopytko 1995: 538). Hence they require more attention and a good degree of sensitivity to the pragmatic context. Rudanko (1993) in his study Pragmatic Approaches to Shakespeare analyses Othello, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens mainly from a Speech Act Theory perspective. However, his observations on the characters rely heavily on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) and Brown and Gilman’s (1989) politeness theories. There being no solid definition of impoliteness at the time, he concludes that Shakespeare’s dramatic figures are not necessarily intent on maintaining social harmony in conversation, and thus he invents a new strategy of “nastiness”, which is defined not as a mere “lack of politeness”, but rather as “adding something gratuitously to

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offend the hearer”, which is similar to “rubbing salt in the wound” (Rudanko 1993: 167). Following Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, Rudanko makes a further classification of the strategy into “positive nastiness” as “affronts directed to the hearer’s positive face”, and “negative nastiness” as “verbal action encroaching upon the hearer’s want to have his freedom of action unhindered and his attention unimpeded” (Rudanko 1993: 168), which seem to be mirror reflections of “positive” and “negative” politeness. In his examination of Timon of Athens Rudanko notes that some speech acts, in particular requests, are intrinsically face-threatening (however, his analysis based on speech act verbs is somewhat limited to specific contexts where specific words are used). Rudanko (2006) updates his analysis of “nastiness” in Shakespeare proposing a new strategy that would reflect unpleasant verbal behaviour, which he calls “aggravated impoliteness” (Rudanko 2006: 838). On the one hand, it is similar to impoliteness in its intentional action on the part of the speaker to cause social conflict and disharmony in communication. On the other hand, it constitutes “a more serious manifestation of ill will or malice than ‘mere’ impoliteness” (Rudanko 2006: 838). It is important that “aggravated impoliteness” is performed not to achieve some transactional goal but simply to offend the hearer, as is demonstrated in Timon’s intentional turning down requests from the Senators to come back as their leader. Another study by Rudanko (2007) is an analysis of deception which reveals covert violations of Gricean Maxims in Julius Caesar and Othello. In particular, it is this type of deception in discourse that is intended by the speaker to influence the hearer in order to change the course of their action (Rudanko 2007: 110). He gives an example of Decius, one of the conspirators, who tries to coax Caesar into coming to the Capitol, where he can be assassinated. Rudanko argues that the more indirectly Decius acts, the more successful he is in persuading Caesar to ignore Calphurnia’s ominous dream and to go to the Capitol hill. Decius violates, in a covert way, the Maxim of Quality (be truthful) and the Maxim of Quantity (be as informative as is required) when he lies to Caesar and hides his “covert intention”, which is defined here as “an intention the speaker does not want the hearer to recognize” (Rudanko 2007: 113). Much as the audience is able to recognize Decius’s first-order intention at the covert level (to kill Caesar on the Capitol hill), Caesar himself can only recognize the first-order intention at Decius’s overt level (Decius wants Caesar to come to the Capitol).3 From Rudanko’s analysis we 3



Some clarifications about the terminology are necessary. Rudanko’s (2007: 113–114) conceptual framework for analyzing deception pragmatically involves two types of deceptive verbal behaviour. A first distinction into: an overt intention (“an intention that the speaker wants the hearer to recognize”) and a covert intention (“[an intention] that the speaker does not want the hearer to recognize”). A second distinction into: a first-order intention (“an intention about the world, or about the world of the play”) and a second-order intention (“an intention about a first-order intention”).

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learn, first, that deception can arise from violating individual maxims covertly, as Decius “quietly and unostentatiously” (Grice 1975: 45) exploits the Gricean Cooperative Principle and the maxims. Decius’s deception is successful because Caesar cannot notice these violations on the character-character level of communication (Rudanko 2007: 116). However, the audience are able to notice the true intentions of Decius at the covert level as well as the fact that Caesar does not recognize them. In a pragmatic study of drama indirect deception can be part of the author-audience level of communication, in which the audience can pass judgments on the characters’ intentions to a far greater extent than in the case of “reallife dialogue” (Rudanko 2007: 110). Culpeper (1996) in his trendsetting study “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness” introduces the notion of “impoliteness” as a set of strategies designed to cause “social disruption”, which “are oriented towards attacking face, an emotionally sensitive concept of the self” (Culpeper 1996: 350). He notes that it is impoliteness and verbal conflict that revive dramatic dialogue and have a significant impact on the development of the characters and the plot. He provides a careful case study of (im)politeness strategies in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and highlights that the use of strategies by the Macbeths is conditioned by the situation of disequilibrium caused by the murder of Duncan and the characters’ willingness to re-establish equilibrium in the banquet scene when they wish to strengthen their social position and tighten the bonds with the Lords. Culpeper analyses Lady Macbeth’s famous speech “Are you a man?” (Act 4 Scene 3), in which she challenges Macbeth’s masculinity, suggesting Macbeth is not man enough to cope with fear and get over Duncan’s and Banquo’s deaths (Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost sitting at the table during the banquet). Lady Macbeth uses impoliteness to attack his face and make him “pull himself together” (Culpeper 1996: 365). She also expresses impolite beliefs and she flouts the Maxim of Quality in the very question – “Are you a man?” – as it is obvious that Macbeth is a man. Culpeper (1996: 366) points out that Lady Macbeth’s strategies are based mostly on positive impoliteness and sarcasm, which turn out effective in the course of the play, since Macbeth transforms from a weak man with a guilty conscience into a “desensitised murderer”. In Language and Characterisation (2001), Culpeper talks about the role of politeness in fictional characterization (see also Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, Ch. 4, this volume).4 Fictional dialogue, he says, works according to the dynamics of social interaction and involves a strategic and goal-oriented manip4



Culpeper expresses his indebtedness to Manfred Pfister (1988) and his classification into explicit and implicit characterization. The term explicit characterization applies when characters define themselves in explicit terms, in a straightforward manner, as in third-person narration novels. The term implicit characterization applies when the reader has to infer characterization from the character’s verbal behavior (Culpeper 2001: 164).

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ulation of language (Culpeper 2001: 235). Shakespeare’s characters in the same way as real people use polite linguistic strategies for maintaining harmony in communication or refer to impoliteness to manifest their privileged position. Also, the very same variables (power, distance, ranking of the imposition) matter in Shakespeare’s dialogues just as they matter in human interaction. For example, Culpeper (2001: 175) recalls Act 4 Scene 2 from King Richard III, the scene in which Buckingham reminds Richard of the promise he had given him in return for devising a plot to kill Hastings. Culpeper analyses numerous factors contributing to Richard’s impolite speech, for instance, the frequency and allocation of conversational turns and the volume of speech (Richard dominates this conversation and forces Buckingham to self-select), and topic control and interruptions (Richard often changes the subject to evade answering Buckingham’s questions and intrusions) (Culpeper 2001: 177). When his interlocutor urges Richard to give an answer to the question: “May it please you in resolving me in my suit?” (Shakespeare 2006: King Richard III, 4.2. 117), Richard replies: “Thou troublest me; I am not in the vein” (Shakespeare 2006: King Richard III, 4.2. 118), thus suggesting that he will not fulfil his wishes and grant him the Earldom of Hereford as a token of gratitude. Regarding the public context of this conversation as well as the fact that Richard calls Buckingham’s claim “begging” and compares him to a jack which strikes the bell of a clock as in “Because that like a jack thou keep’st the stroke / Betwixt thy begging and my meditation” (Shakespeare 2006: King Richard III, 4.2. 114–115), Culpeper believes Richard’s behaviour implies impoliteness, since “jack” means “a knave” and is a term of abuse (Culpeper 2001: 178). The same argument can be made with some other terms of address, for example Richard refers to Buckingham as “thou” (derogative, the speaker demonstrates their position of power) whereas Buckingham addresses Richard in deferential terms, such as “my Lord”, “your Highness”, “your Grace”, thus highlighting his position of subservience (Culpeper 2001: 179). Richard’s condescending manner indicates an impolite attitude together with his belittling terms of address; he is occupying the floor for most part of the conversational exchange or wandering off topic, which Culpeper classifies as the violation of the Maxim of Relation. However, Buckingham’s perseverance and boldness to stand up against his powerful (conversational) opponent is to be admired. After all, it is Richard who will back off from the conversation (Culpeper 2001: 180). Bousfield (2007) in “Never a truer word said in jest” describes the pragmatic dimension of a meta-theatrical scene of a role-play involving Prince Hal and Falstaff in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part 1. First, Falstaff pretends to be Hal’s father, King Henry IV, and next it is Hal who wishes to play the father. Bousfield (2007: 211) claims that in the first part of the role-play Falstaff manifests his friendship and devotion towards Hal by means of “mock politeness” or “banter”. Falstaff playing the part of King Henry IV calls Hal a “naughty varlet”, a sort of a “mischievous boy”, but his aim is not to offend. Rather, Falstaff, as a servant and faithful drinking companion, wants to strengthen their mutual bond (Bousfield

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2007: 211). When, however, it is Hal who plays his father in the second part of the performance, he uses the very same strategy, “banter”, but with the intention to offend. He calls Falstaff names and he really means it: “a huge bombard of sack”, “stuffed cloakbag of guts”, “roasted Manningtree ox with a pudding in his belly”. Bousfield calls Hal’s linguistic behaviour “impoliteness masked as banter” (2007: 211), where the impoliteness is intentional and no longer “unserious” (2007: 214). Impoliteness in this study of Shakespearean drama is used for the sake of the characterization of Prince Hal. It demonstrates that in drama, just like in real-life relationships, it is easier to offend from a position of power, because the speaker’s superiority over their hearers allows them to more freely produce “conflictive verbal FTAs” (Bousfield 2008: 72). After all, Hal attacks Falstaff’s positive face when he plays the king and not when he plays himself, the prince-troublemaker. Bousfield’s (2007) analysis also supports the argument that impoliteness is underlain by intentionality and can only be understood by taking heed of the context of the utterance. Fraser and Nolan (1981) claimed that no sentence is inherently polite or impolite. We often take certain expressions to be impolite, but it is not the expressions themselves but the conditions under which they are used that determines the judgment of politeness. (Fraser and Nolan 1981: 96)

The conditions in which Falstaff’s face is attacked resemble a king-commoner communication and in spite of the festive atmosphere of the Bore’s Head tavern, Prince Hal under the guise of revelry and play skilfully hides his intention to offend his interlocutor. Several conclusions can be drawn from this exchange. First, following Culpeper (2005: 37), Bousfield (2007: 211) argues that banter or “mock impoliteness” is not “genuine impoliteness”, because it is offensive only on the surface and holds true only in certain contexts. Here, all offensive terms can be applied to Falstaff on a regular basis, Falstaff simply is what Hal calls him, so, according to this framework, the impoliteness is “genuine”. Secondly, “impoliteness is not unintentional” (Culpeper 2005: 37), since the willingness of the speaker to offend the hearer is always present in the exchange and the offended party takes offence because they have recognized the speaker’s intention to offend. Falstaff feels offended, which we learn from his reaction. When Bardolph interrupts the role-play to warn Falstaff against the Sheriff, who is on his way to the tavern to arrest Falstaff for theft, Falstaff insists on continuing the role-play because he is anxious to address Hal’s abuses of his positive face (Bousfield 2007: 218). He is determined to protect his good name and shouts to Bardolph: “Out, ye rouge! Play out the play. I have / much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff” (Shakespeare 2002: King Henry IV, Part 1, 2.4. 471–472). Finally, Bousfield’s analysis demonstrates that indirectness in impoliteness can be even more offensive than expressing impolite attitudes directly. Culpeper (2005: 44) calls such attitude “off-record impoliteness”, when “the FTA is performed by means of an implicature but in such a way that one attributable intention clearly outweighs any others”. It must be

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noted that the carnivalesque context and the form of the exchange (role-play) serve the purpose of producing by Hal purposefully intentionally abusive FTAs towards Falstaff. Hal’s offensive terms suggest Falstaff’s undesirable qualities such as obesity, laziness or drunkenness. Finally, in The Pragmatics of Early Modern Politics, Kizelbach (2014) clarifies the idea of “performing kingship” in Shakespeare’s history plays. The study introduces a notion of “political face” (Kizelbach 2014: 258), which relates to modern pragmatic notions of face as an interactional and social construct (see Arundale 2006; Lim 1994; Spencer-Oatey 2007). She claims that strategic and goal-oriented policy-making in Shakespeare is based on Machiavellian dissimulation and theatrical performance/role-playing. Since the king’s “political face” served as a reflection of his social self, it was particularly vulnerable to attack. In this way, success in Realpolitik, which was a standard manner of policy-making in Early Modern Europe, depended on the king’s strategic management of negotiations and on saving face in public interactions. Shakespeare’s kings use both politeness and impoliteness in their political discourse; however, the analysis of the first tetralogy showed that too direct, “bald on-record impoliteness” is not advisable in politics (Kizelbach 2014: 257) – the kings lose face in public, and they are perceived as ineffective politicians (Harry Hotspur) or they lose power (Richard II). It is rather going “off-­ record” with impoliteness that helps conduct one’s policy effectively. For example, the Dauphin’s perplexing gift of tennis balls achieves a desirable effect, because it offends Henry by suggesting that he has not got over his damaged reputation as a good-for-nothing Prince Hal and that he will not make a good king. As a matter of fact, Act 1 Scene 2 of King Henry V shows two clever politicians who act indirectly. The French Dauphin in delivering a box of tennis balls through his messenger poses an indirect threat to King Henry’s face, wishing to humiliate him in public and make him fly with rage, which would only prove his immaturity. Henry’s response to Dauphin’s offence is sarcasm or “mock politeness”, which helps him save face in public when he is the most disturbed. Leech (1980: 144) sees “mock impoliteness” as “a friendly way of being offensive” and Culpeper (1996: 357) defines it as “mock politeness for social disharmony”, which stands in opposition to banter. Henry will use positive politeness in his sarcastic reply to the messenger, suggesting that he has recognized the Dauphin’s intention to offend: “We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us. / His present and your pains we thank you for” (Shakespeare 2001: King Henry V, 2.1. 260–261). In the final section of this scene he will turn to “on-record” impoliteness and aggressive language, which will this time serve as manifestations of power and military strength: “When we have matched our rackets to these balls / We will in France, by God’s grace, play a set” (Shakespeare 2001: King Henry V, 2.1. 262–263). Henry’s “conventional indirectness” (Kopytko 1995: 524–525) will be displayed as “negative politeness” in the scene of punishing traitors Cambridge, Scroop and Grey in Act 2 Scene 2. This verbal strategy allows him to do a harmful act (punish the traitors

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to their deaths) and to avoid responsibility at the same time. Henry, in a cunning way, inflicts punishment in the name of the people he represents as the king rather than in his own name, addressing the traitors thus: “Touching our person seek we no revenge, / But we our kingdom’s safety must so tender, / Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws / We do deliver you (Shakespeare 2001: King Henry V, 2.2. 175–178). Indirectness or “off-recordness” (Culpeper 2005: 44) pays off in politics to a much greater extent than openly shown hostility and “on-record” impoliteness. In this way, the term “pragmatics of politics” does not only denote the humanistic, realistic Machiavellian way of policy-making in the history plays, but it also mirrors the linguistic relations of power in Renaissance dramatic texts filtered through the pragmatic theories of face and (im)politeness. 2.2.

(Im)politeness in the studies on the long eighteenth century

The beginning of the eighteenth century marked a new model of behaviour based on a rational, emotionless debate between speakers. Polite discourse was formed as a reaction to the English Civil War (1642–1651), which was a result of a conflict between two political factions, the Whigs, who opposed absolute monarchy, and the Tories, supporters of King Charles I. The Glorious Revolution (1688), with the Parliament inviting William of Orange to the throne and rejecting King James II, served as a compromise between the two sides – Tories gave up their claims of divine-right absolutism and accepted the Whig model of constitutional monarchy with limited powers.5 Finally, the Licensing Act of 1695 ended political censorship of the press and unleashed a tide of print. This significantly changed the world and social relationships, since until then it was the Court that dictated patterns of social behaviour. Whigs, as the party of liberty who fought against courtly tyranny, opposed the “false sociability” (Klein 1994: 184) of the absolutist French court. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, a moralist and political writer, one of the prominent leaders of the Whig party, drew a distinction between “courtly” and “true” politeness (Klein 1994: 176). According to Shaftesbury, the politeness at court was artificial and affected by courtly hierarchy and the need to flatter those who had power. Courtly politeness was far from the ideal of “directness, openness and honesty” (Klein 1994: 183), and stood in opposition to genuine politeness, a moral and cultural model of behaviour which he defined as “a true Relish and simplicity in Things or Manners”.6 5 6



http://www.britannica.com/topic/Whig-Party-England (accessed on April 1, 2016). Shaftesbury in a letter to Pierre Coste, the Huguenot émigré, on the psychological influence of the Court: “Where a Court absolutely governs, it is too dazzling a thing to suffer its Vices and Corruption to be understood or thought as it deserves. To tell a royall bred Gentleman, the Pupill of a Court, or any one who […] has look’d with admiration on the great doings there – to tell such a one (I say), an adorer of Court-greatness and Polite-

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The Tatler (1709–1712) and The Spectator (1711–1712) were the first popular magazines which served as common platforms of rational public debate on the topics of politics, morality and manners. London coffeehouses played the role of “modern” institutions in which city dwellers would not only drink beverages but also meet and read and exchange their views in a rational and refined way. Klein notes that much as the debates in coffeehouses and the print culture might not have directly corresponded to the canons of politeness in the eighteenth century, Steele’s and Addison’s periodicals became “one arena in the struggle for politeness” (Klein 1994: 12). Politeness as a “modern” theory of social interactions presupposed not only polished manners displayed at the table during a conversation but also a certain kind of morality, which imposed on interactants a mutual respect that allowed for differences of opinions and “differences among selves” (Klein 1994: 3).7 This new model of life cherished social gatherings and, as The Spectator would often demonstrate, showed that all social groups can be involved in a debate and enjoy life through conversation. Politeness in conversation was based on “verbal agreeableness” and “pleasing” one’s interlocutor(s), allowing for the equality of all participants and offering each participant an “opportunity for self-display” (Klein 1994: 4) at the same time. The growing importance of the middle class and the development of commerce exerted an enormous impact on what Watts (2002: 155) calls ‘polite behaviour’, ‘polite language’ and ‘polite education’. Watts (2002: 155) claims that the British society in the eighteenth century was “obsessed” with the idea of politeness, which was not only displayed through polished manners and morals, but also through correct speech. Polite language started to be synonymous with standard language, as it was through education and the acquisition of Standard English that the middle classes could enter the sphere of the polite gentlemanly society. The need for correcting and purifying the English language of artificial affectation and antiquated phrases or harmful dialects is voiced by Jonathan Swift in A Proposal for

7



ness; that there is a Politeness far beyond, that there is hardly any thing there, that can possibly be of a true Relish and simplicity in Things or Manners, this would be astonishing, and have little Effect more than to raise Disdain perhaps or Contempt”. P.R.O. 30/24/20/118, Shaftesbury to Pierre Coste, November 15, 1706 (Klein 1994: 175). Langford (2002: 312) differentiates between The Spectator mode and the Shaftesbury mode of the eighteenth-century politeness, suggesting that both modes were focused on moral conversation conducted in a gentlemanly manner; however, this was with slight differences (Fitzmaurice 2010: 89). The politeness disseminated by The Spectator was addressed to the middle classes, providing them with a code of behaviour and moral education that would earn them a high place in a social hierarchy to which they aspired. The Shaftesbury politeness was more restricted and elitist with its focus on good taste, which was perceived as an “inborn” quality and “an attribute of the true gentleman” (Watts 2002: 162).

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Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), in which he presents the concerns of “some very judicious Persons, with whom [he] consulted” (Swift [1712] 2001: 6) over declining Standards of English use and the general deterioration of the language (Watts 2002: 163–164). Swift claims that the heyday of the English language lasted from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I until the Great Rebellion of 1642 and argues that “nothing would be of greater Use towards the Improvement of Knowledge and Politeness, than some effectual Method for Correcting, Enlarging, and Ascertaining our Language” (Swift 2001: 6).8 Thus, from “a social ideal” reflected by polished manners and “the art of polite conversation” politeness becomes linguistic correctness, the standard language spoken by polite and educated society in the second half of the eighteenth century (Stein 1994: 8). According to Locher (2008: 131), a natural corollary of language standardization was a growing number of grammars, which differentiated ‘proper’, ‘correct’, and ‘polite’ use of English from ‘improper’, ‘low’ and ‘incorrect’ use of English.9 Grammar and spelling books were practical tools in the hands of social climbers from the middle class on their way to acquiring Standard English in order to be part of “polite” society (Locher 2008: 139).10 Politeness in the eighteenth century was indicative of a set of social practices, for example having polite conversations, sociability in communication, and displaying refined manners and behaviour in public (Brewer 1997: 102). Historians of the period (Carter 2002; Langford 2002) note that in the course of the century the meaning of politeness as the facilitation of interaction by its participants evolved into practising good manners to deceive the hearer. Fitzmaurice (2010: 88) states that towards the end of the eighteenth-century politeness declined as a value and started to be associated with social etiquette. Tea table manners of handling the Swift blames Restoration drama for spoiling the English language with “affected Phrases” (Swift 2001: 19) and “new, conceited Words […] borrowed from the current Style of the Court” (Swift 2001: 19–20). This serves as a direct attack on the English Court, which is accused of lowering the standards of propriety of speech and correctness and is, therefore, called “the worst School in England for that Accomplishment” (Swift 2001: 19). Swift (2001: 19) then calls for “the Education of our young Nobility, that they may set out into the World with some Foundation of Literature, in order to qualify them for Patterns of Politeness”. 9 Michael (1997: 41) notes that from the 1750s until the end of the eighteenth century 99 new English grammar books were published, and together with new editions or reprints of old grammars this number amounted to 345 (see also Locher 2008: 129). 10 From Locher’s (2008: 130) analysis of a vast array of the eighteenth-century grammars it stems very clearly that a) grammars were written for young men, women, children, schools and foreigners to make up for the lack of the English language being taught in schools; b) grammars had both a ‘prescriptive’ and ‘proscriptive’ nature, because they not only presented ideal sentences and advised how the language should be spoken, but also provided the reader with examples of the faulty use of English. 8

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knife and fork well, or debates involving polite rules of conversation had a façade of a mere performance.11 Davidson’s book Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness (2004) argues that “hypocrisy” in the eighteenth-century writings was no longer stigmatized as a flaw but started to be associated with broadly understood “politeness”. Civility in a natural way involved some role-playing and even lying, and so insincerity or hypocrisy would often be naturalized under the epithet “good manners”. Swift, Hume and Burke were the main proponents of thus understood politeness, arguing so much in favour of manners as the cornerstone of civilization and social life that they sanctioned hypocrisy as a moral virtue. Politeness, actually, functioned as an umbrella term for other manner-related notions, for example “modesty”, “gallantry”, and “self-control” (Davidson 2004: 2). Davidson (2004) shows how in the eighteenth century the boundary between hypocrisy and civility becomes blurred and how the ideal of veracity starts to become problematic. Swift, Mandeville and Locke discuss politeness as manners in the context of power and gender, reserving hypocrisy as a privilege of the upper classes and excluding the class of servants from the rubric of positive hypocrisy. The mid-eighteenth century witnesses the confrontation between Mary Woolstonecraft and Edmund Burke over the morality of the French Revolution. Much as Burke in the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) uses the word “chivalry” to be understood as a body of manners that retain social stability, Woolstonecraft calls for “a revolution in manners” (Davidson 2004: 76) to change the relationship between men and women and save women from the obligation of taking the social pose of modesty, which promotes insincerity. This is how in the nineteenth-century writings hypocrisy as “tact” is redefined as a virtue of the middle class and predominantly a female virtue. Hypocrisy, sincerity and politeness in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction are discussed on the basis of two novels in Davidson (2004): Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740–1741), and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). In Pamela the female protagonist’s safety in the story depends on her ability to convince the reader that she is not a hypocrite. In order to demonstrate that Pamela needs to exercise dissimulation and display false modesty to remain a decent maiden and a respectable female servant, Richardson provides plenty of opportunities for Mr. B, his sister and friends to expose her hypocrisy. Pamela does act as a hypocrite: however, her deceptiveness is occasionally mitigated by her female virtue and vulnerability (Davidson 2004: 109). She is a prisoner in B.’s house, but in order to protect herself from his sexual advances she reminds B. in her letters about her vulnerable position as a social inferior and appeals to his

11

Ideas about the eighteenth-century politeness taken from a scholarly debate “In Our Time: Politeness” hosted by Melvyn Bragg at BBC Radio 4 at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/p004y29m (accessed on March 20, 2016).

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sense of honour, claiming that B. as a member of the upper class is supposed to set an example for her rather than abuse her: do you think, Sir, (pardon your poor Servant’s Freedom; my Fears make me bold; do you think, I say) that your general Assurances of Honour to me, can have the Effect upon me, that, were it not for these Things, all your Words ought to have? – O good Sir! I too much apprehend, that your Notions of Honour and mine are very different from one another: And I have no other Hope but in your continued Absence. If you have any Proposals to make me, that are consistent with your honourable Professions, in my humble Sense of the Word, a few Lines will communicate them to me, and I will return such an Answer as befits me. (Richardson 1742: 138–139)

Pamela in her letter debases herself in front of Mr. B., she calls herself “your poor Servant”, which Davidson (2004: 119) labels as “ostentatious language of humility”; and the word “humble” as in “in my humble Sense of the Word” according to Davidson (2004: 119) is used by Pamela “in a morally aggressive fashion”. The fact is that Pamela instructs her master on moral behaviour under the guise of polite language (“O good Sir!” or “pardon your poor Servant’s Freedom”) and she skilfully uses her subservient position to grant herself this right. Davidson (2004: 119) realizes that to some Pamela’s attitude may seem as “a manipulative self-abasement”, but this is the only way for her to point out to Mr. B. his moral degradation as a member of the upper class (she emphasizes that her notion of Honour is very different from his understanding of the word). Pamela’s hypocrisy is mitigated under the mask of politeness and female modesty as a way to protect herself against B.’s dishonourable actions. Her female dependency and position of a servant and a social inferior justify Pamela’s hypocrisy and, occasionally, turn it into a virtue. Davidson (2004: 117) believes that Richardson’s presenting Pamela as a “mistress of equivocation” does not belittle her importance as a narrator or a role model. Mr. B. in his letter to Mrs. Jewkes, the housekeeper, characterizes Pamela as a dissimulator who “is enough to corrupt a Nation by her seeming Innocence and Simplicity” (Richardson 1742: 162). However, he addresses the letter to Pamela by mistake, so she gets to read it. Having read the letter addressed to Pamela, Mrs. Jewkes scorns the maid for her lack of good manners and for continuing to read the correspondence, which was not addressed to her: “you ought, in Manners, to have read no further” (Richardson 1742: 163). Pamela this time shows impoliteness (the lack of good manners) towards both her benefactor and his housekeeper by being too inquisitive. Nevertheless, Davidson (2004: 128) claims that manners are the privilege of the rich and powerful, whereas servants are justified when they refrain from displaying manners for self-protection. Needless to say, Pamela had to read the letter in order to know what B. thinks of her and how to guard herself from his further sexual advances. In this way, Pamela many times excuses her false modesty or impoliteness (lack of manners) with her subservient position in B.’s household:

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Alas! for me, what a Fate is mine, to be thus thought artful and forward, and ingrateful! when all I intended, was to preserve my Innocence; and when all the poor little Shifts, which his superior wicked Wit and Cunning have render’d ineffectual, were forced upon me in my own necessary Defence! (Richardson 1742: 165)

Davidson believes that equivocation as a strategy used for guarding female virtue was culturally justified in the eighteenth century. “Good hypocrisy”, she says, was dissimulation propelled by the obligation to maintain the harmony of political and domestic life, which would take the forms of manners and politeness (Davidson 2004: 147). False modesty bordering on hypocrisy becomes “second nature” with Pamela, and she is not to blame, because she acts it out in self-protection (Davidson 2004: 123). A debate on hypocrisy in the eighteenth century was triggered by a similar debate between Richardson and Fielding, the author of Shamela (1741), a satire on the epistolary novel. This debate is also a debate on Pamela’s hypocrisy, but it has never really been closed, since what Richardson presents as a new model of female decency, Fielding presents as a social game or playing one’s part. As a matter of fact, neither Fielding nor Richardson openly say that Pamela is a hypocrite. The very title Pamela, or virtue rewarded exposes to ridicule the idea of virtuousness that comes at a price – virtue should be a value in itself, it does not need to be rewarded. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in Davidson’s (2004: 146) view, can be read as an argument for hypocrisy rather than a critique of insincerity. Hypocrisy, again, is excused in some situations as a legitimate manifestation of female dependence. Davidson (2004: 148) claims that Mansfield Park is a direct answer to Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which appealed to women to quit their false modesty that makes them deceitful. In her novel, Austen discusses the relationship of virtue and politeness in the character of Fanny Price, whose dissembling actions are forgivable and sometimes necessary, as they are required by her inferior social position. The novel sheds a new light on the question of gender and demonstrates how important femininity was in obtaining and preserving virtue in the system of the eighteenth-century patronage, which bred corruption and hypocrisy, because everybody was dependent on everybody else (Davidson 2004: 147–148). Fanny is misunderstood by other characters because her motives are not transparent, and she often conceals her thoughts, controls her feelings and bodily symptoms (she, for example, suppresses her tears and hides her blushes) as they may be read as hypocritical (Davidson 2004: 155). It could be argued that Fanny earns the love of Edmund Bertram because she disguises her real feelings and opinions, and some critics even believe that “[t]he shade of Pamela hovers over her career” (Trilling 1955: 212). Fanny is withdrawn and she hates putting herself forward. When her uncle returns from the West Indies, Edmund reproaches her for being too silent and for not exercising the art of being pleasing enough in conversation:

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“But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?” “I did – and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.” “And I longed to do it – but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like – I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.” (Austen [1814] 1988: 198)

Fanny chooses not to talk and she tactfully refrains from satisfying her own curiosity, because she does not want to embarrass her cousins. She is very self-conscious about her inferior position and holds her tongue so as not to give her cousins a false impression that she ingratiates herself with the family, being, as she is, a poor relative. Davidson (2004: 150) claims that modesty is often projected as hypocrisy when manifested by the lower-class heroines in Austen’s fiction – Fanny’s considerateness and tact seem to her rich cousins strategic and “tactical” behaviour. They perceive her as being “ostentatiously virtuous” (Davidson 2004: 151) and believe that she wants to marry up, knowing that Edmund is a catch. Much as Fanny’s modesty may lead some readers to question the sincerity of her motives and compare her with Pamela, Davidson (2004: 163) says that Mansfield Park does not put an equation mark between virtue and remuneration, because Fanny refuses to marry up and accept Henry Crawford as her reward; instead we read in the novel that “Fanny must have been his reward – and a reward very voluntarily bestowed” (Austen 1988: 467). In her book Davidson (2004) claims that politeness as tact undergoes a transformation from condemnation as vice at the beginning of the eighteenth century, which was a direct effect of the Restoration interest in Frenchness with its declining moral and linguistic standards bred by French aristocrats, to glorification as a domestic virtue in the later eighteenth and nineteenth century, thus allowing British women to control their emotions for the benefit of their families and their own (Davidson 2004: 8). Davidson employs close analyses of the novels and situates them in a wider cultural context to justify the fact that politeness as tact, manners and modesty, started to be associated with hypocrisy in the English novel of that time. She defends hypocrisy as “a kind of functional sincerity” (Davidson 2004: 5) that was acceptable for use by female characters who found themselves in the position of dependence. She argues that Pamela and Fanny bore “psychological costs” (Davidson 2004: 14) of their modesty (often displayed as self-control and self-concealment), since their tact and lack of transparency would be misunderstood and taken as falseness by others. She also believes that it is Burke’s and Wollstonecraft’s redefinitions of tact as a middle-class virtue and female virtue that fostered the naturalization of hypocrisy as tact and as a political value in the nineteenth-century British fiction (Davidson 2004: 13).

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Jucker (2016) examines politeness in a selection of English eighteenth-century plays in relation to the complex interactions between the author and the reader in both intradiegetic and extradiegetic level or as he names it “the politeness in the literary text” and “the politeness of the literary text” (Jucker 2016: 112). Jucker provides a close analysis of two plays, Richard Steele’s sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers (1722) and George Lillo’s domestic tragedy The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell (1731). Politeness is understood as an ideology of the upper classes and as a means of social advancement (see Taavitsainen and Jucker 2010; Watts 1999, 2002), since every member of the society was conscious of their position and had to behave accordingly. Steele’s comedy presents Bevil Jr. and his romantic dilemma – he is in love with the orphan Indiana, but his parents want him to marry Lucinda. When he feigns his love for Lucinda, he enrages his friend Myrtle, who is in love with Lucinda and who challenges him to a duel. Bevil Jr. does not accept the challenge, because the laws of civility and gentility do not allow him to fight or to be filled with rage. Lillo’s tragedy is a story of an apprentice, George Barnwell, who is seduced by a London prostitute, Sara Millwood. She coaxes him into stealing money from his master, Thorowgood, and robbing and killing his rich uncle. Soon after committing the murder George feels very guilty and is arrested: however, all the remaining characters forgive him. Jucker notes that in both plays characters are polite on all levels (they stay true to themselves, they are full of understanding towards wrongdoers, they guard their reputation), but the plays themselves are also “polite” towards the audience. The Restoration comedy thrived on impolite and vulgar language and obscenity while these plays “propagate middle class virtues and moral values” (Jucker 2016: 108; Nünning and Nünning 1998: 99) and serve as “educational theatre” (Jucker 2016: 110). Steele, for example, educates his audience by propagating “gentility” and providing an image of an exemplary gentleman (Ozoux 2002: 160). The audience are instructed on politeness by observing polite conversations among the characters and their polite attitude. Lindsay (1993: xxiv) notes that in the play “even the back-chat among the servants is governed by notions of loyalty and propriety”. Lillo’s play is heavily moralistic and educates the audience through providing the examples of undesirable behaviour embodied in George Barnwell, who yet accepts his punishment and takes full responsibility for his offences. Moral counsel is also offered in dedications, prologues and epilogues to the play. For example, in the dedication to The London Merchant we learn that tragedy is not limited to princes but that it may become a “tale of private woe” (Lillo 1993: 265). What is interesting is the fact, as Jucker (2016: 112) argues, that it is difficult to distinguish the two (intradiegetic and extradiegetic) levels of politeness in the texts, because it serves as both a means of the characterization of dramatic figures by offering examples of social role models and as a way of instructing the audience on proper and moral behaviour.

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(Im)politeness studies of the modernist and contemporary fiction and drama

(Im)politeness in current studies on the modernist and contemporary fiction and drama is often discussed in a more interdisciplinary context, within stylistics, in particular in the field of pragmatic literary stylistics (Carter and Simpson 2005; Chapman and Clark 2014; Simpson 2004). Over the last decades, literary studies have veered towards cultural studies and, aided by cultural and social theories such as Cultural Materialism, New Historicism or Postcolonialism, they became more “anthrolopolgical” and “socio-political”, and “less linguistic” (Warner 2014: 194). This tendency to analyse literary texts as cultural products neglected the importance of the literary utterance and how it can function as an “actual event of communication” (Warner 2014: 193). This void was filled by stylisticians who analyse stretches of literary language in wider (linguistic, social, cognitive) contexts to point at a communicative and interactional nature of literary texts.12 Warner (2014: 194) rightly notes that this interest in literature as discourse or “language in use” contributed to the development of other disciplines, for example literary pragmatics and pragmatic stylistics, which borrow ideas from pragmatic theory to describe and explain various stylistic and textual effects in literature. The concepts of ­(im)politeness and face offer new insights on pragmatics in the study of literary texts, since they have a potential to demonstrate the relational and interactional value of literature. However, I should emphasize that the contemporary pragmatic analyses of literary language are seldom limited to (im)politeness only, but they are more transdisciplinary and involve other pragmatic fields, for example, Gricean pragmatics, Speech Act Theory, Relavance Theory, or Critical Discourse Analysis. Chapman and Clark (2014) in the edited collection Pragmatic Literary Stylistics present an overview of modern trends in pragmatics and politeness studies and their applications in fiction and drama. They underline the indebtedness of contemporary literary linguistics to Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Grice’s theory, acknowledging the fact that most studies in literary pragmatics in recent years have questioned and successfully developed their original ideas and terminology. Chapman and Clark (2014) discuss, among others, Muriel Spark’s narrative style, applying a relevance-theoretic framework (Clark 1996, 2013; Pilkington 2000; Sperber and Wilson 1995) to investigate the aesthetics of the narrative and to figure out the role of inferencing and the contribution of the reader in the reading process (Caink 2014). The concept of implicature is used to analyse Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction to show how armed conflict can be communicated implicitly and not explicitly from the “neo-Gricean” perspective (Chapman 2014). Much attention 12

Stylistics is a branch of pragmatics which employs linguistic methods and ideas to study texts, including literary texts, to analyse their production, understanding and reception (see Busse, Ch. 7, this volume).

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is devoted by Clark (2014a) to the role of inferencing in the first and subsequent readings of Anton Chekhov’s (1899) story The Lady with the Little Dog. He argues that pragmatics, in particular through the process of inferencing, facilitates the act of reading, understanding and evaluating literature, not only by individual readers but also by cultural groups.13 Panagiotidou (2014) looks at literary intertextuality as cooperation between the reader and the text and uses Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate how the knowledge of other texts influences the production and reception of a given literary text. Warner (2014) in her analysis of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “Blackeye and his Donkey” presents the act of literary writing as a social practice, adopting ideas from politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987), impoliteness (Bousfield 2008; Bousfield and Locher 2008; Culpeper 2011), facework and sociality rights (Spencer-Oatey 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007). She illustrates that illocutional and stylistic choices made by a writer serve as strategies for rapport management with the reader (Warner 2014: 193). Özdamar, a Turkish-German playwright and director living in Berlin, was asked to write an opinion piece about multiculturalism (in particular, the relations between the Germans and minorities) in the post-unification Germany of the 1990s for Die Zeit. Instead, she submitted a literary anecdote “Blackeye and his Donkey” describing her work on “Blackeye in Germany”, a play about the Turks in Germany she had directed. The editors of the newspaper were unwilling to publish her contribution, because instead of objectively commenting on German-Turkish relations as a typical member of her ethnic group, she adopted a literary style. This literary style asserted her position as an author and indicated that the problem of immigration and the Turks in Germany influenced her professional work.14 Warner (2014: 202) discusses Özdamar’s literary rendition as “aggressive facework” (see Bousfield and Locher 2008; Culpeper 2011). Warner argues that experiential testimonies from members of ethnic minorities or socially marginalized groups can be perceived as FTAs by some readers, who may find themselves directly or indirectly implicated in the author’s negative feelings

Clark (2014b) employs Relevance Theory as a “post-Gricean” approach to explain inferential processes involved in reading and understanding literature. He investigates salient inferencing in William Golding’s The Inheritors (see Clark 2009), in which the reader is more aware of the inferencing processes they must engage in to understand Benjy’s narrative. He gives an example from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to tell the difference between an implication and implicature. Clark contrasts “local” and “global” inferences based on the co-referential relationship between the words a young man and he in the first sentence of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. 14 Özdamar warned her readers about the nature of her text and in her letter to the editors she wrote: “I am writing something. But it is completely different from what you expect” (Özdamar 1993: n.p.). In this way she indicated the ‘horizon of expectations’ she would like her readers to share (Warner 2014: 192). 13

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of oppression or exclusion. Faulty rapport management between the author and reader may threaten the collective or individual positive face of the reader, who in this case is a representative of the dominant and oppressing group (the Germans), who may react antagonistically and, for example, may stop reading the text, or refuse to publish the content (Warner 2013, 2014: 202). Özdamar disturbed the rapport management between herself (author) and her readers, because as a mode of expression she intentionally chose a genre different from that expected – a literary anecdote instead of a conventional newspaper opinion piece (Warner 2014: 199). Özdamar’s example demonstrates that facework depends on the content and illocutionary force of the message. In Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students, Simpson (2004) discusses, among others, the first-person (homodiegetic) and third-person (heterodiegetic) modes of narration to determine the point of view in fiction on the basis of Iain Banks’s novel The Crow Road (1993). The book relates to Speech and Thought Presentation in narrative fiction (Short 1996; Leech and Short 2007; Hoffmann, Ch. 6, this volume), which is exemplified by Short’s study of the narrative point of view in the fiction of Irvine Welsh.15 Simpson falls back on the seminal study of Pratt (1977), which investigates the dynamics of the speaker-audience communication in fiction relating to Austin’s Speech Act Theory that views literature as discourse and literary communication as action. Pratt (1977: 100) distinguishes “the literary speech situation”, in which the speaker-audience relationship in fiction is discussed, from the roles of the participants in everyday linguistic communication. Participants who play the role of the audience must temporarily renounce their right to contribute, and the speaker (author/narrator/character) needs to request his/her right to address the audience and recognize this right to be an imposition on the audience; hence the speaker must also acknowledge the audience’s right to judge his/her performance. In addition, Simpson (2005) analyses linguistic politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson 1987) in Ionesco’s play The Lesson. He examines the linguistic behaviour of the Professor teaching his eighteen-year-old female Pupil arithmetic. The Professor’s verbal behaviour changes from diffidence and shyness to dominance, even aggression, at the moment of the communicative breakdown. This study clearly shows that individuals in the position of power have more freedom to use face-threatening acts (FTAs) baldly, without redress:16 from For a detailed discussion on the point of view in drama see McIntyre (2004). In his socio-pragmatic analysis of Dennis Potter’s play Brimstone and Treacle (1978), McIntyre demonstrates that applying theories of point of view to written dramatic texts can aid the process of dramatic figures’ characterization and lead to a greater understanding and appreciation of linguistic indicators conveying viewpoint in drama (see also Short 1996: 263–278; Hoffmann, Ch. 6, this volume). 16 From Brown and Levinson’s strategies for doing FTAs: Strategy 1: “without redressive action, baldly” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 60, 69). Simpson clarifies: “[…] there 15

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negative politeness and redressive FTAs in the form of apologies, begging forgiveness, or deference, the Professor proceeds to unmitigated commands, warnings, and finally threats, manifesting that he pays no attention to the Pupil’s face wants (Simpson 2005: 183–184). Simpson’s study of Ionesco provides sound evidence for the usefulness of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory in the analysis of character development in the play since we can see how the timid and diffident Professor turns into an aggressive dominator. Simpson (2005: 184) claims that “the bizarre and essentially unmotivated role reversals in The Lesson are reflected by changes in the linguistic behaviour of its characters”. He sees politeness as a “framework” (Simpson 2005: 184) for evaluating the quality of social relationships which build this play. 3.

Concluding remarks

As has been said above, fiction does not have the potential to offend “for real” because it presents the fictional world of human relationships: nevertheless, it serves as a reflection of human discourse. (Im)politeness in the novel and in drama works not only as a method for characterising the broadly understood presented world with its plot and characters (Bousfield 2007; Culpeper 1996, 2001; Kizelbach 2014; Rudanko 2006, 2007), but it can shed new light on the communication between the author and the reader (Jucker 2016; McIntyre and Bousfield 2017). It should be acknowledged that most recent studies on (im)politeness in fiction tend to be interdisciplinary and are conducted along with post-Gricean theories, Critical Discourse Analysis (Carter and Simpson 2005; Clark 2014b; Simpson 2004), Relevance Theory (Chapman and Clark 2014; Clark 2009), and Speech and Thought Presentation (Simpson 2004) and that further research can be pursued in a close collaboration with other disciplines, such as stylistics. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Professor Miriam A. Locher and Professor Andreas H. Jucker, for their invaluable comments and suggestions they offered me in my writing process, as well as for the patience and kindness they showed to an inexperienced author. are some situations, in which speakers use bald, non-redressive FTAs. One is where a speaker holds a position of high relative power over the addressee and fears no serious interactive consequences from using such a strategy. Other situations are emergencies where the demands of politeness may be suspended in the interests of expediency or urgency” (Simpson 2005: 173).

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Panagiotidou, Maria-Eirini 2014 Intertextuality and the pragmatics of literary reading. In: Siobhan Chapman and Billy Clark (eds.), Pragmatic Literary Stylistics, 132–151. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Pfister, Manfred 1988 The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pilkington, Adrian 2000 Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Porter, Joseph A. 1979 The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press. Pratt, Mary Louise 1977 Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rudanko, Juhani 1993 Pragmatic Approaches to Shakespeare: Essays on Othello, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Rudanko, Juhani 2006 Aggravated impoliteness and two types of speaker intention in an episode in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Journal of Pragmatics 38(6): 829–841. Rudanko, Juhani 2007 Concepts for analyzing deception in discourse intended to be persuasive: Two case studies from Shakespearean drama. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8(1): 109–126. Searle, John 1981 Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. First published [1979]. Selden, Raman, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker 2005 A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 5th Ed. London: Pearson Longman. Sell, Roger D. 1991 The politeness of literary texts. In: Roger D. Sell (ed.), Literary Pragmatics, 208–224. London/New York: Routledge. Short, Mick 1996 Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. Harlow, UK: Longman. Simpson, Paul 2004 Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. London/New York: Routledge. Simpson, Paul 2005 Politeness phenomena in Ionesco’s The Lesson. In: Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson (eds.), Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics, 169–193. London/New York: Routledge. Spencer-Oatey, Helen (ed.) 2000 Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London: Continuum.

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Spencer-Oatey, Helen 2002 Managing rapport in talk: Using rapport-sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations. Journal of Pragmatics 34(5): 529–545. Spencer-Oatey, Helen 2005 (Im)politeness, face and perceptions of rapport: Unpackaging their bases and interrelationships. Journal of Politeness Research 1(1): 95–119. Spencer-Oatey, Helen 2007 Theories of identity and the analysis of face. Journal of Pragmatics 39(4): 639–656. Sperber, Dan and Deidre Wilson 1995 Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd Ed. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. First published [1986]. Stein, Dieter 1994 Sorting out the variants: Standardization and social factors in the English language 1600–1800. In: Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), Towards a Standard English 1600–1800, 1–17. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker 2010 Expressive speech acts and politeness in eighteenth-century English. In: Raymond Hickey (ed.), Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change, 159– 181. (Studies in English Language.) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Terkourafi, Marina 2008 Toward a unified theory of politeness, impoliteness, and rudeness. In: Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher (eds.), Impoliteness in Language: Studies on Its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, 45–74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Trilling, Lionel 1955 The Opposing Self. New York: Viking. Warner, Chantelle 2013 The Pragmatics of Literary Testimony: Authenticity Effects in German Social Autobiographies. (Routledge studies in rhetoric and stylistics.) New York: Routledge. Warner, Chantelle 2014 Literature as discourse and dialogue: Rapport management (facework) in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s ‘Blackeye and his donkey’. In: Siobhan Chapman and Billy Clark (eds.), Pragmatic Literary Stylistics, 192–209. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Watts, Richard J. 1999 Language and politeness in early eighteenth century Britain. In: Manfred Kienpointer (ed.), Ideologies of Politeness. Special issue, Pragmatics 9(1): 5–20. Watts, Richard J. 2002 From polite language to educated language. The re-emergence of an ideology. In: Richard J. Watts and Peter Trudgill (eds.), Alternative Histories of English, 155–172. London/New York: Routledge. Watts, Richard J. 2003 Politeness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

15. (Im)politeness and telecinematic discourse Marta Dynel Abstract: The principal objective of this chapter is to shed some light on the prevailing topics and central methodological problems related to the study of (im)politeness in telecinematic discourse, as well as to furnish the readers with a wide selection of references regarding the issues pertinent to this field of investigation. First, the notions of politeness and impoliteness are briefly introduced. A distinction is also drawn between fictional and non-fictional telecinematic discourse, the former being here used synonymously with “film discourse”. The existing research on politeness and impoliteness in both discourse types is duly surveyed. Further, the author examines the issue of verisimilitude and (im)politeness evaluations, the two pivotal methodological problems which researchers studying (im)politeness in fictional telecinematic discourse need to face. The chapter closes with a number of suggestions for future research. 1. Introduction Recent work on (im)politeness has frequently drawn on telecinematic discourse, which provides a rich source of data in which conflicts are heightened and where language is used purposefully to cause offence. Also, in this type of data, the role of politeness and etiquette becomes salient, as is the case with films about the royalty or cross-cultural encounters. Whilst (im)politeness in telecinematic fiction is an attractive topic of investigation, very little academic work has been done in the area, not to mention theoretically-orientated work. The scholarship on (im)politeness in non-fictional telecinematic discourse, by contrast, is much more extensive. This chapter gives an overview of the field of (im)politeness and (non-)fictional telecinematic discourse and considers a selection of methodological problems pertinent to the pragmatic studies on (im)politeness in fictional telecinematic discourse. Before a survey of the areas of research can be conducted, the focal terms, politeness and impoliteness, need to be briefly introduced. Secondly, fictional discourse and non-fictional telecinematic discourse are distinguished. The background literature on politeness and impoliteness, as manifest in the two discourse types is duly examined. Further, attention is paid to two problematic methodological issues, namely verisimilitude and (im)politeness evaluations. Finally, the chapter offers a few suggestions for future research. The discussion is illustrated with several extracts of acclaimed films and serials. This nearly random DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-015 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 455–487. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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selection of sources1 (guided mainly by the author’s personal interest) of the carefully chosen extracts testifies to the prevalence of (im)politeness phenomena in fictional discourse. 2.

Key concepts and theoretical standpoints

2.1.

Politeness and impoliteness

The so-called first-wave politeness research encompasses the canonical works of Lakoff (1973, 1977, 1989), Leech (1983, 2003), and last but not least Brown and Levinson ([1978] 1987). Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model, which seems to have had the greatest impact on the academic field, centres on Goffman’s ([1955] 1967) notion of face,2 as well as a view of communication as intentional and rational activity, in accordance with Grice’s ([1975] 1989) Cooperative Principle and maxims of conversation, which can be legitimately flouted for the sake of politeness (see Dynel 2013a for criticism). According to Brown and Levinson (1987: 1), politeness presupposes “potential for aggression as it seeks to disarm it and makes possible communication between potentially aggressive parties”. Politeness is hence defined as redressive action taken to counterbalance the disruptive effects of face-threatening acts (FTAs). Brown and Levinson classify realisations of FTAs (1987: 60), also referred to as politeness super-strategies (1987: 91), into five groups, presented in the order of intensified mitigation of FTAs. Since the publication of the seminal texts by Brown and Levinson (1987), the notion of politeness has been frequently revisited (see e.g. Eelen 2001; Kádár and Haugh 2013; Lakoff and Ide 2005; Watts 2003). Among other things, this has resulted in the emancipation of another research area on the mirror-reflection phenomenon, viz. impoliteness. The issue of unmitigated face attack/aggravation was addressed in a number of early publications (Austin 1990; Craig, Tracy and Spisak 1986; Goffman 1967; Lachenicht 1980; Penman 1990). However, it was not until after Culpeper’s publication of a paper in 1996 that impoliteness started to be recognised as a field of investigation in its own right (for summaries, see Bousfield and Culpeper 2008; Dynel 2015a; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010; Locher and Bousfield 2008), testifying that impoliteness cannot be treated merely as an unintentional result of failed politeness (Beebe 1995; Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003). The label 1



2



Careful readers who are film enthusiasts will notice that the sources do share common denominators such as that the films and series cited here feature Benedict Cumberbatch and are in English. Brown and Levinson (1987) attribute this notion to Goffman, but “face” is reported to have been earlier discussed by Asian authors (see Turner 2003).

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“impoliteness” is traditionally used as an umbrella term for purposefully produced face-threatening utterances, by means of which the speaker intends (rather than happens) to inflict face damage, and thereby, to cause offence3 (see e.g. Bousfield 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2010; Culpeper 1996, 2005,4 2008; Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003; Lachenicht 1980). The presence of impoliteness in both real-life and fictional interactions also bears out that it cannot be regarded simply as part of politeness and deserves to be conceptualised and studied independently (Bousfield 2008a; Craig, Tracy and Spisak 1986; Culpeper 1996, 2005; Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003). Nonetheless, a lot of research concerns both politeness and impoliteness. Therefore, a great proportion of the publications deploy the term “(im)politeness”, thereby accounting for different phenomena on the politeness – impoliteness continuum. Culpeper (1996, 2005) and Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann (2003) propose a five-point classification of politeness strategies, reflecting Brown and Levinson’s (1987) framework, as well as incorporating Leech’s notion of irony as mock politeness, re-labelled “sarcasm” (see Dynel 2013b).5 Albeit widely accepted, this well-entrenched classification has been challenged for similar reasons as Brown and Levinson’s (1987) taxonomy6 of politeness strategies (Bousfield 2008a; Dynel 2013a, cf. Culpeper 2016). The primary drawback is that the superstrategies are discerned with regard to two unrelated criteria, face orientation and observing or flouting the Gricean maxims, which are conducive to literally conveyed meanings or implied meanings respectively. Consequently, the superstrategies are not mutually exclusive (see Bousfield 2008a; Dynel 2013a). Thus, rather than offering a full-fledged taxonomy, for his part, Bousfield (2008a) submits an extensive list of (im)politeness strategies. Recent years, nonetheless, have seen the so-called “discursive turn” in (im)politeness research, which diverts from linguistic forms and strategies as vehicles for (im)politeness in order to focus on participants’ diversified evaluations within localised interactions (e.g. Eelen 2001; Kádár and Mills 2011; Locher and Watts 2005; Mills 2003; Watts 2003; for overviews, see Kádár and Haugh 2013; Locher 2012). Here is an example from the first episode of Fortysomething, a British

3 4



5



6



This is the view endorsed here as well. Culpeper (2005, 2011) incorporates the hearer’s perspective into the definition, eliminating the speaker’s intention as the necessary condition for impoliteness (cf. Dynel 2013b). In his recent work, Culpeper (e.g. 2011, 2016) abandons this approach, even though he does not deny its feasibility (see Dynel 2013b), pointing out that there is solid research that adopts his original framework (e.g. Lorenzo-Dus, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch 2011). Lachenicht’s (1980) typology is burdened with the same methodological problem.

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comedy miniseries that tells the story of a couple (Estelle and Paul, both in their forties) and their three sons, to illustrate this point: (1) [Estelle Slippery is strolling in a park and she sits down on a bench next to an elderly woman. There’s a dog next to the latter.] 1 Estelle: Lovely dog. 2 Woman: [doubtful] You think? 3 Estelle: [smiling faintly] Yes. 4 Another woman [at a distance]: Billy! Here boy! Here boy! [The dog starts run 5 ning towards her] Come on, boy! 6 [Estelle and the elderly woman burst out laughing.] 7 Estelle: I thought he was hideous, actually. 8 [They both laugh again.] (Fortysomething 2003: Season 1, episode 1)

Estelle’s compliment (line 1) may be considered an act of politeness, whereby she means to start a conversation with the stranger. It also serves as mitigation of the potentially face-threatening nonverbal action she has performed by impinging on the woman’s personal space. However, as the situation unfolds and it turns out that the dog belongs to someone else (line 4), Estelle feels entitled to express her true belief (line 7), thereby tacitly communicating that her compliment was only a white lie told out of politeness. As she produces the utterance that would be face-threatening/impolite to the dog owner (if she could hear it), she displays solidarity politeness towards the elderly lady, who, as Estelle must have realised (line 2), seems to share this opinion. On the whole, the study of (im)politeness is an extremely prolific area of pragmatics, with hundreds of noteworthy publications released each year. This being said, the focus of this chapter is much narrower, namely (im)politeness as it manifests itself in telecinematic discourse. The latter notion must now be teased out. 2.2.

Telecinematic discourse: From fiction to non-fiction

The linguistic scholarship on characters’ verbal interactions in series, serials and films, which can be screened in cinemas, televised, syndicated on DVDs, or circulated on the Internet, uses diversified labels to capture the focal phenomena. These labels include: “the language of fictional television” (Bednarek 2010), “television dialogue” (Quaglio 2009), “television dramatic dialogue” (Richardson 2010a, 2010b), “dramatic discourse” (Bousfield and McIntyre 2011), “TV-series-speak” (Alvarez-Pereyre 2011), “the language of films” (Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi 2011), “film dialogue” (Katz 1998; Kozloff 2000; Rossi 2011; Toolan 2011), “filmspeak” (Alvarez-Pereyre 2011), “cinematic discourse” (Androutsopoulos 2012; Piazza 2006), or “telecinematic discourse” (Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi 2011). At first blush, “telecinematic discourse” seems to be a perfect umbrella term for the genres central to the present chapter. However, this label seems to exclude communica-

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tive modes other than television and cinema, which it purposefully distinguishes. As Androutsopoulos (2012: 140) rightly observes, mode-related distinctions are “empirically futile and theoretically unproductive”, with all media artefacts being contemporarily available on the Internet. More importantly, the label “telecinematic discourse” may be (in a commonsensical manner) considered to encompass also non-fictional television genres, such as televised quiz shows and news broadcasts, or documentaries screened in cinemas, all of which may be scripted (at least partly), but are not inherently fictional (see Jucker and Locher, Ch. 1, this volume). Therefore, given the scope of the present volume, the primary focus of this chapter should be fictional telecinematic discourse, which is used synonymously with the term film discourse/talk (see Dynel 2011b, 2011c). These labels are here used in reference to characters’ communicative practices in feature films, as well as in series and serials, notwithstanding their generic differences. (Im)politeness will show in the same ways in all three, which can then be captured under one label “film”. Before fictional telecinematic discourse is addressed, some attention must be paid to the non-fictional genres, which have been crucial for the development of impoliteness research. 2.3.

Impoliteness and non-fictional telecinematic discourse

Whilst the pivotal politeness studies seem to have shown marked preference for everyday face-to-face interactions and have also amply addressed literary works (see Kizelbach, Ch. 14, this volume), from its inception, impoliteness research has focused on television genres (cf. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014). Telecinematic discourse offers fertile ground for studying impoliteness, which must be commonplace in everyday interactions, but is not as easily available for researchers as its counterpart in media discourse is. Importantly, Culpeper’s interest in impoliteness was inspired by a television documentary entitled Soldier Girls (see Dynel 2013b). This is also why Culpeper’s (1996) article, which represents a watershed in impoliteness research, takes examples from this television documentary. Similarly, Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann’s (2003) paper is exemplified with data from The Clampers, BBC’s “true life show” documenting the work of traffic wardens who suffer insults and receive threats when trying to enforce parking laws. Proposing major reformulations of Culpeper’s framework, Bousfield (2007, 2008a, 2008b) culls his data from what he calls “docusoaps” (The Clampers, Parking Wars, Soldiers to Be, Redcaps, Motorway Life, Raw Blues and Boiling Point). Essentially, television discourse, notably that of British provenance, has helped to determine the basic definitions and detailed mechanisms of impoliteness. Whether or not the programmes serving exemplification in these classical publications present only genuine and spontaneous discourse, the authors seem to treat their examples primarily as if they were real-life language data, not paying heed

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to their mass-mediated/televised nature. The basic feature of all telecinematic discourse is that it intrinsically resides in two levels of communication, one formed by real or fictional interactants on the screen, and the other involving viewers as receivers of the interactions on the screen (see Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume). It is only in his 2005 paper that Culpeper devotes more attention to impoliteness as a phenomenon situated in televised programmes with regard to the caustic comments made by the host of the British version of The Weakest Link. Impoliteness is thus shown to serve entertainment, being performed primarily for the viewer’s pleasure and even humour experience (see Culpeper 2011; Dynel 2011a; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Lorenzo-Dus 2013; Lorenzo-Dus 2009a; Sinkeviciute 2015; cf. Dynel 2012, 2013c for film discourse). This function explains the prevalence of impoliteness on television, aptly captured as “incivility-as-spectacle” (Lorenzo-Dus 2009a). Here is a selection of the diversified non-fictional television discourse genres studied in the context of (im)politeness: a) political broadcast, discussions and interviews (Clayman and Heritage 2002; Dynel 2011a; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2009; García-Pastor 2002 2008; Hernández-Flores 2008; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2013; Kienpointner 2008; Lorenzo-Dus 2007, 2009a; Piirainen-Marsh 2005; Tracy 2008) b) quiz and talent shows (Culpeper 2005; Culpeper and Holmes 2013; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Bou-Franch and Lorenzo-Dus 2010, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Bou-Franch and Lorenzo-Dus 2013; Lorenzo-Dus 2009b; Lorenzo-Dus, Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013) c) reality game shows (Blas Arroyo 2013; Gordon 2013; Sinkeviciute 2014, 2015, 2017) d) documentaries and docusoaps (Bousfield 2007, 2008a, 2008b; Culpeper 1996; Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003; Limberg 2008) Traditional television programmes, such as debates or quiz and talent shows, may be claimed to include elements of prefabricated fictional talk, i.e. non-spontaneous talk pre-prepared for the sake of viewers’ entertainment. Thus, the same may be claimed about at least some specimens of (im)politeness distinguished in such programmes. Whilst many a television show host will have a glib tongue, will show acerbic wit, and will be capable of producing vitriolic, ingenious putdowns, it is hardly believable that they are all created on the spur of the moment. More likely, before recordings are made, many barbs have been pre-prepared by the speakers themselves or by other production team members to be used at opportune moments. However, this lack of spontaneity does not change the fact that a real language user, not necessarily the one speaking on the screen, has constructed a given impolite utterance. Also, whether or not at least partly pre-scripted, traditional television programmes are essentially non-fictional. Their discourse is hence, technically speaking, beyond the scope of the present volume.

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On the other hand, many of the programmes listed above represent reality television genres, the majority of which deploy the fly-on-the-wall filming strategy, giving viewers an impression that they are surreptitiously watching people who are really following their daily routines or performing their regular duties. Semi-scripted genres of reality television like Big Brother may involve pre-fabricated situations, which only impose contextual constraints7 on the interactions between the housemates. However, these interactions, notably the ones containing (im)politeness practices, are very close to everyday language use, constituting naturally occurring non-fictional but mass-mediated data (see Sinkeviciute 2014, 2017). This is not necessarily the case with docusoaps also known as docudramas (see Hill, Weibull and Nilsson 2007; Murray and Ouellette 2009), which may be said to constitute an intermediate category between fictional and non-fictional programmes. Docusoaps attempt to guide the audience into believing that what they are witnessing is real interactions spontaneously held by real individuals, with the camera recording the events. In actual fact, however, although some docusoaps feature real people in their real roles (e.g. DEA), in many (e.g. The Academy),8 scenes are staged by unknown actors or ordinary people who have volunteered to appear on television. In either case, docusoaps are fully or partly scripted, even if (loosely) based on true stories. Wannabe actors are guided by the production crew in terms of what meanings they are supposed to communicate and roughly how they should do this,9 but the ultimate form of the utterances and interactions depends on the (sometimes unskilled and stressed) actors’ rendition, which may be below the par. What is most important from the perspective of discourse studies is that in all docudramas, whether or not well acted, verbal interactions are neither spontaneous, nor non-fictional, contrary to what some viewers may think. Nor is the use of impoliteness therein. However, such fictional (im)polite interactions may be considered similar in relevant respects to naturally occurring language use and amenable to linguistic analysis just like impoliteness in films (see Section 3.1). Save the deceptive element (i.e. leading the naive viewers to believe that they are watching recorded facts, not scripted or free acting), skilfully made docusoaps are very similar to feature films, series and serials, of whose fictional nature viewers are aware, even if they prototypically suppress this thought in order to derive pleasure from watching fiction (see Dynel 2011b, 2011c).

Needless to say, also everyday non-mediated interactions are contextually constrained. Polsat, one of the long-standing Polish television channels, has earned notoriety for releasing numerous docusoap series devoted to different sensational topics, such as unfaithful spouses or horrible nannies, all performed (very inadequately) by ordinary people, who are recruited via online advertisements. 9 This has been reported to me by an anonymous informant, who has performed in Polish docusoaps. 7 8

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The interplay between (im)politeness and fictional telecinematic discourse

On the inter-character/characters’ level of communication, also known as the diegetic level (see Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume), interactions in films, series and serials are realised by fictional10 interlocutors, as devised by the production crew. Among other things, characters perform (im)politeness and respond to it. This (im)politeness appears to be an attractive topic of investigation, which shows in a flurry of theses and student papers (e.g. Rong 2009; Sinkeviciute 2010). In the scholarly literature so far, the interface between (im)politeness and fictional telecinematic discourse has had three paramount manifestations,11 depending on which of the two notions is the central phenomenon under investigation, and on whether the focus is on diegetic or extra-diegetic communication. Firstly, some attention has been paid to impoliteness as a phenomenon embedded in film discourse from the perspective of the pragmatics of interaction. The focus has been on the effects (im)politeness constructed by scriptwriters and the rest of the production crew has, or is meant to have, on viewers. Following in Culpeper’s (2005, 2011) footsteps, impoliteness has thus been discussed as a source of viewers’ vicarious pleasure (cf. Dynel 2013c and references therein). It has been argued that impoliteness in multi-party interactions shows strong affinity with disparagement humour, a notion that enjoys a distinct research tradition within humour studies, being typically captured by superiority theories. These theories are premised on the assumption that the feeling of superiority, mockery and amusement at the expense of the target lie at the heart of humour experience (see Dynel 2013c and references therein). Disparagement humour aims to amuse the hearer by victimising the target via blunt criticism, belittlement, debasement, degradation, or humiliation, all of which necessitate the use of language that coincides with impoliteness. The fields investigating humour and impoliteness can, therefore, inform each other (see Dynel 2012, 2013c, 2016). Incidentally, the merging of the two areas presents itself also in studies not devoted to fictional discourse (e.g. Haugh and Bousfield 2012; Sinkeviciute 2013). Secondly, some work on impoliteness has recently been done in the burgeoning area of pragmatic stylistics (e.g. Chapman and Clark 2014) with regard to film discourse. The focus of such research is the workings of (im)politeness as a linguistic tool serving characterisation (see Kizelbach, Ch. 14, this volume), plot Not all characters must be strictly fictional, a case in point being historical figures (cf. Turing in Example [2]). However, their portrayals and utterances are essentially fictional. 11 Another research strand, admittedly less salient and so far only tangential to the pragmatics of (im)politeness, focuses on translation of (im)politeness-related expressions or speech acts (see Mariottini 2012 and references therein). 10

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development, and the communication of meanings on the characters’ level. Generally, based on chosen specimens of fictional talk, authors study (im)politeness as it helps construct the fictional reality to be perceived by viewers (Bednarek 2012; Bousfield and McIntyre 2011; Culpeper 1998, 2001; Mandala 2011). For example, Bousfield and McIntyre (2011) present the interplay between language and visual input in the “funny guy” scene in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, drawing, among other things, on (im)politeness theory. For her part, Mandala (2011) deploys the framework proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) to account for the development of the focal character, the cybernetic Seven in Star Trek: Voyager, and her interactions with the other characters. Linguists with interests in stylistics consider (im)politeness phenomena as fictional, not necessarily extrapolating from their findings any conclusions obtaining for real-life language use,12 even though they tacitly assume that fictional talk does hold lessons for real-life interaction. Additionally, fictional data allow researchers to arrive at the underlying ideologies drawn on (whether ridiculed, reinforced, or challenged) in a particular society. In this vein, employing the basic assumptions of (im)politeness theory in their discussions of the discourse in chosen films and series, authors implicitly validate the applicability of the theory to film talk, indirectly adducing evidence in favour of the latter’s verisimilitude (e.g. Jobert 2013; Kantara 2010; Piazza 2011; Pillière 2013; Richardson 2010a;13 see Section 3.1 below). Thirdly, addressing various aspects of (im)politeness, several authors (e.g. Dynel 2012, 2016; Haugh 2015; Kádár 2013; Kádár and Haugh 2013) resort to fictional talk as their exemplification data (cf. the discussion of Example [1] in Section 2.1), frequently not dwelling on this methodological step. This practice consists in using instances culled from film discourse to illustrate postulates relevant to (im)politeness as a universal phenomenon present also in everyday talk, which is what the authors actually aim to account for. Film discourse is thus treated merely as a handy source of illustrative data, which gives insight into the diversity of problems related to (im)politeness (Kádár and Haugh 2013), whilst the characteristic features of fictional interactions (notably, the two levels of communication and the viewer’s role) are not taken into account. As Bousfield (personal communication) wittily put it, fictional discourse offers researchers a sandpit to test their hypotheses before applying them to real-life language data. Treating fictional interactions as if they were real-life language data, the authors appear to unwittingly accept the assumption of film discourse’s verisimilitude.

As Jucker (2015: 63) warns, fictional discourse “can be subjected to pragmatic analyses as long as there are no claims that the findings have validity beyond the data itself”. 13 This monograph offers just a sketchy description of (im)politeness. 12

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3.1. Verisimilitude Film discourse amounts to fictional and non-authentic conversations held by characters. Their interactions are “scripted”, “constructed” and “prefabricated” (Chovanec 2011; see also Bednarek 2010; Spitz 2005). Film talk is then frequently juxtaposed with real/real-life or authentic discourse, also referred to as ordinary, natural, or everyday discourse. Some argue that film discourse must be anti-empirical and artificial, inasmuch as it “has been scripted, written and rewritten, censored, polished, rehearsed, and performed” (Kozloff 2000: 18). Conversely, the basic premise underlying studies on various linguistic phenomena in film discourse is that it typifies real-life discourse in a chosen respect, such as the mechanics of (im)politeness. The fictional discourse of films, series and plays14 does reflect real language use, which is why it can give insight into its workings with regard to a whole host of linguistic problems, as evidenced by ample literature (e.g. Alvarez-Pereyre 2011; Bednarek 2010, 2011; Berliner 1999; Dynel 2011b, 2015b; Emmison 1993; Forchini 2012; McHoul 1987; Murphy 1977; Piazza 2006; Rose 2001; Richardson 2010a; Rudanko 2006; Spitz 2005; Tannen and Lakoff 1994). Fictional discourse should, and typically does attempt to, imitate real language use, evoking an illusion of real-life conversations, adhering to “a complex code of what a culture at a given time agrees to accept as plausible, everyday, authentic” (Kozloff 2000: 47). It must be remembered that verisimilitude is relative to the times and specific context at hand, co-determined by several socio-pragmatic variables, such as: a character’s status, age, gender, all affecting his/her idiolect; the relationship between the characters; or the norms holding for a given community of practice (e.g. inmates in prison or doctors in a hospital), even if those cannot always be empirically verified by the general audience. This also concerns characters’ idiosyncratic behaviours, as illustrated by the following interaction from The Imitation Game, which tells the story of how Alan Turing and his colleagues managed to crack the codes of Germany’s Enigma machine, thereby shortening World War II. (2) [Alan Turing is focused on his work, whilst all his co-workers, one of them being Cairncross, are leaving to have lunch.] 1 Cairncross: Alan? 2 Turing: Yes? 3 Cairncross: I said we’re going to get some lunch.

14

Some of the references in this section concern the scholarship on plays, not film discourse. However, linguistic studies of the language of plays (see Bednarek, Ch. 5, this volume) bear resemblance to those of film discourse, and they involve the same methodological problems concerning verisimilitude, regardless of the differences stemming from their generic features (e.g. presence or lack of multi-modal cues, unless a play is staged in a theatre).

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  4 [no response]  5 Cairncross: Alan?  6 Turing: Yes?   7 Cairncross: Can you hear me?  8 Turing: Yes.   9 Cairncross: I said we’re off to get some lu—. This is starting to get a little bit 10 repetitive. 11 Turing: What is? 12 Cairncross: I had asked if you wanted to come have lunch with us. 13 Turing: Uhm, no you didn’t, you said you were going to get some lunch. 14 Cairncross: Have I offended you in some way? 15 Turing: Why would you think that? 16 Cairncross: Would you like to come to lunch with us? 17 Turing: What time’s lunch time? 18 Alexander: [frustrated, raised voice] Christ! Alan, it’s a bleeding sandwich. 19 Turing: What is? 20 Alexander: Lunch. 21 Turing: Oh, I don’t like sandwiches. 22 Cairncross: Never mind. (The Imitation Game 2014)

In this interaction, Cairncross makes several attempts to (politely) invite Turing to lunch (lines 3, 9, 12, and 16), with his utterances falling on the latter’s deaf ears. Turing fails to respond (line 4) or arrive at the politeness implicature (line 13), which leads Cairncross to believe that he has unwittingly performed a face-threatening act (line 14). This is actually what Turing does, as he unintentionally shows disrespect to the interlocutor by not responding, rationalising about his previous utterance (line 13), and ultimately bluntly expressing his dislike (line 21). Viewers will attribute these inappropriate replies to Turing’s quirkiness or preoccupation with the task at hand. However, informed viewers may also be aware of the fact that Alan Turing is a non-fictional character, who is regarded as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. Most famously, during World War II, he played a crucial role in cracking the Nazi’s Enigma code. He is also alleged to have had Asperger syndrome, which typically shows in severe impairment in reciprocal social interaction, and inability to read implicit meanings. This is what the scriptwriter must have been willing to plausibly indicate here. Also, in some respects, the verisimilitude may depend on the film genre. Sitcoms, for instance, may be less realistic in a sense that, unlike real interactions, they are replete with a wide spectrum of humour forms. Also, much of this humour may stem from phenomena infrequent in real-life talk, such as characters’ irrevocable stupidity or linguistic incompetence (cf. Joey or Phoebe from Friends), which can, however, be conceived as idiosyncratic. Nonetheless, even sitcoms will show verisimilitude in various other respects, for instance the nature (but not frequency) of teasing, which comedy discourse abundantly represents.

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Film discourse’s verisimilitude may be explained on the grounds that “real-life dialogue is the template behind” it (Piazza 2006: 2087). Scriptwriters, who are language users acutely sensitive to forms of expression, draw heavily on their (intuitive) knowledge of linguistic and interactional norms and conventions (Spitz 2005; Stokoe 2008; cf. Herman 1995; Schneider 1988, for the language of plays). The same norms and conventions form the basis for viewers’ interpretations of characters’ interactions (Spitz 2005). Importantly, (im)polite messages can only work in their particular cultural frameworks, without the knowledge of which viewers would not be able to understand when a scene is meant to be raising impoliteness issues. When a fictional interaction shows people causing offence (whether or not intentionally), the viewer will reach a conclusion that impoliteness has occurred by judging the situation against the norms holding for a particular context with which he/she is familiar in the real world. For instance, viewers can easily recognise the impolite nature of the interaction among the family members in August: Osage County, an American drama about a large family whose (mostly female) members are plagued by many problems, which emerge as the story unfolds. (3) [Violet and her two adult daughters, Ivy and Barbara, are sitting at a table. Ivy (approaching 50) has just told Barbara in private that she wants to finally stop looking after their mother (who is suffering from cancer) and start her own life with the man she loves. Barbara has scoffed at the idea.]   1 Barbara: [calling Johanna, the housemaid] Mom needs her lunch, please.   2 Violet: I’m not hungry.   3 Barbara: You didn’t eat anything today. You didn’t eat anything yesterday.   4 Violet: [more emphasis] I’m not hungry.   5 Barbara: [firmly] You’re eating. Do what I say. [looks at Ivy] Everyone do what I  6 say.  7 […]  8 Barbara: Eat.  9 Violet: No. 10 Barbara: Eat it. Mom? Eat it. 11 Violet: [angrily] No. 12 Barbara: Eat it, you fucker. Eat that catfish. 13 [Ivy looks horrified] 14 Violet: [unaffected] Go to hell. 15 Barbara: [angrily] That doesn’t cut any fucking ice with me. 16 Now eat that fucking fish. 17 Ivy: Mom, I have something to talk to you— 18 Barbara: No you don’t. 19 Ivy: Barbara— 20 Barbara: [raised voice] No you don’t. Shut up. [quietly] Shut the fuck up. 21 [Violet looks intrigued] 22 Ivy: Please— 23 Violet: What’s to talk about? 24 Ivy: Mom— 25 Barbara: [angrily] Forget it. Eat that fucking fish.

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26 Violet: [calmly, as if bored] I’m not hungry. 27 Barbara: Eat it. 28 Violet: [firmy] No! 29 Ivy: Mom, I need to—! 30 Violet: [firmly] No! 31 Ivy: Mom! 32 Barbara: [shouting at the top of her voice] Eat the fish, bitch! 33 Ivy: Mom, please! 34 Violet: Barbara …! 35 Barbara: [looking at Ivy] Okay, fuck it, do what you want. (August: Osage County 2013)

This family conversation is fraught with impoliteness produced by Barbara towards her mother and sister. Violet seems to be impervious to the continual face threat but keeps responding quite bluntly too, thereby reciprocating impoliteness, yet not escalating the conflict. Barbara resorts to swearing in the form of cathartic or emphatic expressions (lines 15, 20, 25, and 35) and abuse hurled at her mother (lines 12 and 32). Viewers will realise that, even though this interaction is based on blatant violation of basic rules of familial politeness, it seems to be plausible given the particular context, namely the family’s general propensity for brusqueness and vulgarity (cf. Example [5]). Also, they will acknowledge that Barbara’s offensiveness is a mask for her underlying benevolent intentions (cf. Section 3.2); she wants her sick mother not to be malnourished, and not to discover the home truth from Ivy. Generally, filmmakers operate on the assumption that properly constructed15 fictional utterances and verbal exchanges should sound natural to the audience, or rather should be tacitly accepted as natural relative to the socio-cultural context and should not strike them as being artificial, even if statistically infrequent. This is why scriptwriters attempt to conceive of what real people might be inclined to say (Rey 2001), and “the interaction portrayed in a drama [and film alike] reflects the way its author envisages the mechanisms of interpersonal exchange in real life” (Piazza 1999: 1002). From a different angle, the verisimilitude of film discourse shows in that it can be interpreted with theories proposed for ordinary communication, and the

15

If viewers should recognise a speaker’s stilted, or otherwise inadequate, manner of expression, which is not a matter of a character trait, the scriptwriter may be accused of having failed. This is the case, for instance, with the utterances made in Polish by the main heroine in Sophie’s Choice, a Polish woman who left her home country as an adult. As any Pole will confirm, Meryl Streep’s non-native accent aside, most of the few utterances she produces in her native language are grammatically awkward (e.g. in Polish, the subject “ja” (“I”) is typically dropped unless it is used for the sake of emphasis, of which the script writer must have been oblivious).

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workings of linguistic theories can be verified on the basis of fictional interactions (cf. Bednarek 2010; Culpeper 1998; Forchini 2012; Jucker 2015; Quaglio 2009; Richardson 2010a; Simpson 1998). Nevertheless, it needs to be stressed that, upon closer inspection, film discourse does show peculiar communicative/linguistic features, which is evidenced by corpora studies (see e.g. Bednarek 2011; Quaglio 2009). This seems to the result of contextual constraints. Notably, some manifestations of (im)politeness may be regarded as being such a feature (see Dynel 2015b). In particular, the lavish use of creative impoliteness typical of film talk, as well as entertainment programmes (see Culpeper 2005, 2011; Dynel 2012, 2013b, 2013c, 2015b), does not appear to be so commonplace in real-life talk. Rather than residing in formulae (cf. Culpeper 2011) or literal forms of expression, impoliteness in film discourse frequently deploys various forms of implicitness (cf. Example [4] below) or wordplay, which involve verbal novelty and spring a surprise on the hearer. As already indicated, a preponderance of instances of impoliteness in film discourse is a source of vicarious pleasure for viewers. The success of using impoliteness to lure viewers is borne out by the popularity of witty characters with the tendency, and even uncanny predilection, for witty abruptness, such as Dr House, the eponymous hero of the American television series (House M.D.) played by Hugh Laurie, or Sherlock Holmes, whether the one in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and its sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows performed by Robert Downey Jr., or the one portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the British television series Sherlock. Enthralled by the fictional reality, viewers construe a hero’s proclivity for impoliteness as a plausible, albeit idiosyncratic, character streak. What helps bring about this effect is the listening characters’ reactions to impoliteness (whether the receivers of face threat or non-targeted hearers, see Example [5]; cf. Dynel 2012, 2013c). These also need to ring true, with some hearers taking offence, and others sanctioning impoliteness (for the discussion of sanctioned impoliteness, see Culpeper 2005, 2011; Dynel 2015a and references therein). Therefore, viewers will perceive frequent attempts at producing impolite utterances (whether or not evaluated as impolite by hearers) as plausible, even if speakers with such a predilection are scarce in real life (see Dynel 2015b). Here is an instance taken from the British series Sherlock: (4) [Sherlock has just finished a long monologue presenting his insightful and complex inferences about the dead woman who he is leaning over. John Watson is mesmerised. Among other things, Sherlock has stated that she was in Cardiff earlier that day.] 1 Lestrade: Cardiff? 2 Sherlock: Obvious, isn’t it? 3 John: It’s not obvious to me. 4 Sherlock: [with contempt] Dear God! What’s it like inside your 5 funny little brains? It must be so boring. 6 [Lestrade and Watson say nothing. Lestrade looks unaffected.]

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  7 Sherlock: Her coat, slightly damp. She’s been in heavy rain in   8 the last few hours. No rain anywhere in London until the last   9 few minutes. Under her coat collar is damp, too. She’s turned 10 it up against the wind. (Sherlock 2010: Season 1, episode 1, A Study in Pink)

By the time this part of interaction has taken place, the viewers will have recognised Sherlock’s powers of deduction, feeling of intellectual superiority, as well as abruptness. They must also note that neither of the hearers who are the targets of Sherlock’s deprecating but creatively structured jibe (line 4) responds verbally as if they feel offended, and Lestrade also looks as if he is impervious to it (line 6). This is because they must both be in awe of Sherlock’s intellectual capacity, consequently sanctioning, i.e. making allowances for, his uncouthness, while waiting for further explanations. The discussion above corroborates the assumption on which (im)politeness researchers work when referring to fictional examples as specimens of discourse that help elucidate universal mechanisms of impoliteness. It may be safely claimed that (im)politeness phenomena found in fictional interactions are “by no means unique to a fictional world” (Rudanko 2006: 830), which is why they are frequently taken to be representative of (im)politeness in real-life talk. Overall, from an academic perspective, films and series rife with impoliteness offer diversified specimens of this phenomenon, which can be investigated from a variety of perspectives with reference to specific research topics. For instance, in stylistics, the focus may be on characterisation (Bednarek 2011, 2012; Culpeper 1998, 2001), relationship formation (Kantara 2010), or the display of emotions (Bousfield and McIntyre 2011); in the pragmatics of interaction, attention is paid to the effects an impolite utterance exerts on different hearers in multi-party interactions (Dynel 2012); whilst in humour studies, the relationships between humour and (im)politeness may be explored (Dynel 2013c, 2016). On the other hand, it would be unwise to do quantitative sociolinguistic studies, based on fictional language data, unless the research focused on the manifestation of some variables strictly in the fictional discourse. Regardless of the focus of investigation, film talk has a methodological advantage over real-life discourse thanks to not only its heterogeneity but also its inherent interpretative availability from the viewer’s perspective, and hence also from the researcher’s perspective (Coupland 2004; Rudanko 2006). This is of crucial importance for interpreting the speaker’s production of (im)politeness and the reactions it evokes in hearers, which involves the interpreter’s recognition of interactants’ underlying motives, goals, and thus intentions, based on the cues they display.

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Interpreting (im)politeness

The notion of intention lies at the heart of the traditional neo-Gricean definitions of both politeness and impoliteness, which is juxtaposed with rudeness, i.e. unintentional face threat, according to the prevailing view (Bousfield 2008a, 2010; Culpeper 2008; Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003). Nonetheless, some (e.g. Culpeper 2005, 2011; Locher and Watts 2008) reject this criterion due to its empirical elusiveness. Indeed, neither hearers nor researchers can ever categorically know the speaker’s intentions (Hardaker 2010). If even the primary hearers cannot be sure about speaker intentions, it follows that inferring intentions must be even more difficult for researchers. This does not mean that intentions are not conjectured or attributed to speakers (Grimshaw 1990). It seems that human communication is intrinsically centred on accountability (see Haugh 2008, 2013), and hence the tacit attribution of intention understood in a deontological sense (Haugh 2013; Haugh and Jaszczolt 2012). This means that the speaker is considered committed to, and accountable for, the communicated meanings, or rather the meanings the hearer sees as having been communicated, irrespective of what the speaker’s intention may have been in reality. This happens unless the hearer has reasons to question the speaker’s intentionality underlying the meaning he/she seems to be communicating, for example because of cultural differences, of which the hearer is aware. By default, the hearer aims to decipher the speaker’s intended meaning, and not just any meaning or inadvertent meaning, even if conscious intention recognition seems cognitively unfeasible in the majority of cases. Nevertheless, if some interpretative problems should arise regarding the speaker’s intentions to communicate meanings, the hearer may need to consciously ponder them. Conscious attribution of intentionality lies at the heart of much (im)politeness research, even if the result of academics’ interpretative process is never certain and may even be specious (Grimshaw 1990). Since “interlocutors do not wear their intentions on their sleeves”, no actual intentions can be determined but only “‘plausible’ intentions can be reconstructed, given adequate evidence” (Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003: 1552). Whether or not explicitly invoking the notion of intention, researchers do dissect (un)intended meanings (against the backdrop of how these are recognised by the participants themselves), and thus they refer to intentionality when they are conducting analyses of (im)politeness in interactions. In other words, the (lack of) intentionality does underlie practically all scholarship on (im)politeness, which is invariably concerned with speakers’ purposefully communicated meanings vs. inadvertently conveyed ones, and their reception by hearers. Rightly, in contemporary (im)politeness research, emphasis is placed on communicated meanings being co-constructed by the speaker and the hearer (e.g. Bousfield 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2010; Culpeper 2005, 2008, 2011; Hardaker 2010; Locher and Watts 2005, 2008; Watts 2003). Consequently, both

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the speaker’s and the hearers’ communicative ends need to be taken into consideration, on the strength of the contextual evidence at hand. All this is related to one of the primary methodological assumptions in the studies of (im)politeness, namely the distinction between first order and second order (im)politeness (also referred to as (im)politeness1 and (im)politeness2, or emic and etic approaches respectively). This distinction concerns lay users’ understandings vs. theorists’ conceptualisations of (im)politeness (see Craig, Tracy and Spisak 1986; Eelen 2001; Watts, Ide and Ehlich 1992). First order interpretations have taken on great importance in discursive studies on (im)politeness and the prevalent view is that the second order approach should capitalise on first order evaluations (e.g. Bousfield 2010; Haugh and Bousfield 2012; Locher and Bousfield 2008; Locher and Watts 2005; Mills 2009). Analysing linguistic data, researchers base their judgements about (im)polite interactional practices on participants’ own understandings. These evaluations may be implicitly communicated by verbal or non-verbal means, or they may be explicated in the form of metapragmatic comments (on the metapragmatics of (im)politeness, see e.g. Culpeper 2011; Culpeper, Haugh and Sinkeviciute forthcoming; Haugh 2010; Kleinke and Bös 2015; Spencey-Oatey 2011). However, first order evaluations may be equi­ vocal, and they may not be subject to easy interpretation in second order terms. First order evaluations are “individual and can at best become interpersonal and intersubjective, but can never be objectively verifiable” (Watts 2003: 164). Therefore, second order interpretations must allow for a margin of error, inasmuch as they are either devoted only to projected (not necessarily genuine) evaluations, or anchored in intention ascription and “mind-reading” with regard to both the (im)polite speakers’ goals and the hearers’ actual evaluations. These deliberations can now be taken to the sphere of film discourse, where the speakers and hearers are fictional ones, as are their interactions. Ordinary language users evaluate everyday communicative behaviours as (im)polite, and so do fictional interactants (cf. first order (im)politeness), thereby mimicking real-life interactions. According to the recipient design premise underpinning the construction of film discourse (Dynel 2011b, 2011c; cf. Bell 1984; Bubel 2008), meanings emerging from characters’ interactions must be available to the viewer, technically labelled “recipient”. The recipient design that underlies fictional interactions promotes inferences concerning the characters’ level of communication. Viewers are given the necessary insight into interlocutors’ intentions (even if they typically do not ponder on them consciously), and the context and co-text of the interactions shown on the screen so that they can understand them adequately. Guided by a wide range of cues, the viewer will typically hold fictional interactants accountable for the meanings they communicate to one another. The viewer can then (unconsciously) judge the interactions and evaluations made on the screen, sometimes being privy to more information than the individual characters. The viewer is typically invited to recognise a character’s goals or genuine feelings, even if the

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latter should make them covert for other characters. This applies also to characters’ genuine (im)politeness-related intentions and evaluations, which need not always be (but most frequently are) disclosed to the viewer, and therefore the viewer-researcher. Abandoning the role of ordinary viewers enthralled by the fictional reality (see Dynel 2011b, 2011c and references therein), (im)politeness researchers pay attention to selected communicative phenomena on diegetic or non-fictional level of communication. Researchers not preoccupied with the specificity of fictional discourse and the level of communication involving viewers conventionally can treat characters as if they are real individuals and assign characteristics of individuals to them, the key one being intentionality (Rudanko 2006; cf. Kantara 2010). Thus, in research on film talk, attempts can be safely made to conjecture speaking characters’ intentions to be (im)polite, as well as listening characters’ first order evaluations of (im)politeness, as manifest in their reactions, whether verbal or non-verbal. This also necessitates recognising intentions underlying such reactions. A statement may be ventured that researchers considering film talk stand a strong chance of making correct second order evaluations of (im)politeness, thanks to film talk’s inherent property of being constructed for the viewer’s understanding.16 As already indicated, fictional interactions have an important advantage over real-life discourse as a data source in that “the material is in the public domain and can be easily examined and verified” (Rudanko 2006: 831). In the case of (im)politeness, this “ease” concerns the feasibility of evaluations researchers can make with regard to the goings-on in fictional interactions. Because of this, it may be claimed that “fictionalised reality can sometimes reveal social processes more clearly than lived reality” (Coupland 2004: 258). Overall, provided that its verisimilitude is supported, film discourse lends itself perfectly to linguistic analysis, which is not necessarily the case with large corpora data or personally recorded real-life conversations. Researchers who use such data but are incapable of holding interviews with conversationalists may experience great interpretative difficulties, not being privy to interlocutors’ common ground and minute contextual factors central to the understanding of (im)polite exchanges, or may unwittingly make wrong inferences. Despite the affordances film discourse offers, analysing it, an (im)politeness researcher must still allow for minor interpretative problems. One may encounter problematic cases in which a fictional hearer’s interpretations are ambivalent or open-ended and/or the fictional speaker’s intentions are multi-layered and

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This happens unless viewers’ lack of understanding is part of the communicative plan, for instance when characters’ genuine intentions are not meant to be recognised, at least initially.

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convoluted. Incidentally, not making the viewer privy to the “truth”, filmmakers strengthen the impression of verisimilitude. After all, ambivalence and uncertainty concerning people’s inner states are common in real-life interactions, especially when face threat is involved. Another limitation of film discourse concerns the application of cinematic techniques, which need not always facilitate linguistic analysis. For example, as a result of camera work or editing, a hearer’s reaction to impoliteness may not be shown to the viewer if filmmakers consider it inconsequential to the plot, which makes the theoretical analysis of the hearer’s first order evaluation impossible. Here is an example from August: Osage County that illustrates several issues concerning viewer-researchers’ recognition of characters’ intentions and interpretations in an interaction riddled with impoliteness: (5) [Mattie Fae notices her son, disparagingly called “Little Charles” despite his age (37), playing the piano and singing a romantic song to Ivy (Mattie Fae’s niece, who is approaching 50), who is leaning her head on his shoulder. As the viewers know, the two have been having a secret affair. Both Little Charles and Ivy are regarded by their mothers as socially and intellectually inept and treated with disdain. Mattie Fae remains quiet and watches deadpan for a moment before she speaks.]   1 Mattie Fae: Liberace, you’d better get yourself together, we have to get home  2 and take care of those damn dogs. They’ve probably eaten the   3 drapes by now.   4 [Little Charles nods, ashamed of having been caught singing for Ivy.]   5 [Charlie, Mattie Fae’s husband appears.]   6 Charlie: I’m sure the house is fine.   7 Mattie Fae: [noticing the TV on] Oh, look, honey, Little Charles has got the TV  8 on.   9 Little Charles: No, I was just — 10 Mattie Fae: This one watches so much television, it’s rotted his brain. 11 Ivy: [defensively] I’m sure that’s not true. 12 Mattie Fae: What was it I caught you watching [Charlie tries to butt in] the other 13 day? 14 Little Charles: [shyly] I don’t remember. 15 Mattie Fae: You do so remember, some dumb talk show about people swapping 16 wives. 17 Little Charles: [unbuttoning the collar of his shirt] I don’t remember. 18 Mattie Fae: You don’t remember. [turning too Ivy] Too bad there isn’t a job 19 where they pay you to sit around watching TV. 20 Charlie: [tiredly] C’mon, Mattie Fae — 21 Mattie Fae: [in a shriekish voice] Y’know he got fired from a shoe store? 22 [Little Charles sighs, his eyes closed, his head hanging down.] 23 Charlie: [in an authoritative tone but calmly] Mattie Fae, we’re gonna get in 24 the car and go home. And if you say one more mean thing to that 25 boy I’m gonna kick your fat Irish ass into the highway. 26 Mattie Fae: [hurtling towards him, shouting] What the hell did you just say to 27 me?

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28 Charlie: Kids, go outside, would you please? 29 [Little Charles and Ivy leave hurriedly, both slouching and ashamed like 30 little children.] 31 [Mattie Fae is gobsmacked, with her mouth open.] 32 Charlie: [starts angrily, but gets calmer with each sentence] I don’t under 33 stand this meanness. [Mattie Fae looks apologetic.] I look at you 34 and your sister and the way you talk to people and I don’t under 35 stand it. I can’t understand why folks can’t be respectful to one 36 another. I don’t think there’s any excuse for it. My family didn’t 37 treat each other that way. 38 Mattie Fae: Oh, maybe cause your family didn’t have … 39 Charlie: [shouting] You’d better not say anything about my family right now, 40 I mean it! [Barbara, Mattie Fae’s other niece appears in the door 41 way, and hides behind the wall] [calmly again, with emphasis] We 42 just buried a man I loved very much. And whatever faults he may 43 have had, he was a good, kind, decent man. And to hear you tearing 44 your own son not even a day later dishonors Beverly’s memory. 45 We’ve been married 38 years and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. 46 But if you can’t find a generous place in your heart for your own 47 son, we’re NOT gonna make it to 39! [he turns back and leaves] (August: Osage County, 2013)

Even though Mattie Fae’s facial expression does not show any emotions, she must be displeased with her son’s affair with Ivy, which the recipient can easily surmise from her actions. She abruptly terminates Little Charles’s singing, ridicules him (cf. the sarcastic allusion to Liberaci17) and orders him around (line 1). As the interaction unfolds, she appears to be intent on humiliating her son in front of his love by purposefully revealing compromising information and making scathing remarks about him (lines 7, 10, 12, 15 and 21). As can be understood in the light of his (non)verbal reactions (lines 4, 10, 14, 17 and 22), Little Charles must take offence at his mother’s aggressive utterances but is extremely submissive and patiently suffers her attacks, rather than responding, let alone reciprocating impoliteness. Ivy also acknowledges the impoliteness targeted at her boyfriend, as manifest in her attempt to defend him (line 11), which does not resonate with Mattie Fae, who continues her onslaught, unaffected also by her husband’s attempts to soothe her (lines 6 and 20). It is thus transparent that Charlie also recognises her face attacks at Little Charles. Importantly, this shows unequivocally in Charlie’s metalinguistic comments (first order evaluations, i.e. “mean thing”, “meanness”, “folks can’t be respectful” and “tearing your own son”) that he makes concerning his wife’s (and her sister’s) impoliteness in his longer turns (lines 16–23, 31–36 and 38–46). He also has recourse to impoliteness in parts of these turns when he uses verbal abuse, gives her orders and raises his voice. These appear to be successful rhetorical 17

Władziu Valentino Liberace was a child prodigy who became a pianist and entertainer.

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tools to break the flow of her diatribe (line 30). However, he tries to remain calm and curb her angry behaviour, whose reason escapes him. Neither Charlie nor the recipients are privy to the entire scope of Mattie Fae’s underlying premises for her impoliteness. Observant viewers will notice that when her husband questions her behaviour, she seems to be showing remorse for a moment (line 32), but she does not disclose the rationale behind her behaviour. The recipients may conjecture that she is averse to her son’s relationship either because she is not appreciative of Ivy or she does not want to lose control over her son, which is why she wants to put him in very bad light in front of Ivy. This is only partly true, which the recipients discover in the course of the film when it transpires that Little Charlie and Ivy have the same father. With the benefit of hindsight, they can understand that Mattie Fae will have been impolite to vent her frustration and incite Ivy to end the affair, incestuous as it is. Cognisant of all this, researchers have full insight into Mattie Fae’s overt and covert intentions underlying the impoliteness towards her son. 4.

Future research

So far, with regard to telecinematic discourse, (im)politeness researchers have focused primarily on impoliteness phenomena, albeit in relationship to politeness. However, there is still a massive lacuna in research on not only politeness but also impoliteness in fictional interactions. There are innumerable topics to pursue, a selection of which is presented below. First of all, more attention should be paid to the validation of the claim that (im)politeness in fictional talk is characterised by verisimilitude. New studies may lend support to the works which draw on fictional data to exemplify the universal workings of (im)politeness. On the other hand, rather than studying (im)politeness in film discourse as if it were a real phenomenon, researchers may follow the stylistic approach teasing out the mechanisms of (im)politeness in films (as well as series and serials), thus bearing out the applicability of linguistic theory to fictional interactions. In either case, the list of potential foci of interest is very long and open-ended. Apart from holistic studies, attention may be paid to any of the plethora of communicative phenomena or speech act types which are naturally associated with (im)politeness, as evidenced by the lists of politeness and impoliteness strategies, such as joking and, more generally, conversational humour, compliments, requests, or swearing. Another research topic to study is the “Pygmalion” theme, where the young girls are educated to become ladies (e.g. My Fair Lady, Sabrina, or The Princess Diaries). For example, especially the remakes illustrate the changing nature of gender norms. Proper conduct and class distinctions are also topicalised in films and series such as Roman Holiday, Little Lord Fountleroy, or Downton Abbey. Stylistic studies may also consider issues such as characterisation or relationship development. Depending on the topic of investi-

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gation, such research may also necessitate insights from the scholarship on multimodality and “film grammar”, which captures the nature of cinematic techniques deployed by the production crew. Film talk may serve as a basis for inter-cultural and cross-cultural pragmatic studies, a strand of research which has already been followed in research on reality television (Culpeper and Holmes 2013; Lorenzo-Dus, Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013). Comparisons may be made concerning the chosen manifestations/forms of (im)politeness in films from different countries, whether or not English-speaking. Similar studies can be conducted with respect to film translation. Investigations of film discourse may also contribute to the nascent field of the metapragmatics or metalanguage studies in general (see Verschueren 2000) with regard to (im)politeness (Blas-Arroyo 2013; Lorenzo-Dus 2009b; Sinkeviciute 2015, 2017), where the focus is on viewers’ evaluations of utterances in television programmes. Similar analyses can be performed in reference to audience’s understandings of fictional scenes. In the light of even only these few pointers and the fact that new language data keep pouring in, it can be safely concluded that fictional telecinematic discourse holds a lot in store for (im)politeness researchers. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker for their helpful comments on the previous versions of this chapter. References Primary sources August: Osage County 2013 Dir. John Wells. Screenplay by Tracy Letts. The Weinstein Company. Downton Abbey 2010–ongoing Dir. Brian Percival et al. Screenplay by Julian Fellowes. Carnival Film & Television. Goodfellas 1990 Dir. Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese. Warner Bros. House M.D. 2004–2012 Dir. Greg Yaitanes et al. Screenplay by David Shore et al. Heal & Toe Films et al. Little Lord Fountleroy 1980 Dir. Jack Gold. Screenplay by Blanche Hanalis. Norman Rosemont Productions.

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Haugh, Michael 2010 When is an email really offensive?: Argumentativity and variability in evaluations of impoliteness. Journal of Politeness Research 6(1): 7–31. Haugh, Michael 2013 Speaker meaning and accountability in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 48(1): 41–56. Haugh, Michael 2015 Impoliteness Implicaures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Haugh, Michael and Derek Bousfield 2012 Mock impoliteness in interactions amongst Australian and British speakers of English. Journal of Pragmatics 44(9): 1099–1114. Haugh, Michael and Kasia Jaszczolt 2012 Speaker intentions and intentionality. In: Keith Allan and Kasia Jaszczolt (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, 87–112. Cambridge, UK: University Press, Cambridge. Herman, Vimala 1995 Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. London: Routledge. Hernández-Flores, Nieves 2008 Politeness and other types of facework: Communicative and social meaning in a television panel discussion. Pragmatics 18(4): 681–706. Hill, Annette, Lennart Weibull and Åsa Nilsson 2007 Public and popular: British and Swedish audience trends in factual and reality television. Cultural Trends 16(1): 17–41. Jobert, Manuel 2013 Domestic and professional impoliteness in Fawlty Towers: Impoliteness as a dramatic device. In: Denis Jamet and Manuel Jobert (eds.), Aspects of Linguistic Impoliteness, 75–93. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Jucker, Andreas H. 2015 Pragmatics of fiction: Literary uses of uh and um. Journal of Pragmatics 86: 63–67. Kádár, Dániel Z. 2013 Relational Rituals and Communication: Ritual Interaction in Groups. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmilan. Kádár, Dániel Z. and Michael Haugh 2013 Understanding Politeness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kádár, Dániel Z. and Sara Mills (eds.) 2011 Politeness in East Asia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kantara, Agyro 2010 Impoliteness strategies in House M.D. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 6(2): 305– 339. Katz, Ephraim 1998 The Film Encyclopedia, 3rd Ed., Fred Klein and Ronald Dean Nolen (rev.). New York: Harper Perennial. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine 2013 Politeness, impoliteness, non-politeness, “polirudeness”: The case of political TV debates. In: Denis Jamet and Manuel Jobert (eds.), Aspects of Linguistic Impoliteness, 16–45. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars.

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Locher, Miriam A. and Richard J. Watts 2005 Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research 1(1): 9–33. Locher, Miriam A. and Richard J. Watts 2008 Relational work and impoliteness: Negotiating norms of linguistic behaviour. In: Derek Bousfield and Miriam A. Locher (eds.), Impoliteness in Language: Studies on Its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice, 77–99. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria 2007 (Im)politeness and the Spanish media: The case of audience participation debates. In: María Elena Placencia and Carmen García (eds.), Research on Politeness in the Spanish-Speaking World, 145–166. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria 2009a Television Discourse: Analysing Language in the Media. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria 2009b ‘You’re barking mad, I’m out’: Impoliteness and broadcast talk. Journal of Politeness Research 5(2): 159–187. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Patricia Bou-Franch 2011 On-line polylogues and impoliteness: The case of postings sent in response to the Obama Reggaeton YouTube video. Journal of Pragmatics 43(10): 2578– 2593. Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, Patricia Bou-Franch and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013 Impoliteness in US/UK talent shows: A diachronic study of evolution of a genre. In: Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds.), Real Talk: Reality Television and Discourse Analysis in Action, 199–217. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mandala, Susan 2011 Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven of Nine: A case study of language and character in a televisual text. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 205–223. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mariottini, Laura 2012 Audiovisual (im)politeness: An interlinguistic and intercultural analysis of Spanish films dubbed into Italian. In: Lucía Fernández Amaya, Maria de la O Hernández López, Reyes Gómez Morón, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Manuel Mejias Borrero and Mariana Relinque Barranca (eds.), New Perspectives on (Im)Politeness and Interpersonal Communication, 114–137. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars. McHoul, Alec 1987 An initial investigation of the usability of fictional conversation for doing conversational analysis. Semiotica 67(1–2): 83–104. Mills, Sara 2003 Gender and Politeness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mills, Sara 2009 Impoliteness in a cultural context. Journal of Pragmatics 41(5): 1047–1060.

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16. Stance in fiction Daniela Landert Abstract: This chapter deals with stance as the expression of evaluative, epistemic and affective attitudes. Stance is a multifaceted concept and it is used in different ways across different research traditions. In fiction, stance can be realised both in character speech and in narratorial voice, and it can be expressed verbally as well as through non-verbal means, such as gestures and facial expressions. Studying stance can provide insights into characterisation, the dynamics between characters, plot development and narrative perspective. The chapter provides an overview of the different ways in which stance is relevant for the study of fiction from a pragmatic perspective, and it points to the great potential of future research in this area. 1. Introduction Recent years have seen a growing interest in the linguistic study of how speakers and writers express stance. This includes the study of evaluative expressions, like beautiful, epistemic expressions, like possibly, and affective expressions, like I hate. Such stance expressions play an important role in fiction on different levels. On the level of the communication between narrator and addressee (or: the narratorial level), stance expressions can influence how a story is perceived, for instance when overt narrators explicitly evaluate characters and events. On the level of the communication between characters (or: the character level), stance expressions provide a resource for characterisation and character alignment. Characters can explicitly evaluate themselves and others and they can also be characterised more implicitly through their use of stance expressions, for instance as being insecure or determined. Despite the relevance of stance for fiction, the amount of research that has explicitly been devoted to this area is limited. Linguistic studies of fiction have often discussed characteristics which are closely related to stance, but without focussing on stance itself. Examples include point of view, (im)politeness, speech acts, emotions, and characterisation (see also the relevant Chapters 4, 6, 14, 15 and 17, this volume). On the other hand, work on stance has mostly focused on non-fictional language, especially conversation and academic writing. For instance, an influential volume in the area, edited by Hunston and Thompson (2000), contains contributions that focus on academic writing (Hoey 2000), conversational narratives (Cortazzi and Jin 2000), persuasive texts such as book reviews and comment DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-016 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 489–514. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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articles from newspapers (Hunston 2000) and comparisons between academic writing, conversation, and news reportage (Conrad and Biber 2000). There is no contribution that is specifically devoted to fiction, although there are studies that are based on corpora which include fiction to a considerable extent (Channell 2000; Thompson and Zhou 2000). In addition, one of the papers (Martin 2000) uses many examples from a play, Educating Rita by Willy Russell, as illustrations of dialogue, without discussing the status of the play as a fictional text. Instead, the examples appear alongside examples from newspapers, magazines and classroom writing and, collectively, these contexts are taken to represent language use more generally. This treatment of fiction in Hunston and Thompson’s volume is quite typical of the treatment of fiction in research on stance more generally. The aim of this chapter is not so much to provide a comprehensive overview of exisiting research on stance in fiction, but to point out some of the aspects in which stance is relevant for the study of the pragmatics of fiction, as well as to indicate some of the research traditions in which related work has been carried out. I will start by giving a very brief introduction into classifications of stance expressions and related concepts in Section 2. In Section 3, I will introduce corpus studies as one line of research in which stance has been investigated in fictional data, in particular approaches that compare stance expressions across different registers. While these studies often do not devote a great deal of attention to the status of the data as fiction, the remaining sections all deal with aspects of stance that are intrinsically related to the nature of fiction. Section 4 discusses the role of stance on the narratorial level, in particular its relevance for narrative perspective and narratorial voice. Section 5 looks at stance expressions in character dialogue and explores the link between stance taking and character alignment. In Section 6, finally, I will connect some of the latest developments in research on stance and in research on the pragmatics of fiction by looking at multimodal stance in telecinematic discourse. 2.

Types of stance

Stance expressions cover a wide variety of different attitudes, which are often classified into several groups according to the kind of attitude that is expressed (see also Keisanen and Kärkkäinen 2014: 297). Evaluative stance refers to assessments that, in most general terms, fall somewhere along a continuum from good to bad. This includes value judgements that express how desirable, aesthetic, correct or appropriate something is. Adjectives such as good, inferior, beautiful, and wrong are a common way of expressing evaluative stance. Affective stance expresses emotions, for instance with verbs like love, adjectives like happy and adverbs like sadly. Epistemic stance deals with the degree of certainty or reliability of information. Expressions such as I am sure and certainly are used to communicate a high

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degree of certainty, whereas I doubt and possibly mark information as being less certain. Epistemic stance is closely related to evidentiality, which is the indication of the source of information. In languages like English, which lack morphological marking of epistemicity and evidentiality, stance expressions often combine information about both aspects. For instance, I believe expresses a strong commitment to the reliability of information (epistemicity) and it also marks information as being based on the speaker’s or writer’s own belief (evidentiality). In contrast, apparently expresses a lower degree of certainty and it indicates that the speaker or writer has some form of external evidence. The last group of stance meaning is style of speaking stance, which is used to characterise the ongoing communication. Examples are frankly, to be honest, strictly speaking, and I swear (see Biber et al. 1999: 975). There is no general agreement among researchers as to which subtypes ought to be included in studies of stance and how exactly to draw the lines between different types of stance. For instance, in the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Biber et al. (1999) distinguish three types of stance, namely epistemic stance (which includes evidential stance), attitudinal stance (which covers both evaluative and affective stance), and style of speaking stance. This last type, style of speaking stance, is rarely treated as a separate category by other scholars. In addition, terminology varies greatly across approaches. Some approaches use evaluation as a cover term under which other types of stance are subsumed (e.g. Bednarek 2006; Thompson and Hunston 2000), while for others, evaluative stance is one subcategory of stance (e.g. Kärkkäinen 2003; Keisanen and Kärkkäinen 2014). Some scholars see a functional difference between the two concepts. For instance, Du Bois (2007: 163) defines stance as a “public act” that is achieved through “simultaneously evaluating objects, positioning subjects (self and others), and aligning with other subjects”. Thus, according to his definition, evaluation is one of three components that together establish a stance. Alba-Juez and Thompson (2014: 10) draw the distinction between stance and evaluation in a different way, defining evaluation as the “expression of the speaker’s stance or attitude” (emphasis in original). In other words, they see stance as “a more abstract concept” and evaluation as the realisation of stance through communication (Alba-Juez and Thompson 2014: 10). Others adopt an entirely different classification system for the meanings introduced above, such as the Appraisal Framework that was developed in the tradition of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin 2000; Martin and White 2005). The framework distinguishes three different types of stance meanings: affect, which is similar to affective stance introduced above; judgement, which covers moral evaluations; and appreciation, which refers to other types of evaluations, such as evaluations of aesthetic quality. Moreover, there are a number of research areas and topics that overlap with the study of stance and stance expressions to a considerable extent, including, for instance, (inter-)subjectivity, modality, pragmatic markers, emotional language, vague language, intensifiers

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and hedges. It is not possible to discuss the relation between each of these concepts and stance here (but see, for instance, Englebretson 2007; Jaffe 2009; Keisanen and Kärkkäinen 2014; Thompson and Hunston 2000). There is a wide range of linguistic resources that can be used to express stance. Lexical items that tend to express stance meanings can include adjectives, verbs, nouns and adverbs. Certain structural patterns have also been identified as playing an important role for stance marking. These include sentence adverbials, thatand to-complement clauses, nouns followed by prepositional phrases, and modal verbs (Biber et al. 1999: 969–970; Gray and Biber 2014). In addition, some languages have morphological markers of stance. Alba-Juez and Thompson (2014: 100) present examples from Spanish, where the use of the suffixes -ucho/a, uco/a, and -azo/a can turn adjectives and nouns into negatively evaluated nouns (e.g. larguirucho ‘a tall but graceless person’, from largo ‘long/tall’ + -ucho). Examples of morphological markers of evidentiality can be found in Cuzco Quechua, where enclitics indicate whether the information expressed in the verb is based on the speaker’s own observation, on information reported by someone else, or on conjecture (Faller 2002: 3; see also Aikhenvald 2004). Apart from these explicit markers, stance can also be expressed more implicitly. Biber et al. (1999) mention non-linguistic and paralinguistic means of stance marking. Non-linguistic means include gestures, facial expressions, and body postures, while paralinguistic means refer to pitch, intensity and duration (Biber et al. 1999: 697). Alba-Juez and Thompson (2014: 100) point out that an utterance such as I’m sure he cares for you can express a positive or negative (e.g. ironic) evaluation, depending on intonation and context (see also Escandell-Vidal, Marrero Aguiar, and Pérez Ocón 2014; Estebas-Vilaplana 2014). It is clear that these are characteristics that are especially relevant for the study of spoken language, but similar effects can be achieved in written language, for instance through the use of special fonts, formatting (large font or boldface), capitalisation, emoticons and emojis. Finally, in both written and spoken language, context plays an important role when expressing and interpreting stance. Given that there is no one-to-one relation between linguistic forms and stance meanings, it is often the context that allows interactants to decide whether a stance is expressed or not. In addition, there are cases in which stance is expressed without any clear conventional stance markers, so that it is difficult to pinpoint lexical items or linguistic structures that create the stance meaning. Hunston (2004) demonstrates this point with the following example: (1) The intention of this article is not to offer ‘new ideas’ for pedagogical application, but to share a very real concern about our survival both as teachers and as human beings. If this seems unduly dramatic, then so be it. Our situation is already dramatic almost to the point of tragedy. We are at risk – from the pressures of consumerism, the media, technology, and rampant trivialisation. Our lives are lived at an increasingly accelerating pace, leaving less and less time for mature reflection and the exercise of independent

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choice. The results are burnout, breakdown and a loss of the ability to direct our own lives. We risk becoming units in the service of a system we no longer understand, rather than the vibrant individuals we are all capable of being. (Maley 1999, presented and discussed in Hunston 2004: 159)

Hunston (2004: 159) argues that this passage “sets up a value system in which some entities are ‘good’, others are ‘bad’”. In a later publication, Hunston (2007: 39) further points out that it is questionable whether stance is created exclusively through linguistic means in this passage. While there are lexical items that express a negative attitude (e.g. tragedy, risk), more general cultural evaluations of how time is spent also seem to play an important role. Thus, context has to be taken into account for the study of stance. Traditionally, most studies of stance and related notions have focused on explicit stance markers. However, recently there has been an increasing focus on stance in interaction, where stance is expressed in dialogic settings and often in more implicit ways (for a recent overview of research on stance in interaction, see Keisanen and Kärkkäinen 2014). This line of research investigates how speakers position themselves in relation to their interlocutors through stance taking. Speakers can create different degrees of alignment with other participants by either sharing their stance or by taking a different stance. In this way, stance taking becomes an important resource for establishing participant roles in interaction and, accordingly, Du Bois (2007: 139) refers to stance as “a linguistically articulated form of social action”. Going one step further still, Bucholtz and Hall (2005) link stance taking to identity construction. They see identity as a product that is constructed through linguistic practices in interaction. Building on the view of stance as social action, they argue that over time stances can “accumulate into more durable structures of identity” (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 596). From this very brief overview it should have become clear that stance is a multifaceted concept that is used in different ways across different research traditions. More grammatically oriented approaches adopt a narrow definition in which stance refers to the speaker’s or writer’s subjectivity in the form of personal attitudes and judgements. According to this view, stance is a local phenomenon that can be tied to specific lexico-grammatical patterns. In contrast, interactional approaches use a broader definition in which stance is linked to social positioning and identity construction. These latter approaches tend to focus on the intersubjective construction of stance, in which stance is not restricted to specific lexical forms or grammatical patterns. As a consequence of the different uses of the term, the concept of stance will slightly change across the sections that follow. The corpus approaches described in Section 3 tend to focus on stance expressions that are realised in fixed lexico-grammatical patterns and, thus, can be identified automatically. In contrast, implicit and interactional stance expressions become more important for topics covered in later parts of this chapter, especially for the discussion of multimodal stance.

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Corpus approaches to stance

Some studies of stance are based on data that include fiction, even though the specific relation between stance and fiction is not explored in detail. Instead, fiction is treated as one type of data alongside other data that represent language use more generally and thus can be used to study specific linguistic phenomena, such as stance. This is especially true for corpus approaches to the study of stance, given that most corpora that attempt to represent language use overall contain a substantial amount of text from fiction. For instance, fiction contributes 20% of data to the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2012), 19% to the written part of the British National Corpus (Burnard 2009) and 12% to the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English corpus (Biber et al. 1999: 25). There are various reasons why fiction is so well represented in corpora. One reason is that it is a reflection of how language is used. The amount of language produced as part of fictional texts is huge and many of us devote a great deal of time to reading and watching fiction, both in educational settings and for recreational purposes. Some forms of fiction are further seen as instances of especially artistic, aesthetic and exemplary realisations of language, such as the works of Shakespeare and other canonical authors. Finally, fictional texts – especially those whose copyright has expired – are comparatively easy for researchers to access. Printed books do not need to be transcribed, unlike conversations; access to novels and plays is easier than access to private correspondence; and books – fictional and non-fictional – are increasingly available in digital form. Corpus-based studies of stance can be divided into several groups. Research in the first group is interested in language use overall and no comparison is made between stance in fiction and stance in other registers. Hunston’s (2007, 2011) work on evaluative stance belongs to this category. Based on the Bank of English Corpus, she studies expressions and phraseologies that express evaluative stance. She interprets examples in the context of the concordance lines in which they occur and she is able to show that the phrases in which evaluative lexical items are used and other co-occurring expressions play a role for the stance that is expressed. Since the Bank of English Corpus includes data from fiction, her examples are partly based on fiction. However, there is no detailed analysis of how different registers influence or condition stance expressions, or how stance expressions can serve specific functions in specific registers. Thus, such approaches reveal new insights into stance expressions in general, but they do not throw much light onto the more specific role stance expressions play in fiction. Still, the fact that fictional data is very well represented in many corpora means that it is likely to influence findings that are based on these corpora. This makes it all the more important to study the specific ways in which stance is used in fiction in more detail. The second group of corpus-based studies deals with differences in stance across different sections of corpora, for instance differences between fiction, aca-

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demic writing, news writing and conversation. The focus mainly lies on quantitative differences between registers, and not all of the studies include fiction. For instance, Conrad and Biber (2000) and Gray and Biber (2014) restrict their analysis to three registers, academic writing, news and conversation. In other cases, fiction is included but stance is not the focus of the study, for instance in Bednarek’s (2008) cross-register comparison of emotional language. Still, there are some findings in this line of research that are relevant for stance in fiction. Biber et al. (1999: 979) are able to show that stance markers are more frequent in fiction than in other written registers (news and academic writing), but less frequent than in conversation. According to them, one factor that contributes to the higher frequency in fiction compared to other written registers is the fact that fiction often contains reported speech, as well as representations of the private thoughts of characters (Biber et al. 1999: 980). Such results can provide some insights into more specific aspects of stance in fiction. They indicate, for instance, that dialogues between characters are one of the places in which stance markers are likely to be found. In addition, if the representation of characters’ private thoughts is an area where stance features prominently, this suggests that the particular type of narrative perspective used will have a marked influence on how stance is expressed. These two aspects are explored in further detail in Sections 4 and 5 below. The last group of corpus-based studies that is of relevance to stance in fiction includes research that investigates the similarities between fictional dialogues and spontaneous face-to-face conversation. Most of these studies do not have an exclusive focus on stance, but since stance markers are one of the characteristics that indicate linguistic immediacy and spontaneity, they often play a central role. Quaglio (2009) presents a multidimensional corpus study in which he compares dialogues from the television series Friends to data from face-to-face conversations. His findings suggest that the two sets of data share many similarities. As far as stance markers are concerned, Quaglio’s discussion of vague language and emotional language includes some epistemic stance markers, but they do not show a very clear picture. While probably is less frequent in Friends than in conversation, maybe, perhaps and of course are more frequent in television dialogue (Quaglio 2009: 82–83, 95). Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005) study intensifiers in Friends and conclude that the data show almost the same rate of intensification as contemporary spoken English. In contrast, Bednarek (2010: 78) analyses data from the television series Gilmore Girls and finds that stance-related n-grams like I think and I mean are under-represented compared to face-to-face conversation.

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Stance and narratorial voice

As mentioned earlier, one place in which stance expressions occur in fiction is in the narrator’s voice. A stance expressed by the narrator is part of the communication between the fictional text and the reader and evaluations and assessments of characters and events influence the reader’s perception of the story. Different classifications of narrators and narratorial voice have been proposed (e.g. Fowler 1996; Simpson 1993; Toolan 1988; for a brief overview, see, for instance, Leech and Short 2007: 206–218; Neary 2014; Niederhoff 2009); they will not be discussed here in detail (but see Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume and Hoffmann, Ch. 6, this volume). However, it is important to note that there seem to be systematic relations between the type of narration and the use and effects of stance markers, and it has been pointed out that stance markers play an important role for establishing narrative voice (Simpson 1993: Ch. 3; see also Bednarek 2008: 186; Martin and White 2005: 72). One aspect that is very clearly tied to stance marking is the degree of perceptibility, i.e. whether narrators are overt, having a strong presence in the text, or covert, having very little presence in the text (Rimmon-Kenan 2002: 97–101). Overt narrators express their stance more clearly than covert narrators, who tend to present descriptive accounts with very little narratorial intervention. Ernest Hemingway is often quoted as an example of an author whose writing typically features covert narrators. (2) Francis Macomber had, half an hour before, been carried to his tent from the edge of the camp in triumph on the arms and shoulders of the cook, the personal boys, the skinner and the porters. The gun-bearers had taken no part in the demonstration. When the native boys put him down at the door of his tent, he had shaken all their hands, received their congratulations, and then gone into the tent and sat on the bed until his wife came in. She did not speak to him when she came in and he left the tent at once to wash his face and hands in the portable wash basin outside and go over to the dining tent to sit in a comfortable canvas chair in the breeze and the shade. (Hemingway [1936] 1962: 11, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”)

In this extract from the short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, there are no explicit stance markers that evaluate the events or the characters. There are a few lexical items that carry an evaluative meaning, such as triumph and congratulations, which indicate that something positive took place. Apart from that the narratorial account consists of a series of factual statements, and it does not even become clear whether the narrator shares the positive evaluation of the event that is celebrated as triumph. The lack of overt stance markers means that the narrator remains in the background and indeed the absence of stance in narratorial voice is one of the defining features of a covert narrator. There are different types of overt narrators and for each of these types, the effect of stance expressions on the communication between text and reader is slightly different. Extradiegetic third-person narrators are narrators that do not

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take part in the narrated events and who also do not refer to themselves in the first person. The narrator in Hemingway’s short story is an extradiegetic third-person narrator, but not all narrators of this type are as covert as Hemingway’s. In Jane Austen’s Emma, for instance, we can find an extradiegetic third-person narrator who presents explicit evaluations of events and characters. (3) Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. […] The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her. (Austen [1816] 2003: 5, Emma)

This opening passage of the novel contains evaluative lexical items that characterise the protagonist as handsome, clever, and rich. The epistemic marker seemed introduces an element of uncertainty with respect to this positive characterisation. In the second part of the quoted passage, the narrator proceeds to present Emma’s disadvantages and the real evils of her situation. Finally, the narrator also presents Emma’s own evaluation of herself, stating that the danger described by the narrator was unperceived by the protagonist. The fact that Emma’s evaluation does not agree with the narrator’s evaluation creates a certain distance between the reader and the protagonist, which is an important factor contributing to the irony for which the novel’s style is known. George Eliot’s novels include examples of extradiegetic narrators who occasionally use the first person, which makes them even more overt. Some of these passages express an attitude towards the described events, such as regret at the beginning of Chapter 24 of Middlemarch. (4) I am sorry to say that only the third day after the propitious events at Houndsley Fred Vincy had fallen into worse spirits than he had known in his life before. (Eliot [1871– 1872] 1965: 273, Middlemarch)

In other cases, the evaluation extends to characters and to more general social norms. Often, Eliot combines the use of explicit stance markers with rhetorical questions, and sometimes her narrator even addresses readers directly (see also Leech and Short 2007: 214). (5) Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? (Eliot [1871–1872] 1965: 456, Middlemarch, also quoted in Leech and Short 2007: 214)

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(6) If you blame Mr. Riley very severely for giving a recommendation on such slight grounds, I must say you are rather hard upon him. (Eliot [1880] 1985: 30, The Mill on the Floss)

The use of rhetorical questions and direct address invites readers to evaluate the events and characters and to share the stance of the narrator. This is especially clear in Example (6) from The Mill on the Floss, in which the narrator explicitly evaluates a potential stance of the reader. The last group of overt narrators that I would like to discuss briefly are first-person character narrators. These are narrators who tell a story in which they participate themselves. There are different subtypes, depending on the centrality of the character in the story and the temporal perspective from which the story is told. I will discuss only one case, namely the narrator in Dickens’ Great Expectations. Pip is a first-person character narrator who looks back on his own life and, in doing so, evaluates himself and his past actions. (7) I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good fellow, – I know – I was ashamed of him, – when I saw that Estella stood at the back of Miss Havisham’s chair, and that her eyes laughed mischievously. (Dickens [1860–1861] 2000: 83, Great Expectations, emphasis in original)

There are two different levels of stance present in this passage. On the one hand, the young Pip, who is the focaliser of this passage, is ashamed of Joe, his brother in law, which implies a negative evaluation of Joe, who is not behaving according to the expected social norms. On the other hand, the older Pip, who is narrating the story, expresses his regret about his earlier feelings (I am afraid), describing Joe as a dear good fellow. The clash between these two different attitudes towards Joe reflects Pip’s development throughout the novel. 5.

Stance in character dialogue

While the previous section looked at stance in the narrator’s voice, this section will deal with how characters express stance, and what kind of effect this creates. One way to approach this is to investigate explicit stance markers in character speech. Nørgaard (2014: 474) argues that epistemic stance markers in the speech of characters can be used for characterisation. For instance, if a character uses many markers of uncertainty, that character will appear less confident as a result. An example of such a characterisation can again be found in Hemingway’s short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. The story revolves around the fact that Francis Macomber is a coward, who, in the decisive moment of his big-game safari, is scared of shooting a lion. He is characterised as insecure and hesitant, and many of his turns consist of questions directed to Robert Wilson, the professional hunter who guides him and his wife on the safari. The dialogues in

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this short story do not contain many epistemic stance markers, but there are a few prominent instances in Macomber’s turns that serve to reinforce his characterisation. The first of these appears at the beginning of the short story, in the second turn by Macomber: (8) It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.   “Will you have lime juice or lemon squash?” Macomber asked.   “I’ll have a gimlet,” Robert Wilson told him.   “I’ll have a gimlet too. I need something,” Macomber’s wife said.  “I suppose it’s the thing to do,” Macomber agreed. (Hemingway [1936] 1962: 11, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, emphasis added)

After hearing that both Wilson and his wife prefer a gimlet over lime juice or lemon squash, Macomber decides to follow their example. However, he uses “I suppose” as a hedge to express that he still has some reservations about their choice. This lets him appear hesitant and insecure, especially since he changes his mind despite not being entirely convinced. Three additional epistemic markers are used by Macomber slightly later in the story, again expressing uncertainty. (9) “Women upset,” said Wilson to the tall man. “Amounts to nothing. Strain on the nerves and one thing’n another.”   “No,” said Macomber. “I suppose that I rate for that for the rest of my life now.”   “Nonsense. Let’s have a spot of the giant killer,” said Wilson.   “Forget the whole thing. Nothing to it anyway.”  “We might try,” said Macomber.  […]  “Maybe I can fix it on buffalo,” he said. “We’re after them next, aren’t we?” (Hemingway [1936] 1962: 13–15, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, emphasis added)

Even though there are not many epistemic stance markers used in Hemingway’s short story overall, their strategic use has quite a distinct effect, contributing to Francis Macomber’s characterisation as insecure and hesitant. The fact that the other characters tend not to use uncertainty markers creates a contrast that reinforces this characterisation. That stance contributes to characterisation has also been shown for telecinematic discourse. In her analysis of the television series Gilmore Girls, Bednarek (2010) finds that there are marked differences between the key words and n-grams used by different characters. More precisely, the key words and n-grams indicate that some characters express certain types of stance (evaluative parameters in Bednarek’s terminology) more frequently than others. She argues that this reflects different “scripted identit[ies]” of the characters, and refers to this aspect as “expressive character identity” (Bednarek 2010: 118).

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Another starting point for studying stance in character–character interaction is the body of research on stance in non-fictional interaction. Most of this research is dealing with face-to-face interaction and uses methods from conversation analysis to study stance taking (for a recent overview, see Keisanen and Kärkkäinen 2014). Obviously, there are a number of differences between face-to-face interaction and fictional dialogue. While the former is typically taking place spontaneously the latter is carefully constructed (Culpeper and Kytö 2010: 67; see also Bublitz, Ch. 8, this volume, on features of orality). Fictional dialogues are usually realised in the written mode – even though in the case of plays and telecinematic discourse they may be intended to be spoken – and they differ from face-to-face interaction with respect to the purposes they serve. Still, based on the fact that fictional dialogues are meant to resemble spoken face-to-face interaction, it is possible to apply concepts from research on face-to-face interaction to fictional dialogues (see also Bednarek 2010, Ch. 5, this volume; Bubel 2011; Lambrou 2014; Quaglio 2009). An important trend in the research on stance in face-to-face interaction is the shift in focus from stance markers in the speech of individuals to the collaborative construction of stance by several interacting participants (e.g. Du Bois 2007; Du Bois and Kärkkäinen 2012; Kärkkäinen 2006). Stance is thus seen as intersubjective rather than subjective, involving several participants who negotiate stance across several turns. Du Bois (2007) introduces the model of the stance triangle to capture different aspects of stance taking. He defines stance taking in the following way: “I evaluate something, and thereby position myself, and thereby align with you” (Du Bois 2007: 163). In other words, expressing an attitude positions the speaker in relation to other speakers, depending on the amount of agreement between their evaluations. A high degree of agreement results in convergent alignment whereas a low degree of agreement leads to divergent alignment.1 Du Bois further points out that convergent alignment is not only created through shared evaluations, but that speakers even take over formulations from previous speakers in order to align themselves with them. He develops a special notation, which he calls stance diagraph, that helps visualise these similarities (Table 1).

1



Du Bois avoids treating alignment and disalignment as a dichotomy. Instead, he sees alignment as a continuum that covers various degrees of convergent and divergent alignment. This point is perhaps best summarised in a footnote in Du Bois and Kärkkäinen (2012: 447): “What we call divergent alignment is often referred to as ‘disalignment’, a term we reject as dichotomizing. In contrast, alignment in our sense is analyzed as continuously variable. Degrees of divergent alignment, as well as of convergent alignment, are recognized.”

Stance in fiction  Table 1.

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Stance diagraph (Du Bois 2007: 166)

#

Speaker

Stance Subject

Positions/ Evaluates

Stance Object

1

SAM

I1

don’t like

those

3

ANGELA

I2

don’t {like}

{those}

Aligns either

In Du Bois’ example, Angela not only agrees with Sam with respect to her dislike, but she even adopts the same formulation he used two lines earlier, followed by either. By using the same formulation, her convergent alignment with Sam is reinforced. Similarities between turns can occur on different linguistic levels. Kärkkäinen (2006) finds a high degree of phonological, syntactic and/or semantic parallelism between different speakers in story telling. She concludes that similarities on different linguistic levels need to be taken into account when analysing how shared stances are negotiated. Applied to fiction, the analysis of shared stances and linguistic alignment between characters can reveal insights into the dynamics between them. Again using Hemingway’s short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” as an example, we can see one instance of this in the first interaction between the three main characters of the story (see Example [8] above). Following Francis Macomber’s question Will you have lime juice or lemon squash?, Robert Wilson and Macomber’s wife Margaret both opt for a third alternative, a gimlet. Margaret Macomber’s response I’ll have a gimlet too takes over Wilson’s formulation verbatim, which creates a very strong convergent alignment with Wilson and a divergent alignment with her husband. Thus, already in the first few lines of the story, the dynamics between the three main characters is expressed through a combination of explicit linguistic stance markers and the more implicit negotiation of shared stances. In Hemingway’s short story, the alignment between the characters is quite stable. In other cases, alignments can change over time, leading to different affiliations of characters over the course of a story. Bubel (2011) presents an analysis of the television series Sex and the City, in which she traces alignment patterns between the four protagonists of the series. She is able to show how shifts in alignments on the micro level – e.g. through the use of repetitions, discourse markers, shared laughter – lead to shifts in social relations on the macro level. For Sex and the City, she argues that two of the protagonists, Miranda and Carrie, have a stable relation as the “core friendship pair”, while the other two friends, Charlotte and Samantha, are “more marginal members” whose status shifts over time (Bubel 2011: 247). One aspect that makes fiction particularly interesting and challenging for the study of stance is that the two different levels on which stance occurs, the narrator’s voice and the character’s voice, can lead to layered stance expressions. The stance the narrator takes towards the character serves as a filter through which the

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audience perceives the character’s stance (see also Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, Ch. 4, this volume, on narratorial filters). For instance, an expression of certainty by a character who is described as having poor judgement will be met with scepticism by the reader, as will a positive aesthetic evaluation by a character who is described as having bad taste. In these cases, the stance expressions by the character lead to a convergent alignment between audience and narrator and a divergent alignment between audience and character. The following passage from Emma can serve as an illustration. Emma here talks to Harriet after they met Mr. Martin, a farmer with whom Harriet is acquainted through frequent visits to his family. While Harriet likes Mr. Martin, Emma thinks that he is socially beneath Harriet. (10) “I think, Harriet, since your acquaintance with us, you have been repeatedly in the company of some, such very real gentlemen, that you must yourself be struck with the difference in Mr. Martin. At Hartfield you have had very good specimens of well educated, well bred men. I should be surprized if, after seeing them, you could be in company with Mr. Martin again without perceiving him to be a very inferior creature– and rather wondering at yourself for having ever thought him at all agreeable before. Do not you begin to feel that now? Were not you struck? I am sure you must have been struck by his awkward look and abrupt manner–and the uncouthness of a voice, which I heard to be wholly unmodulated as I stood here.” (Austen [1816] 2003: 26, Emma)

Emma presents a very negative evaluation of Mr. Martin, trying to convince Harriet that he is an unsuitable match for her. Despite the abundance of negative evaluative markers, the passage does not result in a construction of Mr. Martin’s character as an “inferior creature”. Instead, the fact that Emma was previously characterised as someone with questionable judgement and “the power of having rather too much her own way” (see Example [3] above) is likely to lead readers to reject, or at least question, this characterisation of Mr. Martin. At the same time the passage contributes to Emma’s characterisation. Her words reveal her to be haughty and inconsiderate, in addition to being misguided in her judgement of Mr. Martin. Thus, Emma’s evaluation of Mr. Martin characterises Emma herself as much as it characterises him. 6.

Multimodal stance taking in telecinematic discourse

So far, this chapter has discussed stance purely on the basis of written or spoken language. However, non-verbal aspects play an important role for expressing stance. Gestures, facial expressions, gaze, postures, distance, and spatial positioning can all contribute to or even create stance. For instance, a smile or a thumbs-up gesture can be used to express a positive evaluation, and an unsteady, evasive gaze can be used to express uncertainty or insecurity. As far as positioning is concerned, the concept was developed in the context of discursive psychology (Davies

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and Harré 1990) and it has been used to investigate how acts of positioning are realised through language (e.g. Bucholtz and Hall 2005; Du Bois 2007; Du Bois and Kärkkäinen 2012). However, the concepts of positioning and alignment are based on spatial metaphors and it is easy to see how they can also be realised through actual physical positioning and alignment with others in space. In written fiction, non-verbal aspects of characters’ stance taking can be expressed verbally by the narrator. However, the interaction between spoken language and non-verbal cues of stance taking can best be analysed on the basis of telecinematic discourse, where non-verbal aspects are represented through images and sounds. (Recorded) theatre performances can be studied in a similar way, while comics and graphic novels provide a data source for studying visual cues of stance taking in combination with written language. There has generally been a rise in research into multimodal discourse in recent years. As far as fiction is concerned, linguistic studies of telecinematic discourse have recently gained prominence (e.g. Androutsopoulos 2012; Bednarek 2010; Bleichenbacher 2008; Piazza, Bednarek, and Rossi 2011; Planchenault 2015), which is also evidenced by several of the chapters in this volume. Despite this recent interest, there is still very little research into the interaction between linguistic and non-verbal aspects of stance taking. Most of the findings on multimodal stance taking come from interactional linguistics, where video recordings of naturally-occurring interactions have been used as a data source. To give an example, Stivers (2008) studies how participants in storytelling align and affiliate themselves with the teller’s stance through nodding. Keisanen and Kärkkeinen (2014: 308–313) present a brief overview of the body of work on stance taking in face-to-face interactions, as well as a case study that further illustrates how a multimodal analysis can enrich a purely text-based account. In what follows, I will briefly point out some of the ways in which non-verbal aspects combine with the linguistic expression of stance in telecinematic discourse. Since this is a rather new research area, the main aim will be to identify promising avenues for future research. For the discussion of stance in telecinematic discourse, like for written fictional texts, two different levels of communication need to be distinguished: the character level and the narratorial level. On the character level, non-verbal aspects of communication combine with the character’s utterances in much the same way as they do in naturally-occurring interactions. Again, there are some obvious differences, similar to the differences between spontaneous conversation and fictional dialogues mentioned above. There are various factors that influence how closely non-verbal communication in telecinematic discourse mirrors that in spontaneous everyday interaction, including acting technique and genre (Bordwell and Thompson 2004: 199–207; Naremore 1988). Despite these differences, it is possible to apply methods from multi-modal conversation analysis to the analysis of telecinematic discourse in order to gain insights into embodied stance taking.

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There are two basic options how verbal and non-verbal communication can combine in stance taking. Either the non-verbal signals support the verbally expressed stance or they contradict it. Bednarek (2010: Ch. 7) finds both options in her detailed multi-modal analysis of a break-up scene between Max and Lorelai in the television series Gilmore Girls. For instance, Max provides a positive verbal evaluation of a kiss (That was a great kiss) and supports this evaluation with matching non-verbal behaviour, which Bednarek (2010: 154) describes as: “breathes out ‘puh’, shaking head very slightly [sort of ‘unbelievably great’]”. In contrast, Lorelai’s non-verbal behaviour contradicts her verbally expressed stance after Max breaks up with her. While agreeing with him verbally (Okay; Sure, that makes sense; No, you’re right. You’re absolutely right), her non-verbal behaviour indicates that she does not agree with the break-up (Bednarek 2010: 172). This can be seen, for instance, in her negative facial expression and restless hand movements, which express negative emotions (2010: 156). Bednarek interprets this contradiction as an attempt to be cooperative and harmonious and as possible reluctance to show emotion in the public setting of a coffee shop, which is where the break-up takes place (2010: 172). In this scene, verbal and non-verbal means combine to express a complex stance that can only be fully grasped by applying a multi-modal analysis. On the narratorial level, camera perspective takes over some of the functions of explicit narratorial stance in written fictional texts (Naremore 1988: 39). In Müller’s (2014: 34) words, “[t]he camera shapes the way in which viewers position themselves in relation to the storyworld and the way the storyworld emerges for them.” Referring to F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), she argues that the technique of the moving camera – which was an innovation at that time – allows viewers to share the characters’ perspective and can even convey information about their thoughts that previously had to be provided by intertitles (2014: 33). From a linguistic perspective the central question is how camera perspective and other aspects can combine with explicit narratorial voice in order to express a narratorial stance that is comparable to that of overt narrators in written fiction. While explicit narratorial voice is less typical in telecinematic discourse than in written genres of fiction, it is still used occasionally in the form of voice-overs and asides to the audience (see Brown 2012; Hoffmann, Ch. 6, this volume). In the remainder of this section, I will present a brief case study to illustrate how explicit narratorial voice can combine with different film and sound techniques to create narratorial stance. The scene I selected comes from the television series Mr. Robot (2015). The series describes the activities of a group of hackers who want to bring down a large multinational corporation by deleting all their financial records, at the same time liberating many citizens from their private debts. Elliot, the protagonist of the series, is suffering from anxiety disorder and morphine addiction and his unstable mental health soon becomes apparent to the viewer. Elliot is also the main focaliser of the story and sometimes he takes over

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the role of first-person narrator. In voice-overs he presents his thoughts and ana­ lyses ongoing events. The addressee of Elliot’s narration is his imaginary friend, who is an effect of his mental health problems. The first episode of the series, entitled “eps1.0_hellofriend.mov”, starts with a black screen (followed by credits) and Elliot’s voice: (11) Hello friend. Hello friend? That’s lame. Maybe I should give you a name. But that’s a slippery slope, You’re only in my head, We have to remember that. Shit. It has actually happened. I’m talking to an imaginary person. (Mr. Robot 2015: Episode 1 “eps1.0_hellofriend.mov”)

In later scenes, such uses of direct address are often accompanied by Elliot’s gaze into the camera. There is a play between intradiegetic address of Elliot’s imaginary friend as the addressee of his narration and extradiegetic address of the audience of the television series. The effect is that viewers feel addressed as Elliot’s imaginary friend, which puts them in a problematic position as being part of his mental health problems. Elliot is an unusually overt narrator and his unstable mental health also means that he is an extremely unreliable narrator. The next scene I analyse takes place towards the end of Episode 8. Elliot has just become aware of how serious his mental health problems are. In the previous scene, Darlene, another hacker in their group, told him that she is his sister, a fact that he had forgotten, apparently not for the first time. The scene describes his journey home and ends with the revelation that the leader of their group, Mr. Robot, does not exist. He is a product of Elliot’s imagination, which he created based on his dead father. Table 2 presents an overview of the scene. The first column gives time indications and the second column presents a rough transcription of Elliot’s speech. All of the speech in this passage is in voice-over except for Were you? at 40:47 (in boldface), which is diegetic speech. The third column describes the visual track and sound effects that are relevant for the analysis. They form a second level of (extra-diegetic) narration in addition to Elliot’s intra-diegetic narration. The scene spans only slightly more than one minute, but it is very dense and uses fast cutting, which makes it impossible to analyse each shot individually. It is also full of symbolism, which cannot be discussed here in detail. Instead, I will restrict my analysis to some salient aspects of how stance is created through the interplay of Elliot’s words and filming techniques.

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Table 2.

Description of scene from Mr. Robot 2015: Episode 8 “eps1.7_wh1ter0se.m4v”

Time

Spoken monologue (voice-over)

Description of visual track and sound effects

40:21

Darlene and I would hide in movie theaters all day. Darlene would sing Frère Jacques. She rode her scooter in front of our house.

Elliot is shown, in a subway station coming down a staircase to the platform. This is followed by a series of very brief medium-close to close-up shots of Elliot’s face from various directions (jump cuts) while he is walking back and forth on the platform. The voice is changing direction of origin with each intonation unit.

40:27

I’m crazy I’m crazy I’m crazy I’m crazy I’m crazy

Echo effect

40:28

She tried to run away in the third grade. How come I didn’t remember this? We slept in the same bed when our mom was mean to us. Why did I forget? I remember her voice. How could I forget?

Brief shots of Elliot walking down staircase (flashbacks) cut into shots of him standing on platform (jump cuts) The voice is changing direction of origin with each intonation unit.

40:36

I’m crazy I’m crazy I’m crazy I’m crazy I’m crazy

Echo effect Entering subway (series of brief non-chronological shots) Close-up of Elliot facing camera, but not quite looking into it

40:39

(2:00)

40:41

Are you freaking out? (.) Tell me the truth. (.) Were you in on this the whole time? (.)

Single shot Elliot looks into the camera, face moving slightly towards and away from camera, as if trying to see properly. Elliot’s face is slightly out of focus, camera unsteady.

40:47

Were you?

[still same shot] Elliot shouting (only diegetic speech in this sequence), directly addressing the viewer while looking into the camera.

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Time

Spoken monologue (voice-over)

Description of visual track and sound effects

40:48

(2:00)

Camera angles downward, out of focus. Black out, suggesting Elliot breaks camera.

40:50

Think, God damn it. Think. How can I just forget her like that? A whole person. A relationship. Is this amnesia? What else am I not remembering? I’m crazy. I should have stayed on the meds. I’m crazy. I’m out of my mind. I knew it, I should have never created you. I should have listened to Krista.

Series of shots showing Elliot walking up dark staircase in his house. Entering his flat.

41:05

(5:00)

41:10

I avoid myself. (.) Why? (.) I’m afraid. (.) Okay. (.) Afraid of what? (.) Finding too much. (.) Too little. Nothing at all. Do I even exist? (…)

Long take of Elliot looking at himself in a mirror, his face slowly approaching. Shots of different faces approaching the same mirror are cut in briefly (flash cuts). One face wears a mask in the style of Anonymous, the other face is Mr. Robot’s.

41:24

See me, (.) Elliot Alderson. (.) I am here.

Camera zooms slightly out, still showing Elliot looking at his reflection.

41:28

(4:00)

Elliot breaks mirror with his fist, shown several times from different angles

41:32

Now I’m gone.

Elliot’s face is shown in the remaining shards of the broken mirror.

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Clearly, the overall theme of this scene is Elliot’s questioning of his own mental state and his identity, which implies his unreliability as a narrator. The passage contains several explicit verbal stance markers, the most prominent of which is his repeated evaluation of himself: I’m crazy. More indirectly, by questioning his own memory, he adopts a stance of uncertainty towards the events that have been told so far. Both these aspects are supported in various ways through editing and sound effects. Starting with sound effects, the fact that Elliot’s thoughts are presented in voice-over creates the impression that Elliot is “hearing voices”. This is reinforced by the fact that at the beginning of the scene Elliot’s voice is changing direction of origin with each intonation unit. For instance, Darlene would sing Frère Jacques appears to come from the left (from the point of view of the audience) while the following line, She rode her scooter in front of our house, appears to come from the right. This change of direction does not correlate with Elliot’s position on the screen and therefore suggests that Elliot is not speaking or thinking with one coherent voice, but that his identity is unstable and fragmented. Another sound effect that contributes to this perception is the echo effect that is used with Elliot’s statement I’m crazy. This line is realised in repeated overlapping versions, which again represents the dissolution of his stable identity. In combination, the sound effects support Elliot’s explicit verbal evaluation of himself as crazy in various ways. On the visual level, there are additional features that reinforce this stance. The scene makes repeated use of fast jump cuts, which are abrupt cuts in which the following shot does not match the previous shot seamlessly (Hayward 2006: 229). By disrupting space and time jump cuts can create a disorientation effect and they have been used by directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais to suggest instability and madness (Hayward 2006: 229). This is also the case here. For instance, at the beginning of the scene, there is a series of fast jump cuts showing Elliot’s face from different perspectives. The pace and change of angle are too fast to present a natural change of perspective on the viewer’s part, and neither does Elliot’s movement on the subway platform seem natural. Instead, space and time appear disrupted and this enhances the sense of disorientation. Flashbacks are another editing technique that can be used to disrupt time. Between 40:28 and 40:36 Elliot is shown standing on the subway platform, but there are very brief flashbacks of him coming down the staircase ten seconds earlier, thus further adding to the disorienting effect of the jump cuts. The most meaningful use of jump cuts appears towards the end of the scene, when Elliot looks at himself in a mirror. Brief shots of two different faces are cut in. The first shows a face with a mask similar to those used by Anonymous. The second is the face of Mr. Robot, which suggests to the viewer that the character of Mr. Robot is not real, but part of Elliot’s imagination. In the middle of the scene (40:39–40:50), words, sound and image combine in a particularly powerful way. This is the sequence in which Elliot directly addresses

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the camera. On the linguistic level, direct address is realised with second person pronouns (you), questions (are you freaking out?) and imperatives (tell me the truth). This is supported visually by Elliot’s gaze into the camera. On the level of sound, the question were you? is the only instance of diegetic speech in the entire scene, which gives special emphasis to Elliot’s direct address. The fact that Elliot appears to hold and then break the camera once again blurs the boundaries between intradiegetic address of his imaginary friend and extradiegetic address of the viewer. The breaking down of the separation between the fictional world and the audience in this scene mirrors Elliot’s inability to distinguish reality and imagination and thus conveys his unreliability. In sum, the visual track and sound effects support Elliot’s verbally expressed stance in different ways, leading to a rich, multimodal representation of stance. There are some aspects that are not expressed verbally, but that can only be perceived visually. Most importantly, Elliot never mentions Mr. Robot in this passage and the fact that he invented the character of Mr. Robot is only communicated by showing flashes of Mr. Robot’s face instead of Elliot’s reflection. It is thus the visual level that expresses the full extent of Elliot’s mental health problems and of his unreliability as a narrator. 7. Conclusion Stance, in its various realisations, is closely related to many of the aspects of fiction that are most central for pragmatics. It plays a crucial role in establishing narratorial voice and for characterisation. It can reveal the dynamics between different characters, which in turn is related to plot development. And it lends itself well to multimodal analysis, an area that is becoming more and more important in pragmatic approaches to fiction. Therefore, it is surprising that the systematic study of stance in fiction has not attracted a great deal of attention so far. Research on stance in other domains can contribute tools and methods for the study of stance in fiction. Recent developments in research on stance in interpersonal interaction are particularly promising in this respect, but also the study of more local realisations of stance markers in narratorial voice and the speech of individual characters provides interesting avenues for further research. As far as multimodal realisations of stance are concerned, future research could benefit from bringing together linguistic approaches to stance taking with approaches from film and performance studies, which have a longer tradition of interpreting non-verbal aspects of acting and narration. All in all, stance in fiction is a promising area for future research.

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Acknowledgments I thank Jonathan Culpeper, Carolina Fernandez-Quintanilla, Martin Mühlheim and the editors of this volume for valuable comments and suggestions on a draft version of this chapter. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support through the Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich (grant no. FK-14–074).

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17. Language and emotion in fiction Andreas Langlotz Abstract: Starting from a working definition of emotion, this chapter engages with the special ‘nature’ of emotions in fiction. It outlines the repertoire of verbal and non-verbal cues along which emotional utterances are patterned in literary and telecinematic fictional discourse. After scrutinizing different forms of staging such utterances in film and literature, it also engages with the ‘paradox of fiction’ and discusses how recipients of fictional utterances can be moved by ‘faked’ emotional experiences. It is finally argued that due to its constructed nature, fictional discourse must be attributed a special status for human emotional experience. The theoretical points are illustrated on the basis of examples from the novel and the movie Billy Elliot. 1. Introduction It is a truism that the world of fiction is a prime site for the display as well as the experience of emotion. The close study of the links between poetics, rhetoric, and literature has been prominent in the arts since antiquity. Coining the concept of “catharsis”, Aristotle argued in his Poetics that drama – tragedy in particular – serves the function of emotional purgation (Aristotle 1932: 1449b; see also Planalp 1999: 220–221). The very fact that we name literary, cinematic, or televised genres with labels such as ‘comedy’, ‘tragedy’, ‘(melo)drama’, ‘horror’, ‘thriller’, ‘romance’, or ‘erotic’ points to the ubiquity of even the most basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear and disgust, or love and lust (Ekman and Friesen 1975); and even a very superficial glance at the considerable amount of violence that is part of the fictional worlds of action, war, and fantasy books or films reveals that aggression and anger are deeply entrenched in fictional discourses. With a view to the omnipresence of emotionality in fiction, Oatley (2002: 39) even regards emotion as the very substance and ‘object of enquiry’ of fiction: “Emotion is to fiction as truth is to science”. But how does the intimate relationship between language and emotion in fiction appear when inspected through the lens of linguistic pragmatics? For the purpose of this chapter, I follow a broad definition of linguistic pragmatics as the study of language use, including other modes of communication (Clark 1996: Ch. 1). With regard to emotions, pragmatics is interested in how emotion-related utterances are produced in specific socio-communicative contexts and how they can be interpreted by recipients to make sense of their emotional impact or content (Schnall 2005). DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-017 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 515–552. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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The general cover term ‘fiction’ comprises a great many highly diverse genres of imaginative language use including oral storytelling, written literature, drama and theatre, film as well as more recent media such as videogames. Following Clark (1996: 368), I understand such fictional discourses as forms of “staged communicative acts”, i.e. acts in which the communicative participants only pretend that what happens on the ‘fictional stage’ is real, but for which both have the knowledge that what they experience belongs to an imagined world or fantasy. Therefore, fictional communication creates an extremely complex communicative setup that has been addressed in several narratological theories (e.g. Genette 1980; Iser 1976; see also Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume). While authors stage the fiction for their audience or readership, the storytelling process is mediated by fictional narrators and their implied readers. It is through these narrators that authors give their audience access to the experiences and actions of the fictive characters. For the pragmatic analysis of language and emotions in fiction, it is highly important to take these mediated communicative acts of staging the emotional experiences and utterances into account. In line with these preliminary definitions of pragmatics and fiction, this chapter is designed to provide an overview of how emotion-related utterances are produced and staged in fiction. Moreover, it addresses the question of how fictive emotional expressions and descriptions can emotionalize their recipients. It is my aim to outline a set of central parameters for researching the interface between language, emotion and fiction from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics. However, despite the very centrality of emotion in fictional worlds and discourses this task is both sobering and daunting. It is sobering because the scarcity of previous pragmatic research at the interface between emotional language use and fiction is striking. Apart from a couple of pioneering books and papers (e.g. Bednarek 2008, 2010, 2011; Bousfield and McIntyre 2011; Kozinski 2011), a substantial research tradition has not yet materialized in this area. This may well be a reflection of the relative scarcity of emotion-related research in linguistics in general and linguistic pragmatics in particular (for further comments on the state-of-the art of emotional research in pragmatics see, e.g., Du Bois and Kärkkäinen 2012; Foolen 2012; Langlotz and Soltysik Monnet 2014; Langlotz and Locher 2017). On the other hand, the task of charting language and emotion in fiction becomes absolutely daunting and impossible to achieve as soon as one extends the scope of enquiry to further disciplines that also deal with ‘language in use’, including fields such as literary studies, literary stylistics, literary pedagogy, poetics, cognitive poetics or film and media studies (e.g. Burke 2011; Fludernik 1993; Sklar 2013). To escape the Scylla of too little previous research and the Charybdis of connected research domains that are too vast and too profoundly established for the scope of this overview, I would like to pursue the following strategy for charting the interconnections between language and emotion in fiction. Starting from a working definition of emotion, I will first engage with the special ‘nature’ of

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emotions in fiction in order to derive some central research questions that are of interest to a pragmatic analysis of emotional communication in and through fiction (Section 2). I will then use these questions as a roadmap for investigating some crucial interconnections between language, emotion, and fiction. Section 3 scrutinizes the verbal and non-verbal structures along which emotional utterances become patterned in fictional discourse. Section 4 turns to the narrative staging of such utterances in film and literature. I will then focus on the audience and present previous research on how people can relate to the emotions that they are presented with in fictional settings (Section 5). To conclude, I will reflect on the special place of fictional discourse in the communication of emotions (Section 6). Previous pragmatic research on the relationship between language, emotion, and fiction will be integrated around the discussion of these perspectives. 2.

What are emotions and what is their ‘nature’ in fictional discourse?

When we consume fictional products like books, films, comics, videogames, and others, we are usually moved by them in some way or another. Beyond the cognitive level of understanding what is going on in a story, we tend to emote. Intuitively, we can sense the omnipresence of emotions and the impact that they have on us. Therefore, few people would deny the pervasiveness of our emotional engagement with fiction. However, it is considerably harder to capture scientifically what emotions are, how they function, and how fiction manages to move us. As Du Bois and Kärkkäinen (2012: 433) put it: “Emotion, or at least the potential for emotion, is everywhere in social life; it is just hard to talk about it”. 2.1.

A basic working-definition of ‘emotion’

When searching for a definition of emotion and classification of different types of emotions, one realizes that there is no scientific agreement. A great many competing theories of emotions exist (for an overview see, e.g., Myers 2004: 499–530). In general, one can distinguish between physiological (e.g. James 1884), neurological (e.g. Damasio 1994; LeDoux 1998), cognitive (e.g. Frijda 1986; Lazarus 1991), and sociological theories (Turner and Stets 2005; see also Langlotz and Locher 2017). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide an extensive survey of these different approaches. However, in psychology sequential models (Plutchik 2003) or process-theories of emotion (Scherer 1984) have been very prominent (see also Bednarek 2008: 13–16, 147–148). Along these lines, Planalp (1999: 11–34) describes emotions as complex evaluative processes consisting of five interacting components. In what follows, these components are sketched and their connections to the pragmatics of fiction are briefly addressed.

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1.  Objects/causes/eliciting events Emotions are usually stimulated by a certain cause or initiator. They are about something (Planalp 1999: 14). In fiction such stimuli are discursively constructed and strategically positioned within the narrative to arouse the audience. For example, fear in the movie Jaws (1975) is triggered by the main antagonist – a Great White Shark – whose appearance raises fear and panic within the narrated world and is likely to arouse emotions in the viewers of this horror movie. 2.  Appraisal processes According to appraisal theories (Frijda 1986; Lazarus 1991; Scherer, Shorr, and Johnstone 2001), emotions cannot be triggered by a stimulus alone but have to undergo a cognitive process of evaluation. This appraisal takes into account an agent’s goals within a specific situation as well as how relevant the situation is to his/her life and survival. The emotional appraisal of a stimulus thus depends on its degree of interference with goal achievement and on its impact for the agent’s well-being. Accordingly, a Great White shark instigates most panic if it is appraised as interfering with the action of swimming alone in the sea (situation), in safety (goal) and if it is evaluated as a highly relevant risk (degree of interference) to a character’s survival in this context (high relevance). By contrast, a shark researcher might have a completely different appraisal of a Great White. When spotting such an animal in the wild, he or she might feel awe and delight because the specimen is appraised as a highly welcome addition to the collection of research data for the sake of completing an important research project. Such situation-specific appraisals play a vital role for emotional displays within the world of fiction and for generating the emotional involvement of a recipient (Schiewer 2009: 104–105). This will be further addressed in Section 5. 3.  Physiological changes Appraisals are coupled with physiological changes inside an agent’s body (see, e.g., Damasio 1994: Ch. 8). For instance, the emotion of fear is associated with an increased heart and breathing rate, increased muscular tension and sweating. Such physiological reactions are seen to prepare the agent for action (Plutchik 2003: 109). 4.  Action tendencies/action/expression Emotions such as fear create different action tendencies. When being afraid of something an agent may want to escape, freeze, or fight (Ekman and Friesen 1975: 47–50). Thus, the physiological reactions to the appraised danger of the approaching Great White may put the body into an escape mode. When watching the film Jaws in the cinema the fictional tickling of our physiological reactions is likely to create the thrill that we associate with such a movie (Tamborini 1996). Our regulative capacities (see below), however, will prevent us from running out of

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the cinema. The action component of emotion also includes the communicative dimension of expressing emotions. For instance, we will scream for fear. As this communicative dimension is of great importance for a pragmatic perspective on language and fiction, it will be discussed in detail in Section 3. 5.  Regulation All the four previous components of the emotional process – stimuli, appraisal processes, physiological changes, and action tendencies – may be regulated and managed by an agent (Planalp 1999: 31). If the Great White in Jaws instills too much fear in us, we can just avoid watching it. Alternatively, we may evaluate it as a rather pathetic fictionalization of sharks and feel contempt rather than fear. To control our physiological reactions, it is possible to use techniques such as relaxation or to tinker with our physiology by applying relaxant drugs (Damasio 1994: 120–121). Finally, we may also control our action tendencies: instead of screaming out loud, we may bite our lips and remain silent. Psychological and sociological studies have amply shown that such regulation of emotional displays is highly socio-culturally determined (Hochschild 1979, 1983; Planalp 1999: 207– 212). From the perspective of linguistic pragmatics, emotion-related utterances in fiction can be seen as complex author strategies used to regulate and manage processes of emotionalization in their audience. In other words, by staging emotional processes within fictional worlds, authors may manage processes of emotional arousal in their readers (Dijkstra et al. 1994). Along with these components of the emotional cycle, researchers have tried to distinguish and classify different types of emotions. For example, Plutchik (1962, 1980, 2003) has proposed a multi-dimensional model, that is based on the metaphor of a colour wheel. Similar to the spectrum of colours he assumes the existence of basic emotions, including anger, anticipation, joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust. Like colour hues these emotions may vary in intensity. For example, joy is seen to range from serenity to ecstasy. Emotions are also claimed to be blendable. Through such blends primary, secondary and tertiary emotion dyads can be derived (Plutchik 2003: 105). Accordingly, a blend between joy and trust would yield the emotional substance of love. Guilt would result as a mixture of joy and fear; we feel joy at having achieved something, but simultaneously fear the sanctions of others who do not appreciate this achievement because it runs against social norms. Emotion classifications like these have been discussed very controversially, especially by anthropological linguistic and social-constructionist researchers (see, e.g., Harkins and Wierzbicka 2001; Harré 1986). These scholars claim that different ‘structural’ emotion categories must be seen as highly culture-specific rather than universal (for a good overview of classificatory problems see Schwarz-Friesel 2007: Ch. 3). As will be discussed in Section 3.2 below, the description of emotions in fiction may provide

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interesting insights into the cultural and historical nature of emotion theories and concepts. In summary, emotions can be described as complex and dynamic phenomena that combine processes of stimulation, appraisal, physiological arousal, action tendencies and actions – including emotional communication – and potential acts of regulating these processes. Or as Schrauf and Sanchez (2004: 267) put it: “emotions are complex physiological-affective-cognitive responses to the physical and sociocultural environment”. There are different types of emotions that vary in terms of general quality or valence (positive vs. negative), intensity, and duration (for more detailed definitions and overviews see Langlotz and Locher 2012, 2013, 2017). 2.2.

The ‘nature’ of emotions in fictional discourse

Paradoxically, genuine emotions do not exist in the fictional world. At best, film and theatre actors can put themselves into states of emotional arousal through method acting (Strasberg 1988).1 However, since characters in narratives, drama, and film are staged, artful, and artificial personae, fiction primarily creates illusions of emotionality. From a linguistic perspective these illusions are particularly interesting because they highlight that emotions have a communicative dimension – a “language and aesthetics of emotion” (Langlotz and Soltysik Monnet 2014) – that has a semiotic existence independent of whether it is triggered by the presence of true emotions or not. This argument is supported by the early social-interactional view promoted by Goffman (1978), who treats emotions not as a primarily psychological phenomenon, but as a public form of “display that can be mobilized by participants” in order to index emotional arousal “whether or not such display is to be taken as revealing ‘authentic’ emotion” (Du Bois and Kärkkäinen 2012: 437). In the same vein, creators of fictional discourse can activate emotional displays in order to index the emotional experiences of their protagonists. Through those semiotic constructs alone they may arouse complex processes of emotional interpretation in their audience. Let us consider a scene from the novel Billy Elliot (Burgess 2001) to illustrate this claim: (1) And right at the end of the audition, Billy had said this thing. We were almost on our way out when one of them asked him what it felt like when he danced and Billy … well, he’s like me, not so good with words, but even so. I really think what he said had an effect.

1



Method acting describes a set of techniques that allows actors to immerse into their role to such an extent that they fully identify with their character and thus experience the emotional states that they are performing.

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  He said, ‘Dunno’ - which is what he’d said to every other bloody question they’d asked him. But then he had a little think and then he said something about it feeling like flying. ‘It starts off sort of stiff,’ he said, ‘but once I get going I forget what’s going on and I sort of disappear. Like there’s fire in me whole body. Like a bird. Like electricity,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Like electricity.’   I saw the people on the panel glance at one another and I felt a little tingle go down my spine then, because I knew he’d impressed them. Well. He’d impressed me, anyhow. (Burgess 2001: 143)

This scene is narrated by Jackie Elliot, Billy Elliot’s father. Through the father’s account we learn how the protagonist – a 12-year-old working-class boy trying to gain access to the Royal Ballet School at an audition – described the almost ineffable emotional experience that he goes through when dancing. More precisely, Billy described his experience of an emotional process that is triggered through dancing. Although Billy’s account is removed from the actual experience through its temporal distance, through the father’s narration as well as through his own reporting of the sensation during the audition, one can thus model his emotional experience in accord with the process-model of emotion outlined above. In particular, his description involves various metaphorical similes to describe the hardly articulable physiological sensations that he undergoes when engaging with his passion. Moreover, he addresses his action tendencies in the process. Note that he does not mention any attempt at regulating this positive emotional cycle. The process can be sketched as follows in Table 1: Table 1.

Billy’s ‘emotional process’

1

2

3

4

5

Triggering event

Appraisal process

Physiological changes

Action ­tendencies

Regulation

dancing

feels good

starts sort of stiff; like there’s fire in me whole body; like a bird; like electricity

I forget what’s going on; I sort of ­disappear

none

Within the social setting of the described scene, Billy’s description itself becomes the stimulus for emotional reactions in the jury. And the emotional account also moves Jackie – a striking miner from the north of England and the incarnation of a manly anti-ballet attitude. Despite his rather distant feelings for his son’s artistic

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enterprise, the father is impressed with Billy. But Jackie is not only impressed with his son’s account but especially with the reaction that his son managed to trigger in the audition board, who have to evaluate the son’s artistic qualities. In his own narrative account, Jackie grants us access to the inner world of his own emotional experience as well: I felt a little tingle go down my spine then. Of course, none of the described emotional processes actually occurred for real. They purely exist as descriptions and displays within the world of the narrative. Nevertheless, as readers of the scene, we might be moved – in a similar way as Jackie – by Billy’s answer because we know from the plot that a great deal is at stake for him and his family. We can take the emotional descriptions as stimuli to engage in highly complex appraisal processes ourselves. Thereby our interpretation has to take into account the staged emotional states of three social agents: Billy, Jackie, and the members of the jury. These descriptions have to be combined with our world knowledge and with contextual information from the story. The scene is full of suspense because we know that succeeding in the audition is vital for the socio-economically underprivileged boy and for fulfilling his dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer. In terms of appraisal theory, we are aware of the fact that the situation is highly relevant for Billy’s life; a negative outcome would be equal to destroying his dream as it would mean the end of his career in ballet. Hence, we may strongly empathize with the boy. Simultaneously, we may also make the narrating father the object of our emotional engagement and feel with him for his son. We know from the plot that their lives and their relationship have been shattered by great misfortunes (death of wife/mother, strike among the miners, heavy unemployment and poverty in the community, etc.). It is by adding these narrative parameters to the equation that we may also be impressed with Billy’s account and be emotionally moved by his description of what ballet dancing ‘feels like’ to him. And by speculating on Billy’s success in having moved the judges, the descriptions in the scene may arouse a complex mixture of suspense, curiosity, anticipation, and pride in us. These preliminary observations on the ‘nature’ of emotions in fiction are aligned with social-constructionist approaches (Harré 1986; Wilce 2009). From this perspective emotions are not seen as (uncontrollable) products of human biology and physiology nor as primarily inner-psychological phenomena (Harré 1986: 2–5). Social constructionists regard emotions as socially and linguistically shaped products of culture that are constructed through emotion words and discursive practices. They oppose the view of emotions as mere outbursts of hidden psycho-physiological processes. The social-constructionist stance is particularly interesting for a pragmatic analysis of emotions in fiction. When acknowledging that a great deal of human emotional experience is shaped through communication rather than inner-psychological processes alone, fiction can grant us exclusive insights into patterns of “how to do emotions with words” (Fiehler 2002: 79). From this theoretical perspective the following questions

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are particularly relevant for a pragmatic analysis of language and emotion in fiction: 1. Repertoire: What are the particular communicative means and strategies through which fiction grants its recipients access to emotional experiences? 2. Narrative forms: How are emotional experiences staged in fiction? 3. Appraisals: How can the audience be moved by fictional displays of emotion? What kinds of emotional connections to the fictional world can fictional discourse trigger in its audiences? This overview chapter will attempt to chart central insights from previous research along these three questions. Wherever possible, I will try to illustrate the insights relative to the fiction of Billy Elliot referring to both the film (2000) and the novel (2001). I have chosen to use this material because it exists in three forms: novel, film, and musical (drama). Billy Elliot thus carries the potential of inviting comparisons of emotional ‘language’ use across different fictional genres. Apart from these reasons the choice of the story is purely arbitrary. 3.

Ways of ‘showing emotions’ in fiction

Emotional displays play a quintessential role in signalling the characters’ stances towards other characters, towards objects that they interact with or towards particular situations (Landert provides a detailed discussion of stance in fiction in Ch. 16, this volume). In the linguistic and pragmatic literature on emotion a basic distinction between two ways of presenting emotions is usually made (see Langlotz 2015: 266–267; Langlotz and Locher 2012, 2013, 2017; Schwarz-Friesel 2007: 144). On the one hand, emotions can be described and ‘spoken of’. For example, in (1) neither Billy nor his father were undergoing the emotional experiences addressed, while they were talking about them. Instead they reported their emotional processes and conceptualized them in line with the “referential function” of language (Jakobson 1960: 355). On the other hand, emotions can also be directly expressed by implementing Jakobson’s emotive language function (Jakobson 1960: 356). A second example from the novel can illustrate this. Note that in this scene Tony, Billy’s brother, is first person narrator. He describes an emotional episode with his father: (2) I wanted to put my arms around him. He was leaning against it, tears pouring down his face, barely able to say a word. ‘It’s for wee Billy,’ he said. ‘F*** Billy! You can’t go back, not now!’ (Burgess 2001: 118–119)

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In this scene Tony is trying to prevent his father from leaving the strike post and going back to work in the mine. Tony describes how his father was crying because he had taken this drastic decision in order to earn some money that would allow Billy to go to the audition in London. Tony, who is a miner as well as an ardent fighter for the pickets’ rights, is obviously shocked by his father’s deed and aroused by it. This arousal is indexed by the expressive use of the four-letter word F***. In combination with his brother’s name, the word gives Tony’s statement a great deal of expressive force (for a discussion of such expressives see, e.g., Ronan 2014: 179–183). The interjection is directly connected to Tony’s fictionalized state of great emotional arousal although it remains unclear what specific kinds of emotions Tony is supposed to be experiencing. In what follows I will first provide an overview of the cues that can be used both for describing and expressing emotions (in fiction). I will then scrutinize emotional descriptions (Section 3.2) and emotional expressions (Section 3.3) in more detail. 3.1.

The repertoire of emotional cues

For an investigation of the language of emotion in fiction, it is necessary to outline the semiotic repertoire of emotional cues that can be employed in the production and staging of emotional utterances in fiction. Table 2 lists the most important semiotic resources and adds selected references to previous research on emotional cueing (see also Langlotz 2015: 267). Note that this research is not restricted to fictive emotional utterances. For illustration, the table adds examples from the novel and the film Billy Elliot and specifies whether the respective cues are usually employed for descriptive (D) or expressive (E) purposes: Table 2.

The repertoire of emotional cues

Communicative channel

Type of cue

Examples*

Body

facial ­expressions =E

Jackie displays a desperate facial expression during his argument with Tony (see Figure 1 below)

gesture, posture, and physical actions =E

Tony hugs his father for reconciliation (see Figure 2 below)

Discussed in: Ekman and Friesen (1969, 1975, 1978); Ekman (2003) Discussed in: Clift (2014); Goodwin (2007); Kendon (2004): Planalp (1998); Streeck (2009)

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Communicative channel

Type of cue

Examples*

Prosody and speech rhythm

loudness stress =E

We’re finished, son! What choice have we got, heh? Let’s give the boy a fucking chance. (M: 1:14:10–1:14:16) uttered in a loud voice

lengthening =E

YEEEEEEEEES! We jumped and shouted. (B: 145–146)

pitch = E

I don’t wanna do your stupid fucking ­audition! (M: 45:13) spoken in a loud and highly pitched voice

voice quality =E

We’re finished, son! (M: 1:14:10–1:14:12) uttered in a trembling voice

repetition = E

I cried out, ‘Dad, Dad!’ (B: 118)

emotion words = E, D

I’m sorry son. I’m sorry. (B: 119) He looked shocked. No, not shocked. ­Horrified. (B: 113)

word ­connotations = E, D

We’re finished, son! (M: 1:14:10–1:14:12)

expressive words: a. interjections =E

‘The audition? Oh, I see.’ She laughed. (B: 107)

expressive words: b. swearwords =E

I don’t wanna do your stupid fucking audition! (M: 45:13) I thought, Bloody middle classes! (B: 106)

Phraseology and metaphor

a. idioms = D

But I think I must have broken my heart doing it. (B: 110)

Discussed in: Bednarek (2008); Kövecses (2000, 2002); Schwarz-Friesel (2007)

b. similes = D

It feels like electricity. Like there’s fire in my whole body. (B: 143)

c. metaphor =D

I sort of disappear. (B: 143)

Discussed in: Goodwin, Goodwin, and Yaeger-Dror (2002); Ochs and Schieffelin (1989); Pillet-Shore (2012); Reber (2012)

Lexicon Discussed in: Bednarek (2008); Fiehler (2002); Langlotz and Locher (2012); Ochs and Schieffelin (1989); Ronan (2014); Schwarz-Friesel (2007)

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Communicative channel

Type of cue

Examples*

Syntax and pragmatics

a. emotional propositions =D

That’s right son. We’re all scared all the time. Don’t mind it. (B: 151)

b. expressive speech acts = E

F***ing brilliant! (B: 146)

c. emotional implicatures of speech acts and propositions = D, E

We’re finished, son! (M: 1:14:10–1:14:12)

Discussed in: Langlotz (2015); Langlotz and Locher (2012); Ronan (2014); Schwarz-Friesel (2007)

*  The data are taken both from the novel and the movie. References to the movie are given as (M: time indication) and references to the book as (B: page number). Italics are used to set the examples off from the comments. Bold type is used to highlight the phenomenon in focus. Other than that, no special emphases were added.

While, in principle, this list of communicative means does not differ from the emotional semiotics of everyday talk, pragmatic research into fictional discourse in literature and telecinematic discourse has yielded a number of interesting observations with regard to their fiction-specific employment. 3.2.

Emotional descriptions in written fiction

In her groundbreaking corpus-study on Emotion Talk, Bednarek (2008) provides a very comprehensive analysis of how emotion words are used in different discourse types: conversation, news reportage, academic discourse, and fiction. Thereby the author draws a clear analytical line between “emotional talk as including all sorts of human behaviour that signal emotion without the recourse to linguistic expressions that explicitly denote emotion (emotion talk)” (Bednarek 2008: 11–12, emphasis in original). This terminological distinction basically corresponds to the notions of ‘description of emotion’ vs. ‘expression of emotion’. For the purpose of this overview, her insights into the use of emotion talk in fiction are of central interest. From her larger scale corpus-study based on a selection of the British National Corpus (BNC) containing fictional discourse which amounts to approximately 7 million words, Bednarek (2008: 136) derives the following central patterns concerning the typical use of emotion talk in fiction:

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– describing character emotion in narrative and dialogue (in past): for example, x was surprised, delighted, anxious, disappointed, frightened, impressed, pleased, willing – expressor/action plus affect […]: for example, giggled in surprise – undirected overt affect […]:2 for example, anxious faces, willing young secretary            (Bednarek 2008: 136)

These linguistic means capture the general trend of written fiction to describe the emotions of protagonists in combination with references to the experiencer’s actions and expressive gestures (termed ‘expressors’). Note that this general pattern can also be observed in Example (1) from Billy Elliot. The father describes his and the judges’ emotions using the past (I knew he’d impressed them. Well. He’d impressed me, anyhow.). In Example (2) we see an explicit reference to the father’s action and his affect (tears pouring down his face, barely able to say a word). This ties in with Bednarek’s (2008: 124) insight that “fiction in general is characterized by its frequent reference to behavioural surge expressions […]”. Behavioural surge expressions are bodily actions that index an underlying emotional state. They correspond to the set of body cues in Table 2. Beyond analyzing salient linguistic and grammatical patterns of emotion talk in fiction, Bednarek (2008: Ch. 5, Ch. 6) also engages with a pragmatic and discourse-analytic analysis of emotion talk by means of the notion of ‘appraisal’ as employed in Systemic Functional Linguistics. (Note, however, that in the systemic-functional literature the concept of ‘appraisal’ is used differently from the definition introduced above). Within the scope of this chapter, it is impossible to do justice to her corpus-based revision of this approach. However, with reference to process-models of emotion (see Section 2.1 above) she also develops more general observations with regard to handling “ways of portraying” emotions in (fictional) discourse (Bednarek 2008: 147). In line with ideas advocated in cognitive linguistics (Kövecses 2000: 130; Radden 1998: 289–292), she claims that “people are at least dimly and sub-consciously aware” of the components of the emotional process and that they possess “knowledge structures or schemas about particular emotions” (Bednarek 2008: 148, emphasis in original). These cognitive resources involve: – the kind of cognitive evaluation associated with an emotion; – prototypical and potential antecedent events (eliciting conditions) that cause a specific emotion; – psycho-physiological expressions that are prototypically and potentially caused by a specific emotion; – expressions of action readiness; – prototypical and potential subsequent actions that are caused by a specific emotion. (Bednarek 2008: 148) 2



Bednarek (2008: 73) defines undirected affect as attributions of emotions to emoters without the explicit presence of emotional triggers.

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Note that anthropological linguistic as a well social-constructionist studies have clearly revealed that such folk theories of emotion are by no means universal, but rather culturally and historically specific (Harré 1986). Nevertheless, one can argue with Bednarek that producers and recipients of emotional utterances can make reference to culture-specific emotion schemas when portraying and interpreting emotions in fiction. This is presented in Table 3. In the left column the dimensions of the emotional knowledge schemas are listed, while in the central column the verbalization strategies are addressed. Concrete examples from Billy Elliot are listed on the right. Table 3.

Ways of portraying emotions in the Billy Elliot novel (Burgess 2001) (adapted from Bednarek 2008: 150, Table 5.2)

Portraying ­emotions

How

referring to emoters’ the use of mental disposition emotions terms

Examples from Billy Elliot I’m scared. She’d be so proud of you, son.

fixed figurative expressions

I could feel my heart just ­sinking down to me toes. I felt like I’d turned to stone.

referring to emoters’ the use of behavioural surge psycho-physiologterms ical expressions of emotion

They were all frowning and glaring at us. tears pouring down his face

referring to emoters’ describing mental behaviour actions or behaviour (caused by emotion)

… he felt that lucky. Oh, I envied him. I wish I felt like that about my wife.

describing linguistic ­behaviour   speech act terms   emotional talk devices describing (physical) ­behaviour  actual  hypothetical referring to causes of emotions

describing elicitors/antecedent events

‘Piss off!’ I yelled. ‘Piss off!’ I yelled.

I kissed her again, and she hugged me tight all over again. I thought I was going to die of shame. People were laughing. I gritted my teeth.

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When looking at the examples, it becomes obvious how the semiotic resources for emotional expression and description listed in Table 2 become active in these portrayals. We find emotion words or figurative language, as well as emotional speech acts. Moreover, in written fiction non-verbal cues can be described to become part of addressing the emotional process that a fictive character is going through. The above examples reflect descriptions of non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, bodily gestures and postures, or vocal features. Without explicit reference to fiction, Fiehler (2002: 87–90) also proposes a complex model of emotional accounts that involves: “(a) verbal labeling of experiences and emotions, (b) description of experiences and emotions, (c) designation or description of the events and circumstances relevant to the experience and (d) description or narration of the situational circumstances of an experience”. Such descriptions of emotions comprise a complex set of elements, as listed in the first columns of Table 4. We can apply this analytical framework to Example (1) to appreciate how Billy’s, the father’s, and the judges’ emotional experiences are portrayed along these dimensions, presented in columns 2 to 4 of Table 4. Table 4 reveals both the structural and the conceptual complexity of emotional descriptions in fiction. The analysis also ties in with Bednarek’s claim that fictional portrayals exploit the audience’s implicit and probably subsconscious theories of emotional processes including their causes and effects. When outlining this repertoire and its potential structural implementation in fictional discourse, we have so far ignored the potential variation in rendering emotional experiences. Bednarek (2008: 146–147) points to a cline from explicitness to implicitness in emotional portrayals. While very explicit portrayals make use of mental disposition terms (emotion words like fear, worry, pain, etc.), implicit portrayals only describe unusual (physical) behaviours from which emotional states have to be inferred (see also Langlotz and Locher 2012: 1601). Between these poles of explicit and implicit portrayals she situates behavioural surge terms, which index potentially underlying emotional states. This three-fold cline can be exemplified relative to two further literary examples from Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein (3) and Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea (4). Both extracts can be seen as emotional climaxes in the respective narratives. While in (3) Victor Frankenstein describes his emotional reaction after his first encounter with his antagonist, the scene in (4) describes the old fisherman’s reaction when finally having caught the great marlin, i.e. the antagonist in this story. Applying Bednarek’s cline, I have highlighted mental disposition terms in bold type, behavioural surge terms by underlining, and unusual (physical) behaviours through italics. (3) Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.

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Table 4.

Components of emotional descriptions in the Billy Elliot audition scene

Component ­addressed in the ­description

Billy

Father

Judges

Carrier of experience

Billy

me (Father)

the people on the panel

Type of experience (for unspecified ­experience = UE; for a specific emotion = SE)

UE = like flying

SE = impressed

SE = impressed

Intensity of experience

like there’s fire like electricity

Dynamics or process of experience

it starts off …. but once I get going ….

Object or point of r­ eference of experience

when … danced

Billy had said this thing he’d impressed them

Billy had said this thing

he’s like me, not so good with words

Bases of experience and the yardsticks of the evaluating statement Initiator or the reason of the experience

he (Billy)

he (Billy)

Localization of experience in the body

in me whole body

down my spine

Appearance of expression and somatic-physiological effects of the experience

sort of stiff like there’s fire like a bird like electricity

little tingle

Consequences of the experience

forget what’s going on and I sort of disappear

he (Billy)

glance at one another

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I passed the night wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the ground through languor and extreme weakness. Mingled with this horror, I felt the bitterness of disappointment; dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete! (Shelley [1831] 2013: Ch. V, 94)

(4) He started to pull the fish in to have him alongside so that he could pass a line through his gills and out his mouth and make his head fast alongside the bow. I want to see him, he thought, and to touch and to feel him. He is my fortune, he thought. But that is not why I wish to feel him. I think I felt his heart, he thought. When I pushed on the harpoon shaft the second time. Bring him in now and make him fast and get the noose around his tail and another around his middle to bind him to the skiff. “Get to work, old man,” he said. He took a very small drink of the water. “There is very much slave work to be done now that the fight is over.” (Hemingway [1952] 2004: 73)

As this juxtaposition reveals, the emotional description in Frankenstein is explicit (see the bold and underlined passages), whereas emotions in the Old Man and the Sea remain primarily implicit. The fisherman’s emotions can only be inferred from the description of how he pulls in the fish. While the selection of the two scenes seems arbitrary and ad hoc at first sight, they reveal strikingly different styles of how human emotionality is to be presented in fiction. It is well-known in literature that Ernest Hemingway proposed his own ‘iceberg theory’ of writing, which is grounded in realistic descriptions of actions by means of a simple, direct, unadorned, minimalist style similar to newspaper language (see Landert, Ch. 16, this volume). This style was often combined with photographic realism and cinematic techniques of portrayal. Most importantly, Hemingway avoided any sentiment and pathos by following the maxim of not describing emotions but creating them in the reader through realistic descriptions of moving scenes (Trodd 2007: 17). By contrast, the 18th and 19th century romantics followed a completely different style of emotional writing. Locating the source of insight and understanding in individual subjectivity, the use of explicit emotional language with the effect of opening inner-psychic experiences up to the readership’s investigation was central to romantic writers (see Faflak and Sha 2014). Using the Dictionary of Affect, Kozinski (2011) also explores variation in fictional language. She analyzes the emotional tone in James Bond movies and some James Bond parodies. Through a cluster analysis she finds that the degrees of pleasantness and activation are not constant in these films but have changed over time. Such stylistic variation in fictional emotional portrayals is particularly interesting for linguistic pragmatics as it highlights the strong interdependence between forms of literary communication and their (historical) contexts of use. This observation is aligned with social-constructionist view of emotion outlined in Section 2.2. In agreement with this view, the different ideologies of emotional portrayal

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and expression in different periods and works point to the linguistic diversity with which the ‘emotion domain’ is charted by different authors, in different periods, and in different genres. This ties in with the view that emotion-related utterances are linked with situations, social contexts, norms of display, feeling, and interpretation (Langlotz and Locher 2017). 3.3.

Performing emotionality and performing emotionally

When leaving the context of the written page and moving to telecinematic forms of fiction (see Piazza, Bednarek, and Rossi 2011), one can observe another dimension of variation: the change from the descriptive portrayal of emotional experience to the highly multimodal performance of emotional expressions. An example from the Billy Elliot movie can illustrate this point (see Figure 1).

Body

facial expression gesture & posture

sad face crying head shaking

Prosody Voice

loudness stress

loud trembling voice

Lexicon

negative word connotation

finished

Pragmatics

emotional implicature of speech act

We’re finished, son!

Figure 1. Jackie’s multimodal performance of despair (M: 1:14:10) © Tiger Aspect Pictures (Billy Boy) Limited; Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC

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The still in Figure 1 is related to Example (2), i.e. to the scene when the father gives up the strike to earn some money in order to make it possible for Billy to go to the audition. The scene is highly emotional as the elder son, Tony, wants to prevent Jackie from making this move. In this micro-scene of 1.1 seconds, the father utters: We’re finished, son! While doing so, he displays his emotional state of very strong exasperation along several simultaneous cue dimensions (see the box below Figure 1). The striking multimodal nature of emotional ‘utterances’ in real-life interactions has been addressed by researchers outside the field of fiction. For instance, the Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayals (GEMEP) corpus includes multimodal performances of emotions (Bänziger and Scherer 2010). They are based on actor portrayals and designed for experimental research rather than interactional analyses. In linguistic work, substantial frameworks to chart the multimodal dimensions of emotional signalling have also been proposed (e.g. Fiehler 2002; Wilce 2009). Moreover, multimodality has long been addressed in communication studies (e.g. Planalp 1998, 1999) and interactional studies (Goodwin and Goodwin 2001; Goodwin et al. 2002; Matoesian 2005). Here, the performativity of emotion concepts and corresponding emotional expressions has been demonstrated. But only very few studies – mostly from the fields of conversation analysis, praxeology, and anthropological linguistics – have actually investigated the dynamics of this multimodality in actual embodied practices. Still, most of these studies focus on rather limited examples of emotional episodes and do not analyze emotional signalling in a fully integrated, systematic fashion. Therefore, Planalp’s eighteen year old assessment regarding the lack of integration of these findings into a coherent model is still valid: What is singularly lacking is any plausible account of how cues are combined into complex multichannel messages about emotion, much less accounts of how they are produced and interpreted. (Planalp 1998: 37)

Linguistic pragmatic analyses of the multimodal performance of emotional displays in fiction are even scarcer. In their programmatic paper on the role of emotions in relational work, Langlotz and Locher (2013) use fictional data from a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip to illustrate the dynamics of multi-modal acts of emotional signalling in an episode of relational work (see also Langlotz and Locher 2017). Combining Ochs and Schieffelin’s (1989) classificatory grid of affect cues with Clark’s (1996: Ch. 6) model of signalling strategies in ‘language’ use, they provide a blueprint for conducting in-depth analyses of emotional performances in interpersonal interaction. Most importantly, they discuss how multimodal emotional displays add emotional evaluations to the construal of both the conceptual content as well as the relationship of the protagonists. This framework can also be employed for embedding the micro-scene in Figure 1 into an analysis of relational work in telecinematic fiction (see also Dynel, Ch. 15, this volume). The father’s

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bodily gestures and prosodic expressions strongly emphasize and add an intensively evaluative impact to his negative assessment of his family’s situation, We’re finished, son! These verbal cues constitute the conceptual content of his statement. The emotionalized multimodal performance of his contribution also plays an important role with regard to the construal of their relationship. While Tony is furious with his father at first for having broken the strike, the high degree of despair that is performed through the non-verbal and paraverbal cues has an impact on the son, who gives in to the father’s position and accepts his workaround. This is signalled by his emotional gesture of hugging the father (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Tony hugging his father for reconciliation (M: 1:14:31) © Tiger Aspect Pictures (Billy Boy) Limited; Courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC

With a stronger focus on the creation of character identities through multimodal emotional expressions, Bednarek (2010: Ch. 7) engages in an elaborate case study of a break-up scene in the US TV series Gilmore Girls (see also Landert’s discussion of the same study from the theoretical and analytical perspective of ‘stance’, Ch. 16, this volume). Langlotz and Locher’s proposal is compatible with her analytical system and procedure. She employs a multimodal coding system comprising: “verbal behaviour (evaluative and emotional language, speech act sequences) and nonverbal behaviour (hand/arm gestures; head movements/gaze; facial affect)” (Bednarek 2010: 151). Moreover, she includes some further expressive resources such as stuttering as well as prosodic features (pitch range and voice quality). However, using the multimodal transcription system developed by Norris (2002), Bednarek (2010: 151–164) first analyses these cue dimensions separately

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rather than as composite emotional signals and performances. Thus, her analysis of multimodal emotional cueing in TV series does not yet overcome the problem addressed in Planalp’s quotation above. Along these lines Bednarek (2010: 174) herself concludes: “Ultmimately, future descriptions [of multimodal expressive cueing] need to go beyond separating approaches that fragment the body and need to focus even more on clustering sequencing and simultaneities, both with respect to verbal and non-verbal behaviour”. With regard to the dynamics of emotional performances in interaction, the author advocates the notion of “expressive sequence”, which she defines as “interactive patterns of speech acts between participants that can be associated with expressive meanings (e.g. emotions, evaluations, ideologies)” (Bednarek 2010: 164). This idea – while not using the same terminology – is also compatible with Langlotz and Locher’s proposal of analyzing emotional displays within the dynamics of relational work. In line with the relational work that such sequences perform, Bednarek discusses joking sequences, blame sequences, and the break-up sequence in her data. This allows her to reveal the construction of “temporary, localized and situated expressive identities” (Bednarek 2010: 175). By analogy, the situated performances of emotional displays in our Billy Elliot Example (2) and Figure 2 support the creation of the fictional image of a desperate but responsible father and a rioting yet loyal son. 4.

Staging emotional experiences in fiction

The quality of emotional representations and enactments in fictional discourse is centrally influenced by how emotional experiences are put into scene or staged (Clark 1996: Ch. 12) by their authors. In Ch. 2 of this volume, Messerli discusses the complexities of the participation framework in telecinematic discourse in detail. Here, however, I am more specifically interested in how camera work and narrative perspectivizations are employed for staging emotions to the spectators (see Sections 3.1, 3.2 and 3.4 in Messerli, Ch. 2, this volume) or readers. A suitable model to engage with this narrower conception of staging has been proposed by Langacker (1991a: 210), who approaches the phenomenon from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics. Langacker’s stage-model was not developed for the analysis of fictional discourse, but for the discussion of the alternative construals and conceptualizations that underlie different grammatical constructions. Langacker (1991b: 16) centrally argues that meaning is not only construed through semantic content but also through how this content is shaped by the grammatical form in which it is presented. Starting from this assumption, his stage-model establishes an analogy between linguistic structuring and watching a performance. By representing an utterance in a specific form, the recipients’ mental focus is guided and manipu-

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lated. When reconsidering the stills from the movie Billy Elliot in Figure 1 and Figure 2, we can immediately appreciate how this idea of communicative staging is involved in cinematic representations of emotions. It is through such visual focalizations that emotional experiences are highlighted and brought to the front in fictional discourses. Staging can thus be regarded as one central reason for turning fiction into a special arena for emotionalizing recipients. 4.1.

Staging emotional performances in telecinematic discourse

In film and media studies the ‘language’ for staging visual representations defines the very essence of filmmaking (see, e.g., Ryan and Lenos 2012: Part 1). When analyzing emotional performances in telemediated fictional discourse, we have to distinguish between what emotional displays are placed in front of the camera (Section 3.3) and how the camera shoots this emotional scenario. The what is usually called the mise-en-scène. This includes the characters, the setting, the location, etc. The how is equally important for telling the story because, metaphorically speaking, the camera is like the eye through which we see the world that is staged. Representing emotions through film therefore involves a complex interplay between the what and the how. Without being able to go into any detail about shooting a film, the parameters in Table 5 are relevant for creating emotional effects through alternative dimensions of camera work. A concise overview of emotionalization through camera work is provided by Detenber and Lang (2010). Keutzer et al. (2014: 9–74) offer a more general survey of dimensions of camera work in filmmaking. Table 5 condenses information from these sources with a focus on how the camera can stage emotions in fictional discourse. When applying these analytical categories to the previous examples, one can detect that the visual frame in Figure 1 stages Jackie Elliot’s desperation by means of a close-up shot from an eye-level angle. Moreover, Jackie’s face is put into scene by means of an over-the-shoulder shot from behind Tony’s back. Through these shot techniques the audience experiences the father’s performed emotional state as part of an emotionalized conversation with Tony. The whole scene is filmed with normal lighting. The spectators are thus pulled into the emotional scenario as if they were observing the situation from the point of view of a side-participant. As an effect, they cannot keep their distance from the displayed performance of intense despair. A slightly different shot technique for staging the emotional performance is involved in Figure 2. Here, we see a big close-up shot of Tony’s face and his gesture of embracing his suffering father. Through the closer shot range, the emotional performance is presented even more intimately. Moreover, the shot angle is slightly different from the frame in Figure 1. We can see their strong embrace from a minimal high angle and thus stand slightly above to two protagonists, who are kneeling on the floor. We are thus given the illusion of being very close to them

Language and emotion in fiction  Table 5.

Emotional dimensions of camera work

Shot angles

Shot sizes/scales

Dimension of camera work

Viewpoint

537

If the same person or object is filmed at different shot scales, the director can create different meaning effects. For instance, a close-up shot scale can foster intimacy with a character. By contrast, extreme long shots can swallow the character in its environment.

Apart from different shot sizes, the camera can ‘see’ a scenario from different perspectives.

Shots can also be analyzed according to the position from which the camera is filming. These viewpoints steer how the audience is invited to take part in the action.

Selection of subtypes relevant for ­emotional staging

Potential emotional meaning

extreme long shot

creates an atmosphere, shows a global scenery, or is shown to impress the audience (landscapes, outer space, etc.)

close-up

focuses on emotional reactions (gestures, facial expressions)

big close-up

focuses on the facial expression of emotions

extreme close-up

focuses on details (pars pro toto: a part of a person stands for the whole, e.g. trembling lip for desperation)

low angle

the person shown appears important, self-confident or superior

eye-level

the person shown is equal

high angle

the person shown appears subordinate, inferior or lost.

worm’s eye view

the character shown is very dominant, threatening or mysterious

point-of-view shot

the scene is shown from the perspective of/through the eyes of a character

over-the-shoulder shot

This technique is often used in dialogue scenes. The shot is taken from behind one character who interacts with another person and who is partly shown. The audience is invited to adopt the perspective of someone standing behind this character. So we can see both dialogue partners.

reaction shot

short shot of a character’s response to an action

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Lighting

Dimension of camera work

Light is very important to create a special atmosphere in the film. The intensity, direction, and quality of lighting have a profound effect on how an image is perceived. Light affects the way colours are rendered. Moreover, it can focus attention on particular elements of the composition.

Selection of subtypes relevant for ­emotional staging

Potential emotional meaning

normal

normal lighting imitates or normal way of seeing things

low-key lighting

a lighting creating strong contrasts between the brightest and darkest parts of an image and often creating strong shadows that obscure parts of the characters; this lighting scheme is often associated with negative emotions and genres such as film noir.

high-key lighting

lighting in which images become very bright and shadows (almost) disappear; this is characteristic of positive-emotion genres such as musicals and comedies.

and are also given a spatial impression of their emotional low. Note that these emotional effects must be seen as potential outcomes rather than fixed emotional meanings. In line with Langacker’s stage-model, the camera work manipulates the audience’s focus on a given scene. The visual ‘language of film’ thus mimicks physical engagement to trigger potential emotional involvement. In their analysis of emotion and empathy in the “funny guy” scene in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Bousfield and McIntyre (2011) propose a complex multimodal analysis of emotionality that combines both the characters’ linguistic and paralinguistic behaviour. In their audio-visual transcript the authors also include shot descriptions that are compatible with the framework presented here. Importantly, they claim that “the creation of empathetic emotion in the interactive participants appears to stem from the fact that the camera position and camera shots generate a sense of being in the same physical location as the represented participant” (Bousfield and MyIntyre 2011: 119). This insight is fully compatible with the reading of the father-and-son scene from Billy Elliot. Apart from the camera work, other techniques for editing and post-editing telecinematic discourse also play a role for staging emotionality. These dimensions involve cutting, music, and sound effects. For example, it is well known that cutting rate, i.e. the number of cuts per minute, has a strong effect on how intensely or calmly the audience experiences a given scene (Detenber and Lang 2010; Spot-

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tiswoode 1973: 208–220; Tan 1996). In addition, music and sound effects strongly influence the emotional shading of a given scene. In her analysis of the Gilmore Girls break-up scene, Bednarek (2010: 149–153) analyzes such aspects of the emotional mise-en-scène. In her transcription format (Bednarek 2010: 247–254), she also includes shot sizes; however, unlike Bousfield and MyIntyre, she does not clearly specify how this aspect of fictional staging contributes to the representation of the emotional experience. Thus, there is still great potential for scrutinizing the complex relationships between the multimodal character of emotional performances and how these performances are staged through the formal features of shooting the film and through its complex dimensions of post-editing. 4.2.

Perspectivizing emotional descriptions

Langacker’s stage-model of expressing content through formal and focal adjustments cannot only be applied to telecinematic fictional discourse, but also to written fiction. Most prominently, the research field of narratology (see, e.g., Schmid 2010: 99–117) has proposed very complex theories of how point of view influences the staging of experiences in narratives. With regard to the perspective from which the story is told, the following simplified model of narrative points of view can be proposed (Table 6, see also Culpeper and Fernandez-Quintanilla, Ch. 4 and Hoffmann, Ch. 6, this volume). Table 6.

Narrative points of view (based on Schmid 2010)

Points of view relation of ­narrator to plot

scope

Description external point of view

The narrator stands outside the events in the story.

internal point of view

The narrator is part of or immersed in the story.

unlimited point of view

The narrator already knows the whole plot including what happened before. He/she is also aware of its consequences.

limited point of view

The narrator has only partial access to what happens in the world of the story.

Moreover, one can distinguish between first-person and third-person narrators. First-person narrators usually have internal and limited points of view. However, they may also adopt a more omniscient perspective when looking back at events that took place a long time ago. Table 7 presents a list of five different types.

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Table 7.

Types of narrators (based on Schmid 2010)

Narrator First-person

Third-person

Description main character

tells the story from his/her protagonist perspective

subordinate character

reports on what happens to the main character as an eye-witness or first-person observer can be close to the main character or observe him/her from a certain distance

omniscient narrator

knows everything and moderates the whole storytelling process from outside the action

anonymous or ­unobtrusive observer narrator

describes the actions he/she observes from a limited external point of view

third-person selective narrator

takes the perspective of one figure (often the main character) and adopts a subjective, i.e. internal and limited point of view often works as a form of substitutionary narration: the story is told in the third-person through the eyes of a character

These narrative perspectives play an important role in mediating the readers’ access to the emotional experiences in a given story. When reconsidering Example (1), it becomes apparent how the father – rather than Billy – reports the protagonist’s description of the emotional changes that he experiences when he is dancing. The father works as a subordinate character who reliably reports on what Billy told at the audition from a limited internal point of view. However, the actual information of what happens to the protagonist when he is dancing is given through Billy’s own direct speech, i.e. from the protagonist’s personal perspective. This complex form of staging Billy’s emotional account centrally shapes how the reader is given access to this emotional content in the story. Reading the father’s report, the reader him/herself becomes a sort of eye-witness who gets exclusive external access to Billy’s emotional world through the experiences of his father – his most intimate relative. However, when Jackie quotes what Billy said, the perspective momentarily changes to a main character first-person narrative. In other words, the narrative perspective creates a certain intimacy with Billy, while at the same time maintaining the distance through the observer’s report given by the father. When taking another look at Table 4 presented in Section 3.2, we can directly appreciate how the text shapes our access to the emotional content and highlights the prominence of certain emotional experiences through this form of perspectivization. As the table shows, we receive the most detailed information about Billy’s emotional

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process. By contrast, the jury’s emotions are merely labelled through the emotion word impressed. Between Billy and the jury stand the emotions of the mediating father. The narrative perspective thus creates most emotional proximity to Billy and his father and keeps an emotional distance to the jury. In the movie version of this scene, the camera takes on the role of the narrator. It presents the impressed faces of the jurors instead of Jackie narrating this scene. Thus, similar to the shot ranges of camera work in film, narrative perspective thus adds a formal dimension to emotionalization in fictional discourse. Through perspectivization the implicitness and explicitness of emotional portrayals can be further manipulated. This ‘how’ of emotional staging plays an extremely important role in managing the emotional effects of the ‘what’ that is being staged to the audience. Pragmatic research yet has to fully embrace the challenge of scrutinizing how staging contributes to the production of complex emotional displays in fiction. 5.

How and why are we moved by fiction?

In the previous sections we have scrutinized the production of emotional utterances in fictional discourse with a focus on both the repertoire of emotional cues and the staging of emotional processes through descriptions and multimodal performances. We have discussed how authors of fictive emotional utterances can play with the explicitness and the implicitness of emotional descriptions by manipulating how much is revealed about a character’s emotional state or process. Moreover, through the variable use of multimodal emotional cues, the intensity of emotional performances can be varied (see Langlotz and Locher 2013: 98). The audience’s perceptual and interpretive involvement with this emotional content can be further structured through methods of staging like camera work and narrative perspectivizations. To theorize the audience’s affective engagement with fictional discourse, psychological research on recipient emotions draws a distinction between “fictional emotions” and “artefact emotions” or “F-emotions” and “A-emotions” (Tan 1994: 13). While F-emotions are about what happens in the fictional world, A-emotions are caused by the audience’s fascination with the artefact itself. Thus, when we empathize with Billy, we are experiencing an F-emotion; when we appreciate how well the book is written or the film is shot, our reaction constitutes an A-emotion. F-emotions are caused by a “diegetic effect” – the effect of ‘becoming part of’ the fictional world: The diegetic effect […] can be characterized as a set of embedded illusions. Both the illusion of space and the awareness of being in it depend on the illusion of movement. Taken as a whole, it creates a state of imagination: the viewers are led to imagine themselves as invisible witnesses moving around in the fictional world, and assuming vantage points dictated by the film. (Tan 1994: 26)

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The diegetic effect is caused by the formal features of staging fictional discourse (Whiteley 2016: 510). The narrative features bring the emotional experiences of the fictional characters close to the perception of the audience: “The ways in which fictional content is conveyed through a work’s formal features play a central role in the vividness, coherence and richness of our imaginative engagement and in the nature of our emotional responses arising from it” (Todd 2011: 12). Unfortunately, empirical research, let alone linguistic pragmatic research on this interrelatedness is rare. Therefore, it is useful to turn to psychological models of understanding emotions in fiction and emotional understanding in general. In their on-line comprehension study, Dijkstra et al. (1994) report on correlations between a) the evocation of character emotions and the formal features of literary short stories as well as b) the effects of these character emotions and of suspense on the recipients’ reading times. With regard to a) the study shows that character emotions “culminate with the plot structure, to reach a climax towards the end of the story” and they are enhanced by “causally important actions and events, dialogue, and plausibility” (Dijkstra et al. 1994: 153). Thus, the presence of character emotions is clearly associated with suspense. However, character emotions are less prominent when the descriptions in the texts are more static and imaginative. Concerning b) the study also reveals interesting correlations. In general, the presence of character emotions is shown to speed up reading times. This effect, however, is reversed when emotional portrayals are complex. The same is true for passages that induce suspense because they cause more cognitive involvement in the audience (Dijkstra et al. 1994: 156). The results from this study are interesting because they appear to be consistent with more general psychological models of emotional comprehension. In line with cognitive appraisal theories of emotion, recipients of emotional utterances must interpret the emotional states of the observed characters by recurring to emotional knowledge schemas (see Section 3.2). Thus, when interpreting the emotional experiences of another person or a fictional character, readers and viewers must also recruit knowledge about the character’s goals and expectations within a given situation and about the potential problems that might interfere with a successful and positive outcome of his/her actions (Andersen and Guerrero 1998: 66–67). Planalp (1999: 54–67) distinguishes different levels of engaging with another person’s emotional state. These levels build up on one another. They show qualitatively different degrees to which a recipient may feel emotionally connected to the emotional state of an observed emoter. Note that Planalp’s distinctions were developed for emotional communication in general rather than for fictional discourse. Nevertheless, the distinctions are useful to talk about different degrees of how recipients of fictional emotions can relate to them:

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1.  Emotional recognition At the lowest level of emotional connection, a recipient may merely understand that the observed person is undergoing some emotional experience (Planalp 1999: 55–56). But he/she cannot clearly determine what emotion this is. For example, the highly implicit description of the old man’s feelings in Example (4) does not allow us to precisely interpret his emotional state. The same is true for Billy’s description of his emotional dancing state. In the same way as it is difficult for the boy to conceptualize his emotion, a recipient may not be able to classify Billy’s feelings. 2.  Emotional accuracy Planalp (1999: 56–58) speaks of “emotional accuracy” to denote the next level of emotional connection, namely a recipient’s ability to determine what kind of emotion a character is going through. However, the recipient might not know why the person is feeling this emotion. For instance, when looking at Figure 3 in isolation, one can predict that Billy’s father is sad. But without knowing the context, it is impossible to interpret the precise reasons for this state. 3.  Emotional understanding This level of emotional engagement captures a recipient’s more detailed insight into the emotional process that another person is undergoing (Planalp 1999: 58–61). This involves knowing which type of emotion the emoter is feeling, how this person is feeling, and why the person is emoting. Example (1) can be used to illustrate this level. Taking into account all the contextual information from the text, we know that Jackie is impressed with his son and that Billy’s account of what dancing means to him caused the father to feel impressed. 4.  Empathy Empathy is defined as a form of emotional understanding in which the recipient feels the same emotions as the person that he/she observes (Planalp 1999: 64–66). When being empathic, we feel with a given character. For instance, we can empathize with Billy’s father in Example (2) and feel sad about his great misfortune. 5.  Sympathy Sympathy is another form of emotional understanding. While we can appreciate the emotions that another person is feeling and understand the reasons for the emotional state, we do not adopt the same emotional state but keep our distance and have our own feelings about the given situation (Planalp 1999: 66–67). For example, we may feel sympathy with Dr. Frankenstein in Example (3), but since we are highly aware of the fictive quality of the gothic scene, we do not become contaged by the protagonist’s horror.

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As should have become clear from this brief overview, a higher level of emotional connection entails all previous levels. If a recipient does not see that a person has an emotion (level 1), he/she cannot determine what emotion this is (level 2); and without a recognition of the type of emotion, he/she cannot understand it (level 3), let alone share it (levels 4 and 5). When taking into account these complex levels of emotional understanding, one can better appreciate the results from Dijkstra et al.’s (1994) study. The more complex descriptions of character emotions are, the more complex the process of appraising the character’s emotional state becomes. This increases the audience’s cognitive and emotional involvement through empathic or sympathetic engagement. On the other hand, when the fictional staging causes recipients to only recognize and accurately classify the emotional states of characters without letting them know or see the precise reasons for these emotions, this creates suspense and presses them to read on more rapidly in order to generate deeper emotional understandings. But how do fictionally staged ‘fake’ representations of emotional processes manage to trigger ‘real’ emotional processes in the audience? Why can we feel about a fantasy? In philosophy this problem is known as the “paradox of fiction” (Allen 1986). While it is impossible to engage with the alternative philosophical answers to this paradox here, an interesting recent approach to explain literary empathy has been proposed by Lauer (2007). According to his cognitive-linguistic theory, fictional discourse stimulates our mimetic capacities, which are grounded in the neuropsychological system of mirror neurons (di Pellegrino et al. 1992). Mirror neurons fire when we observe the actions of another agent. When firing, the neurons stimulate our own action planning and action execution centres. In other words, we activate those neuronal structures that would enable us to engage with the same action ourselves without necessarily performing it (Lauer 2007: 140). Mirror neurons thus allow us to understand the other’s actions from our own psychologically and somatically engaged perspective through a form of neuropsychological mimicking. Mirror neurons also provide the basis for our empathic capacities. When observing another person’s emotional behaviour when attending to their descriptions of emotional states, our own emotion execution and emotion comprehension centres can become activated. The closer, the more immediate and the more detailed our observation of the other is, the more likely our mirror-system will cause us to become emotionally involved (Bauer 2005). Lauer’s theory provides an interesting basis for explaining why recipients of fiction become emotionalized although the observed emotions are pure artefacts. As we have seen, fictional discourse can expertly modulate the proximity of and involvement in our perceptions and interpretations of complex emotional performances. The more deeply the emotional utterances allow us to immerse into the emotional process of a fictive character, the more likely we may be to stimulate our empathic system of mirror neurons. Through its ingenious strategies for staging emotions both written and telecinematic emotional discourse may thus pull us

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into emotional states that are profoundly moving. The theory would thus explain Bednarek’s (2008) observations that descriptions of character emotions, expressors and behavioural surge terms as well as undirected overt affect are particularly frequent in fictional prose. On a more general level, the theory would also support Oatley’s (2002: 39) claim that emotion is the very substance of fiction. 6. Conclusion This chapter has charted the relationship between language, emotion, and fiction with regard to the repertoire for producing emotional descriptions and expressions, narrative strategies for staging emotional portrayals and performances, and interpretive processes of comprehending such fictional representations of emotionality. Along these dimensions fictional discourse grants us special insights into the emotional adventures and turmoils of protagonists, including their inner thoughts and feelings, that we could not observe in equal quality and depth in real-life interactions. Going beyond the trivial observation that fiction constructs and triggers a great many emotional experiences, one can more boldly claim that fiction has a special and privileged status for human emotional experience. Therefore, Alvarez-Pereyre’s (2011) statement about telecinematic data can be regarded as being generally true for fictional discourse: The very fact that the lexicogrammatical structures have been, carefully and non-spontaneously, chosen to fulfill the particular functions assigned, makes them extremely good specimens for the study of the relationships between forms, meanings and functions. (Alvarez-Pereyre 2011: 62, emphasis in original)

Through fiction, we can gain access to experiential domains and scenarios that are – for better or worse – inaccessible to us in our normal and everyday lives. Metaphorically speaking, fiction can be claimed to be a kind of laboratory of and for human emotional experience (Oatley 1999, 2002). Working as a catalyst, it can turn such experiences larger than live and put us through highly complex emotional journeys within the timespan of consuming a fictional product and most likely beyond that (Tan 1994). Following Oatley’s claim (2002: 39) that “[e]motion is to fiction as truth is to science”. It can therefore be assumed that human beings first and foremost engage with fiction in order to be moved in some way or another (Lauer 2007). It goes without saying that this overview has only been able to sketch some very general issues. It cannot handle the sheer complexity of emotions in fiction and emotionalization through fiction. Therefore, it is to be hoped that the future will produce much more research in linguistic pragmatics that will fill the great many gaping lacunas that still exist in this highly fascinating research domain.

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank Miriam A. Locher and Andreas H. Jucker for their invaluable feedback on this chapter. References Primary sources Billy Elliot 2000 Dir. By Stephen Daldry. Screenplay by Lee Hall. Universal Pictures. Burgess, Melvin 2001 Billy Elliot. London: Chicken House. Hemingway, Ernest 2004 The Old Man and the Sea. London: Arrow Books. First published [1952]. Jaws 1975 Dir. By Steven Spielberg. Screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. Universal Pictures. Shelley, Mary 2013 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Andreas Gaile (ed.). Stuttgart: Reclam. First published [1831]. Secondary sources Allen, R. T. 1986 The reality of responses to fiction. British Journal of Aesthetics 26(1): 64– 68. Alvarez-Pereyre, Michael 2011 Using film as linguistic specimen: Theoretical and practical issues. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 47–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Andersen, Peter A. and Laura K. Guerrero 1998 Principles of communication and emotion in social interaction. In: Peter A. Andersen and Laura K. Guerrero, (eds.), Handbook of Communication and Emotion: Research, Theory, Applications, and Contexts, 49–96. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Aristotle 1932 Aristotle in 23 Volumes: Volume 23, W. H. Fyfe (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bänziger, Tanja and Karl R. Scherer 2010 Introducing the Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayal (GEMEP) corpus. In: Karl R. Scherer, Tanja Bänziger and Etienne B. Roesch (eds.), Blueprint for Affective Computing: A Sourcebook, 271–294. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Bauer, Joachim 2005 Warum ich fühle was du fühlst – Intuitive Kommunikation und das Geheimnis der Spiegelneurone. Hamburg, DE: Hoffmann und Campe. Bednarek, Monika 2008 Emotion Talk across Corpora. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bednarek, Monika 2010 The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity. London: Continuum. Bednarek, Monika 2011 The stability of the televisual character: A corpus stylistic case study. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 185–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bousfield, Derek, and Dan McIntyre 2011 Emotion and empathy in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas: A case study of the “funny guy” scene. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 105–123. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Burke, Michael 2011 Literary Reading, Cognition and Emotion.: An Exploration of the Oceanic Mind. New York: Routledge. Clark, Herbert H. 1996 Using Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Clift, Rebecca 2014 Visible deflation: Embodiment and emotion in interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction 47(4): 380–403. Damasio, Antonio 1994 Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. London: Penguin. Detenber, Benjamin H. and Annie Lang 2010 The influence of form and presentation attributes of media on emotion. In: Katrin Döveling, Christian von Scheve and Elly A. Konijn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media, 275–293. London: Routledge. Dijkstra, Katinka, Rolf A. Zwaan, Arthur C. Graesser and Joseph P. Magliano 1994 Character and reader emotions in literary texts. Poetics 23(1–2): 139–157. di Pellegrino, Giuseppe, Leonardo Fadiga, Luciano Fogassi, Vittorio Gallese and Giacomo Rizzolatti 1992 Understanding motor events: A neurophysiological study. Experimental Brain Research 91: 176–180. Du Bois, John W. and Elise Kärkkäinen 2012 Taking a stance on emotion: Affect, sequence, and intersubjectivity in dialogic interaction. Text & Talk 32(4): 433–451. Ekman, Paul 2003 Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces, Feelings, and Their Triggers to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. New York: Times Book. Ekman, Paul and Wallace V. Friesen 1969 The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage and coding. Semiotica 1(1): 49–98.

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Ekman, Paul and Wallace V. Friesen 1975 Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Expressions. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Ekman, Paul and Wallace V. Friesen 1978 Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. Faflak, Joel and Richard C. Sha (eds.) 2014 Romanticism and the Emotions: Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fiehler, Reinhard 2002 How to do emotions with words: Emotionality in conversations. In: Susan R. Fussell (ed.), The Verbal Communication of Emotions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 79–106. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Fludernik, Monika 1993 The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction. London: Routledge. Foolen, Ad 2012 The relevance of emotion for language and linguistics. In: Ad Foolen, Ulrike Lüdtke, Tim Racine and Jordan Zlatev (eds.), Moving Ourselves, Moving Others: Motion and Emotion in Intersubjectivity, Consciousness and Language, 349–369. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Frijda, Nico 1986 The Emotions. Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Genette, Gérard 1980 Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method, Jane E. Lewin (trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Goffman, Erving 1978 Response cries. Language 54(4): 787–815. Goodwin, Charles 2007 Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society 18(1): 53–73. Goodwin, Marjorie H. and Charles Goodwin 2001 Emotion within situated activity. In: Alessandro Duranti (ed.), Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, 239–257. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Goodwin, Marjorie. H., Charles Goodwin and Malcah Yaeger-Dror 2002 Multimodality in girls’ game disputes. Journal of Pragmatics 34(10–11): 1621–1649. Harkins, Jean and Anna Wierzbicka 2001 Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Harré, Rom (ed.) 1986 The Social Construction of the Emotions. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Hochschild, Arlie R. 1979 Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology 85(3): 551–575. Hochschild, Arlie R. 1983 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Iser, Wolfgang 1976 Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. München: Wilhelm Fink. Jakobson, Roman 1960 Linguistics and poetics. In: Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 350– 377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. James, William 1884 What is an emotion? Mind 9(34): 188–205. Kendon, Adam 2004 Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kövecses, Zoltán 2000 Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kövecses, Zoltán 2002 Emotion concepts: Social constructionism and cognitive linguistics. In: Susan R. Fussell (ed.), The Verbal Communication of Emotions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 109–124. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Kozinski, Rose Ann 2011 Quantifying the emotional tone of James Bond films: An application of the Dictionary of Affect in Language. In: Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.), Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, 105–123. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Keutzer, Oliver, Sebastian Lauritz, Claudia Mehlinger and Peter Moormann 2014 Filmanalyse. Wiesbaden, DE: Springer Fachmedien. Langacker, Ronald W. 1991a Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Volume II: Descriptive Application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1991b Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, Ronald W. 2008 Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Langlotz, Andreas 2015 Konstruktionen als sozio-emotionale Koordinationsmittel. In: Alexander Ziem and Alexander Lasch (eds.), Konstruktionsgrammatik IV. Konstruktionen als soziale Konventionen und kognitive Routinen, 259–282. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. Langlotz, Andreas and Miriam A. Locher 2012 Ways of communicating emotional stance in online disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics 44(12): 1591–1606. Langlotz, Andreas and Miriam A. Locher 2013 The role of emotions in relational work. Journal of Pragmatics 58: 87–107. Langlotz, Andreas and Miriam A. Locher 2017 (Im)politeness and emotion. In: Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Kádár (eds.), Plagrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)Politeness, forthcoming. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Langlotz, Andreas and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (eds.) 2014 Emotion, Affect, Sentiment: The Language and Aesthetics of Feeling. (SPELL: Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature 30.) Tübingen: Narr. Lauer, Gerhard 2007 Spiegelneuronen: Über den Grund des Wohlgefallens an der Nachahmung. In: Karl Eibl, Katja Mellmann and Rüdiger Zymner (eds.), Im Rücken der Kulturen, 137–163. Paderborn, DE: Mentis. Lazarus, Richard S. 1991 Progress on a cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion. American Psychologist 46(8): 819–834. LeDoux, Joseph 1998 The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Touchstone. Matoesian, Gregory M. 2005 Struck by speech revisited: Embodied stance in jurisdictional discourse. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9(2): 167–193. Myers, David G. 2004 Psychology: Seventh Edition in Modules. New York: Worth Publishers. Norris, Sigrid 2002 The implication of visual research for discourse analysis: transcription beyond language. Visual Communication 1(1): 97–121. Oatley, Keith 1999 Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: Fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation. Review of General Psychology 3(2): 101–117. Oatley, Keith 2002 Emotions and the story worlds of fiction. In: Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange and Timothy C. Brock (eds.), Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, 39–69. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ochs, Elinor and Bambi Schieffelin 1989 Language has a heart. Text 9(1): 7–25. Piazza, Roberta, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.) 2011 Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pillet-Shore, Danielle 2012 Greeting: Displaying stance through prosodic recipient design. Research on Language & Social Interaction 45(4): 375–398. Planalp, Sally 1998 Communicating emotion in everyday life: Cues, channels, and processes. In: Peter A. Andersen and Laura K. Guerrero (eds.), Handbook of Communication and Emotion: Research, Theory, Applications, and Contexts, 29–48. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Planalp, Sally 1999 Communicating Emotion: Social, Moral, and Cultural Processes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Plutchik, Robert 1962 The Emotions: Facts, Theories, and a New Model. New York: Random House. Plutchik, Robert 1980 Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis. New York: Harper & Row.

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Plutchik, Robert 2003 Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Radden, Günter 1998 The conceptualisation of emotional causality by means of prepositional phrases. In: Angeliki Athanasiadou and Elzbieta Tabakowska (eds.), Speaking of Emotions: Conceptualisation and Expression, 273–294. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Reber, Elisabeth 2012 Affectivity in Interaction: Sound Objects in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ronan, Patricia 2014 Talk about flipping health food – Swearing and religious oaths in Irish and British English. In: Andreas Langlotz and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (eds.), Emotion, Affect, Sentiment: The Language and Aesthetics of Feeling, 177– 196. Tübingen: Narr. Ryan, Michael, and Melissa Lenos 2012 An Introduction to Film Analysis. New York: Continuum. Scherer, Klaus 1984 On the nature and function of emotion: A component process approach. In: Klaus Scherer and Paul Ekman (eds.), Approaches to Emotion, 293–317. Hillsdale, MI: Lawrence Erlbaum. Scherer, Klaus, Angela Shorr and Tom Johnstone (eds.) 2001 Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research. Canary, NC: Oxford University Press. Schiewer, Gesine L. 2009 Kognitive Emotionstheorien – Emotionale Agenten – Narratologie: Perspektiven aktueller Emotionsforschung für die Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft. In: Martin Huber and Simone Winko (eds.), Literatur und Kognition: Bestandesaufnahmen und Perspektiven eines Arbeitsfeldes, 99–114. Paderborn, DE: Mentis. Schnall, Simone 2005 The pragmatics of emotion language. Psychological Inquiry 16: 28–31. Schmid, Wolf 2010 Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Schrauf, Robert W. and Julia Sanchez 2004 The preponderance of negative emotion words across generations and across cultures. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25(2–3): 266–284. Schwarz-Friesel, Monika 2007 Sprache und Emotion. Tübingen: Francke. Sklar, Howard 2013 The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Spottiswoode, Raymond 1973 A Grammar of the Film: An Analysis of Film Technique. Berkley, CA: University of Californa Press.

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Strasberg, Lee 1988 A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method. New York: Penguin. Streeck, Jürgen 2009 Gesturecraft: The Manufacture of Meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tamborini, Ron 1996 A model of empathy and emotional reactions to horror. In: James B. Weaver and Ron Tamborini (eds.), Horror Films: Current Research on Audience Preferences and Reactions, 103–123. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Tan, Ed S.-H. 1994 Film-induced affect as a witness emotion. Poetics 23(1–2): 7–23. Tan, Ed S.-H. 1996 Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Todd, Cain 2011 Imaginative acceptance and attending emotionally to fiction. In: Anne Reboul (ed.), Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Kevin Mulligan. http://www.philosophie.ch/kevin/festschrift/index.php Trodd, Zoe 2007 Hemingway’s camera eye: The problems of language and an interwar politics of form. The Hemingway Review 26(2): 7–21. Turner, Jonathan H. and Jan E. Stets 2005 The Sociology of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wilce, James E. 2009 Language and Emotion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Whiteley, Sara 2016 Emotions. In: Violeta Sotirova (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics, 507–522. London: Bloomsbury.

18. Language change and fiction Derek Denis and Sali A. Tagliamonte Abstract: This chapter discusses the connection between language change and fiction. We look at the relationship between change and fiction from two perspectives. First, we identify the ways in which language data from fiction is useful to the linguist interested in language change. We discuss its use both in the general sense as data in the investigation of change and in a specific sense, highlighting unique kinds of evidence that fiction provides particularly for historical pragmatics and sociolinguists. We then shift focus to what Eckert (2003) calls “the elephant in the room”: what’s the role of broadcast media in the diffusion of change? We review the sociolinguistics literature that has asked this question. Does fiction, especially in broadcast media, result in language change, spread innovation, or accelerate diffusion? Or, is the language in broadcast media simply a reflection of the everyday vernacular? We discuss a series of case studies, several of which consider phenomena that bridge historical pragmatics and sociolinguistics (pronominal variation, quotative be like, intensifiers, the pragmatic marker eh, and the marker of solidarity dude). 1. Introduction Our goal for this chapter is to outline the ways in which language use in fiction has not only fundamentally informed the historical linguistic, historical pragmatic, and sociolinguistic understanding of language change, but also how fiction itself, and in particular fiction in mass media, may contribute to the diffusion of linguistic innovation.1 As Eckert (2003) notes, it is essentially a given for non-linguists that media causes language change: We have all been told by non-linguist acquaintances that language change comes from the television. The idea that language change could be accomplished in such a trivial fashion is part of the popular ‘bag o’ words’ view of language … that we are all tired of dealing with. (Eckert 2003: 395)

1



Following Jucker and Locher (Ch. 1, this volume) we understand fictional language to encompass (among others) novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and telecinematic media that is the product of “the imagination of an author in which worlds are created that are populated by fictitious characters”.

DOI 10.1515/9783110431094-018 In: M. A. Locher and A. H. Jucker (eds.). (2017). Pragmatics of Fiction, 553–584. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

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However linguists have shown that face-to-face interaction, not mass media, remains the primary source and trigger of language change (Labov 2001: 228). Early predictions of “widespread standardization caused by broadcast media” have not come to fruition (see Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 503–504 and references therein). While popular perception continues to uphold this idea, studies of the mass media show that it does not have the influence that was once imagined. While it may be one of many factors; the sociolinguistic situation that contributes such factors is complex. At the heart of this complexity is a debate over Aristotelian mimesis: does art imitate life or life imitate art? That is, are media representations of linguistic innovation the source of change or a reflection of what is taking place in the speech community? Furthermore, as Eckert (2003: 395) points out, we must ask ourselves if all features of language are equal in their potential availability for diffusion through non-face-to-face means. For example, Milroy (2007: 149) argues that some changes are available “off the shelf”2 while others are available “under the counter” (see also Meyerhoff and Niedzielski 2003). We review a number of analyses of language change, primarily from variationist sociolinguistics, that investigate this issue (see also Sayers 2014). Some studies find compelling evidence that (televised) fiction is on the vanguard of change (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005) and/or plays a role in the diffusion of change (though as a factor among many others) (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013). Others have found evidence suggesting that language in (televised) fiction is lagging behind speech community trends (Dion and Poplack 2007). Still others suggest a more subtle relationship between language change and fiction (Denis 2013; Kiesling 2004). We do not intend to provide definitive arguments for or against the role of media in language change but rather, we briefly survey the current findings from the literature and offer a synthesis. Before diving into the debate, we address another aspect of the relationship between language change and fiction. We begin by highlighting the importance that historical (textual) fictional data has played in the investigation of language variation and change. The representation of speech in fiction (whether in the form of a play or dialogue in prose) has served as one of the best proxies for actual, historical speech. We argue that two aspects of linguistic variation present in historical fiction indicate their general utility for studying language change. We then discuss three examples of the special utility of fiction in the examination of change in the phonological, morphosyntactic, and historical pragmatic domains. This discussion is the focus of Section 2. The third and fourth sections both tackle the question of fiction and language change but ask a different question: is televised fiction a conduit for linguistic change and what properties make a linguistic feature available for diffusion from fiction in the media? 2



This is a term borrowed from Eckert (2003: 395).

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2.

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Fiction as data for the study of language change

For the vast majority of human history, recorded language was limited to written media. It was not until the twentieth century that technology allowed for the recording of audio (and video). With the exception of discussion and description by contemporary writers, scholars, and grammarians of speech and dialect patterns,3 (socio-)historical language data is limited to patterns of language within textual records themselves. As such, historically-oriented linguists must justify the validity of studying these records as an appropriate approximation of the vernacular speech of the time. As Poplack and St-Amand (2007: 729) note “there is no substitute for real-time [spoken] data in the diachronic study of linguistic change” (see also Denis 2015). While that may be the case, the vast textual record, and in particular fiction, has been critical for the sociolinguistic and historical pragmatic investigation of language variation and diachronic change. Textual data comprises “reflections of casual face-to-face conversation” (Biber et al. 1993: 3–5). As Schneider (2002: 67) suggests, (written) fiction represents speech acts that are “necessarily characteristic” and “render[…] speech forms that a typical member of a given speech community might have uttered with some degree of likelihood, representative of the everyday communication in this community”. Indeed, two aspects of written fiction support its general utility for the study of language change: (1) the presence of variability (Schneider 2003: 71) and (2) the presence of orderly heterogeneity of such variability. We discuss these in Section 2.1 and 2.2 respectively. We then turn to a discussion of the special utility of fiction for offering unique insights into language change and language history, which other types of textual records do not. Three examples of this special utility – much of which is the result of the author’s creative agency – are discussed in Section 2.3. 2.1.

Variation in fiction

Variability is present in a wide range of fiction sources, both historical and synchronic. Here we provide two relevant examples. The works of Shakespeare contain many sociolinguistic variables associated with changes in progress in Early Modern English. For example, the rise of do-support in English took place over several centuries from around 1400 to 1700. At the time Shakespeare was writing there was vigorous variation between do-support and non-do-support; Ellegård (1953: 166) reports 65%, 60% and 24% do-support in negative questions, affirma-

3

A well-known example is Shakespeare’s description of Henry Hotspur as “speaking thick” (King Henry IV, Second Part, Act II, Scene 3) that has been argued to describe his use of uvular-r [ʁ], a feature of Northumbrian English (Heslop 1892–1894: xxiv; Milroy 2007: 153–154).

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tive questions, and negative declaratives respectively in the 1575–1600 period. This variation is reflected in Shakespeare’s work, as in (1) (affirmative questions) and (2) (negative declaratives) from Stanford and Tsiang-Starcevic (1998: 326–327).4 (1) a. What meane you by that saying? (Two Gentlemen of Verona 27; 2190, emphasis added) b. What doe you meane by this hanting of me? (Othello 953; 2270, emphasis added) (2) a. Vneuen is the course, I like it not. (Romeo and Juliet 403; 2180, emphasis added) b. I doe not like the tower of any place: (Richard III 226; 1490, emphasis added)

The variation is so pervasive that both alternates can be found within the same rhyming couplet as in (3), again as reported in Stanford and Tsiang-Starcevic (1998: 328).5 (3) Juliet: Saints do not moue, thogh grant for praiers sake. Romeo: Then moue not while my praiers effect I take. (Romeo and Juliet 386; 670, emphasis added)

Examples of variability are also found in the philological record of ancient languages. One such example is found in the Old Icelandic short tale Auðunar Þáttr Vestfirzka (‘The Story of Auðun of the Westfjords’) which is preserved in the Morkinskinna manuscript (c. 1275, likely originally compiled c. 1220) (Gordon [1927] 1957: 129).6 The tale is about an Icelander, Auðun, who among other adventures travels to Greenland, acquires a polar bear, and delivers it to King Sveinn of Denmark. Along the way, he has two particularly relevant interactions, shown in (4).7 (4) a. ‘Ek mun fá þér vistir, sem it þurfuð, ‘I will provide for.you provisions as you.dual need, til konungs fundar’ for king’s finding’ ‘I will provide you with the provisions that you need for reaching the king.’

4



5



6



7



Shakespearean examples are taken from The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition (Wells et al. 1987). The variation in do-support is so pervasive indeed that Hope (1994: 74) is able to use evidence from the distributions of variants in different scenes of Henry VIII, to support the general hypothesis that this work is a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Manuscript GKS (Gamle kongelige Samling) 1009 fol., Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen. This example was pointed out to the first author by Ian McDougall (University of Toronto; Dictionary of Old English). Translation and gloss by first author, based on Gordon ([1927] 1957). Some modern edited versions of this text normalize the relevant variation in (4a) but at least Gordon (1957: 131, 132) and Jónsson (1932: 182, 184) preserve the variability. Such scribal ‘flare’ is an issue for the study of language variation and change in textual records.

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b. En konungr sagði, ‘Eigi þurfu þér at honum at But king said, ‘Not need you.pl at him to hlæja, því at betr hefir hann sét fyrir sinni laugh, because better has he provided for his sál heldr en ér’ soul more than you.pl ’

‘But the king said, “you need not laugh at him because he has provided for his soul better than you have.’’’

Both examples exhibit archaic forms of the second person pronoun. In (4a), the second person, nominative dual form is given as it (cf. the standard Old Icelandic þit which is found elsewhere throughout the textual record) and in (4b) the second person, nominative plural form appears as both the standard þér and older ér. The newer forms of these two pronouns developed via the same process of morphological reanalysis.8 According to Gordon (1957: 294), the onset þ came about through the encliticization of older it and ér to verbal forms ending with ð: “skuluð ér [‘shall you.pl’] became skuluþér, which by the usual division of syllables was pronounced sku-lu-ðér, and the last syllable was taken to be the pronoun [þér]”. We see evidence of this reanalysis in action in (4b). The token of þér follows the verb þurfa ‘to need’ which would standardly be realized with second person plural inflection as þurfuð, but rather is realized as þurfu, without ð, followed by the innovative pronominal form þér. The token of ér in (4b) does not occur in such a context, nor does the token of it in (4a), which occurs pre-verbally with the verbal inflection preserved.9 We will return to these examples below in Section 2.3. 2.2.

Structured heterogeneity in fiction

The presence (and representation) of variation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for determining the utility of data from fiction. For variationist sociolinguists at least the second condition is that that variation should be constrained by systematic patterns, as has long been observed in vernacular speech data (Labov 1972; Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968). Jankowski (2005) provides cogent evidence for this. She analyzes the variation between variants of stative possession in English (have, have got, got) using a corpus of 20th century plays. These plays, representing both drama and comedy, were written between 1902 and 2001. The

It and ér themselves developed from Common Germanic *jut and *jūz respectively (Ringe 2006). 9 The þér in (4a) is not the nominative plural pronoun, but a homophonous second person dative singular pronoun which does not participate in this variation having developed from Common Germanic *þiz and thus always exhibiting a þ (Ringe 2006). 8



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thirty-six plays from American authors and thirty-eight from British authors are roughly evenly distributed by decade. Not only does the corpus of plays include extensive variation between the three variants of stative possession, but this variation is subject to the same suite of factors that has been observed in data from vernacular spoken language. Table 1, based on Jankowski (2005: Table 6), shows the results of a multivariate analysis10 of factors that constrain the realization of this variable in the British portion of the plays corpus.11 The application value for Table 1 is have (vs. have got and got). The Age of the Play, binned into four twenty-five year groups, is a statistically significant factor in the multivariate analysis (p < 0.05) and the constraint hierarchy indicates a clear trend over time such that have becomes less probable over time, changing from a factor weight of 0.65 in the oldest plays to 0.40 in the newest plays. This is consistent with Tagliamonte’s (2003: 547) findings from vernacular spoken data of three British speech communities in which a change in the overall frequency of have got is increasing at the expense of have. Furthermore, the same linguistic factors that constrain the realization of the variants in the play data are the same factors that constrain the variability in Tagliamonte’s (2003: 547) spoken British data and the direction of these effects is the same: Negative, rather than affirmative, tokens favour have; generic and NP subjects favour have whereas non-generic, pronominal subjects favour have got; and abstract objects favour have. Parallelism in the constraints on variation between vernacular speech data and written data is exactly what would be required to demonstrate the utility of fiction for studying variation and change. As Jankowski (2005) puts it: The play corpora have been shown to be excellent sources for language variation and change data. They have proven to be more than adequate, in that they have been able to provide a broad picture of real-time variation, change and divergence in English over the span of a century. (Jankowski 2005: 41)

Multivariate analysis is a statistical analysis that considers the possible effect of multiple categorical independent factors on the realization of a binary dependent variable. The application value of the dependent variable is the variant of interest. The Input (here 0.439) indicates the overall probability of the application value when all the independent variables are taken into account. The N indicates the number of tokens of the application value (out of the total number of tokens of the variable). Each level of an independent variable is assigned a factor weight, which ranges from 0 to 1. Factor weights above 0.5 indicate that the application value is favoured in that context and factor weights below 0.5 indicate that the application value is disfavoured in the context. The range can be interpreted as the relative magnitude of each independent variable; the larger the range, the larger the effect size. 11 We leave aside social factors (sex and occupation of character) here to concentrate on the comparison of linguistic factors between Jankowski (2005) and Tagliamonte (2003). 10

Language change and fiction  Table 1.

Multivariate analysis of factors contributing to the selection of have in British play corpus (Jankowski 2005: Table 6; copyright granted by author)

Input .439

Factor Weight

N

%

Time (Age of Play) 1902–1926 1927–1951 1952–1976 1977–2001 Range

0.65 0.57 0.43 0.40 25

208 202 201 141

59 51 38 33

Polarity Affirmative Negative Range

0.47 0.63 16

565 187

41 59

Subject Reference Non-generic pron. Generic pron. Non-generic NP Generic NP Range

0.47 0.67 0.67 0.90 43

611 53 61 27

41 62 59 87

Type of Object Concrete Abstract Range

0.42 0.64 22

386 366  

35 60  

N 752/1708 

2.3.

559

The special utility of fiction

While fiction indeed serves a general use for linguists as a source of historical language data (a kind of “text as artifact” view [Taavitsainen and Jucker 2015: 2]), fiction also offers its own unique kinds of evidence. For example, in Shakespeare we find evidence of the English Great Vowel Shift in progress in the form of puns and rhymes characteristic of his writing. A particularly well-cited example is a pun in the speech of Falstaff in Henry IV Part One (Minkova 2014: 22). (5) What, vppon compulsion: Zoundes, and I were at the strappado, or all the rackes in the worlde, I would not tell you on compulsion. Giue you a reason on compulsion? if reasons were as plentifull as blackberries, I would giue no man a reason vppon compulsion, I. (1 Henry IV 522; 1170, emphasis added)

At the time of Shakespeare’s writing, the orthographic vowel in reasons was undergoing the Great Vowel Shift, variably pronounced somewhere between

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[εː~eː~iː] making it partially homophonous with raisins, with the variable pronunciation of its stressed vowel as [aː~εː~eː] (see Lass 2000: 72 on the dating of different stages/movements of the Great Vowel Shift). A similar example comes from Julius Caeser, here playing on the variable homophony of [ɔː~oː] and [oː~uː]. (6) Now is it Rome indeed, and Roome enough When there is in it but one onely man. (Julius Caeser 677; 232, emphasis added)

As we saw above in example (4), the simple presence of variation tells us something about the history of the Old Icelandic pronominal system. However, the broader narrative context of the examples cited above illuminates something even more interesting. Of note is that the archaic variants in the passages in (4) are both contained in dialogue from Danish (not Icelandic) characters; one from King Sveinn (4b), and one from Áki, a steward of King Sveinn’s court (4a). While the change from ér to þér took place in Old Icelandic, it did not take place in closelyrelated eastern varieties of Norse, including the variety that King Sveinn and Áki would have likely spoken in Denmark. This difference is still apparent in contemporary Danish in which the second person plural form is I (from East Old Norse īr = Old Icelandic (þ)ér).12 The one other token of the second person, plural pronoun in the short tale is shown in (7). (7) Auðun segir, ‘Guð þakki yðr, herra, sóma þann allan Auðun says, ‘God thanks you.pl . dat lord, honour the all er þér vilið til mín leggja; … which you.pl wish to me give

‘Auðun says, ‘God thanks you lord, for all the honour which you wish to give to me; …’

In excerpt (7), Auðun is speaking to King Sveinn, hence the honorific usage of the plural second person forms (þér and dative yðr). Critically, the form of the nominative pronoun, spoken by Auðun, an Icelander, is þér. Thus, not only does Auðunar Þáttr Vestfirzka contain the kind of variation familiar to sociolinguists, but its author appears to have used this variation for stylistic effect, representing dialectal forms in the speech of characters. Such mimetic representation of character speech through ‘eye-dialect’ respellings and the use of non-standard lexical and grammatical features is of course a common rhetorical device employed by mod-

12

þér is preserved in Modern Icelandic as the (rarely used) second person nominative honorific pronoun while the Old Icelandic dual þit expanded to be used as the general second person nominative plural þið (Árnason 2005: 1568).

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561

ern authors of fiction, from Charles Dickens to Irvine Welsh (see Planchenault, Ch. 9, this volume). A similar example that is socio-pragmatically revealing is the variation between thou (thee, thine, thy, thyself) and you (ye, yours, your, yourself) second person singular pronouns in Early Modern English. As Crystal (1995: 71) explains, the historical antecedent to the Early Modern English pronominal system marked a number distinction in the second person, with thou as singular and you as plural.13 The number distinction began to blur in Middle English as thou and you developed a politeness distinction akin to French’s tu/vous and German’s du/Sie with thou used by higher status speakers in unequal power situations (and between lower status speakers) and you used by lower status speakers in unequal power situations (and between higher status speakers). This distinction lasted until both the politeness and number distinction levelled to you around the beginning of the eighteenth century. However, the variability between thou and you prior to the obsolescence of thou is useful for “interpreting the emotions of the characters, as well as their varying attitudes towards each other” in works of fiction from this period (Crystal 1995: 71). Indeed, Crystal (1995: 71) lists several examples from Shakespeare of characters varying their use of thou and you in correlation to the characters’ emotions and their attitudes toward their interlocutors. For example, when Hamlet first addresses the ghost in Act I, he uses thou “as is normal in addressing spirits” but switches to you once the ghost’s identity (his father, who demands the use of the form of respect) is confirmed (Crystal 1995: 71). Similarly, when King Lear first addresses Cordelia, his favourite daughter, his use of you indicates his “special respect” for her but once she refuses to exaggerate her love for him (as her sisters have just done) “he switches to an angry thy” emphasizing his higher status (Crystal 1995: 71). The field of historical pragmatics has also operationalized the special utility of fiction in the examination of change. Since Jucker (1995), there has developed an extensive literature on diachronic aspects of pragmatics. Much of this work has made use of corpora of textual data, which contains fiction among other sources of data, to study change in the pragmatic domain (inter alia Brinton 1996, 2008; Culpeper and Kytö 2010; Jucker and Kopaczyk 2017; Traugott 1995).14 However, other historical pragmatic work, stemming from the literary analysis tradition, You was historically the accusative plural form; ye was the nominative. The leveling of this distinction took place over approximately two hundred years, from the early fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century (see Nevalainen 2006: 563). 14 Jucker (p.c.) points out that most historical pragmatic research has not focused on “language change in the narrow sense” (in Jacobs and Jucker’s [1995: 11] terms pragmaphilology) and most work that is diachronically-comparative (in Jacobs and Jucker’s [1995: 13] terms diachronic pragmatics) does not particularly focus on fiction. Indeed, this latter point is applicable to most diachronically-comparative research. 13

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focuses specifically on fiction, which “provide[s] particularly valuable specimens of the language of the past” (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2015: 4). For example, Sell (1992) demonstrates the diachronic mutability of politeness, specifically within the (extratextual) interaction of authors of fiction and readers.15 As Sell (1992: 118) points out, the “politeness of literary texts, probably more than the politeness of any other type of language use, lends itself to diachronic study […] precisely [because] the responses of earlier readers have come down to us” in the form of criticism, review, and comments in letters, books, diaries etc. An examination of criticisms of and responses to the presentation and contents of T. S. Eliot’s (1922) The Waste Land shows a diachronic “soften[ing]” (Sell 1992: 126). What was once perceived as “outrageous” – and thus impolite – is viewed as a classic by modern readers and “[c]lassics seem polite” (Sell 1992: 120) regardless of whatever literary and poetic conventions and norms were flouted and criticized when first written.16 All types of textual records (letters, court transcripts, medical texts, recipes etc.) provide insight into the structure of older varieties of language, and thus can inform our understanding of language change. The examples given here highlight the detailed linguistic insights that it can offer the diachronically-oriented linguist. The creativity of authors of fiction through rhyming and word-play, the mimetic representation of character speech, and the interaction between author and reader provide multi-faceted sources of evidence for the study of language variation and change. We will now shift our focus away from written fiction to other forms of contemporary fiction as broadcast by mass media (through television, cinema and internet). We also shift the treatment of fiction, not as a source for data to evidence language change but as a potential factor in the process of change itself. 3.

Fiction as a reflection of the community or a driving force in change?

While linguists can be reasonably confident that fiction provides a wellspring of data for the analysis of variation and change, what remains unanswered is what role the fiction of media has on the innovation and diffusion of change. As dis One could also examine politeness from the perspective of interactions between characters within a text (see Jucker and Kopaczyk 2017 for an overview of research on historical politeness). 16 Sell (1992: 121) notes the particularly harsh early criticism of The Waste Land for, for example, the recasting of April away from its traditional joyful association to the “cruellest month”, for untranslated non-English quotations, alternation between “grand style and cockney slang”, and for endnotes that do not “succeed in explaining anything, being as muddled as incomplete” (Lucas 1923, cited in Sell 1992: 121). 15

Language change and fiction 

563

cussed at the beginning of this chapter, broadcast media (in particular television) has been popularly thought to contribute to new and ongoing linguistic change in the twentieth century. Stuart-Smith et al. (2013: 506), citing sociological and psychological research, observe that next to sleeping, watching television constitutes the “main leisure activity” for Americans, a fact likely applicable to many other western speech communities as well (Meeker 2014).17 In the contemporary context television shows such as the globally-popular American 1990s sitcom Friends reach a worldwide audience.18 Thus it is not surprising that scholars have looked to broadcast media for explanation of the rapid and global spread of new features of English. Sayers (2014) provides a typology of variationist methods used to investigate the link between globally ubiquitous innovations and media. He identifies four critical binary parameters: (1) the examination of one speech community or multiple geographically separated speech communities; (2) whether or not mass media is mentioned as a possible conduit for diffusion; (3) whether or not media texts are analyzed and compared to vernacular speech; (4) whether or not speaker engagement with media is considered. Sayers (2014: 193) argues that only studies which satisfy both the latter two parameters – studies which consider what Coupland (2009) calls mediation (or mediated speech) in comparison to vernacular speech and what Rubin, Perse and Powell (1985; and other media-effects researchers) call parasocial interaction (the one-sided emotional investment with fictional characters and celebrities)19 – can “enable[…] a significantly fuller interrogation of media influence”. However, very few studies in the current literature satisfy all these criteria together. Importantly, those that are at least comparative in nature and consider both vernacular and mediated speech do not converge on a firm consensus. In this section we review three studies. The first two satisfy Sayer’s third criteria (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005; Dion and Poplack 2007), i.e. they consider “what is on the media ‘shelf’” (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 505) in Eckert’s (2000: 395) sense. The third, Stuart-Smith et al. (2013), is a “tripartite exploration of vernacular speech data, mediation in media texts, and – most importantly –media engagement practices” (Sayers 2014: 193), thus satisfying Sayers’ key criteria. While live TV consumption has dropped in recent years there has been a concomitant proliferation of on-demand and online streaming services such as Netflix. Meeker (2014) reports that in 2014, Millenials report watching live TV 41% of the time while non-Millenials consume live TV 59% of the time. In contrast, 44% of television consumption for Millenials comes from online or on-demand streaming sources while these sources constitute only 24% for non-Millenials. 18 While international versions were typically dubbed, the English versions were at a minimum broadcast throughout the English-speaking world. 19 Parasocial interaction has been shown to be a far more important predictor of general media-influenced behaviour than exposure alone (Gunter 2000: 163, cited in Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 507). 17

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3.1.

Derek Denis and Sali A. Tagliamonte

Intensifiers in television (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005)

The advent of audio-visual recording technology and the rise of televised fiction has provided an important source of language data. While recordings allow us to be confident of the precise realization of linguistic variation (not having to rely on a scribe or author’s representation), the degree to which fiction is representative of the vernacular is very much a matter of debate. Tagliamonte and Roberts’ (2005: 280) explicit goal was to “test the viability of media-based data as a surrogate” of vernacular spoken data. If such data mirrors the spoken language, then televised media, particularly fictional programs that follow the same group of individuals over multiple television seasons would provide fruitful grounds for studying language change in real time. As we have discussed above, the criteria that Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005: 282) use for establishing that televised media is an “informative window on language change” is the presence of variability and orderly heterogeneity. Tagliamonte and Roberts’ (2005) test case is the American television show Friends. Friends, a sitcom that follows the lives of six young professionals in New York City, aired for ten seasons beginning in 1994 and maintained very high ratings throughout its run (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005: 281). More than ten years after its finale aired (May 6, 2004), it remains a pop-culture presence, airing in syndication and through online stream services such as Netflix. Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005) considered the use of intensifiers, adverbs that “boost or maximize” the meaning of the adjectives they modify. Intensifiers constitute a lexico-pragmatic sociolinguistic variable that has been in a continual state of change and recycling since Old English (Ito and Tagliamonte 2003; Méndez-Naya 2003; Mustanoja 1960; Tagliamonte 2008). The major variants in contemporary North American English are really, so, and very, as in (8), all from Friends (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005: 280, emphasis in original). (8) a. Oh, Janine, the really hot dancer girl. b. And this is so weird. c. Trust me, it was actually- it was very funny.

Really and so have both been observed to be on the rise in contemporary Englishes with very on the decline (see Ito and Tagliamonte 2003 on British English; Tagliamonte 2008 on Canadian English; D’Arcy 2015 on New Zealand English). Dozens of other variants permeate the variable context, some common, others much less so, as in (9a) and (9b) respectively, also from Friends (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005: 285, emphasis in original). (9) a. No, I wanna live with a super hot Australian dancer. b. I mean, isn’t that just kick-you-in-the-crotch, spit-on-your-neck fantastic?

To analyze the distribution of intensifiers, Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005) compiled a corpus of transcripts of the first eight seasons (aired 1994 to 2002). Fol-

Language change and fiction 

565

lowing previous analyses of intensifiers, the variable context was circumscribed to all adjectives, whether intensified or not (Ito and Tagliamonte 2003: 262–264). In total, over 9000 tokens of potentially intensifiable adjectives were analyzed over eight seasons. Of these, 22% of adjectives co-occurred with intensifiers. This rate was roughly the same rate as in Ito and Tagliamonte’s (2003) analysis of intensifiers in British English, represented by the York English Corpus of sociolinguistic interviewers (24%). However, it was much lower than the intensification rate in Canadian English, represented by the Toronto English Archive (36%) (Tagliamonte 2008). Given that the English of Friends (American English, New York City) is (grammatically, phonologically, geographically, and historically) more aligned with Toronto English than English in the northeastern UK, this may point to the relative conservative nature of linguistic variables in televised fiction. However, in this discussion we will consider only one dimension of variability, the variation in intensifier form, which is considered “the more important question” (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005: 287). Indeed, the Friends corpus exhibits extensive variation in intensifier use. Of the 1886 intensified adjectives, the proportions of so, really, and very are 44%, 25% and 14% respectively. Other variants account for the remaining 17% and range from 6% (pretty) to hapax legomena, single occurrences (e.g. 9b). This is a first indication of the validity of data from televised fiction for sociolinguistic analysis – consistency of form(s) to reports on vernacular usage. However, as discussed in Section 2.2, the other key feature is orderly heterogeneity (Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968). While variability pervades the Friends data, what is its nature: random or systematically constrained by internal and external factors familiar to sociolinguists? Figure 1, taken from Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005: 290), shows the frequency of intensification by the top three intensifiers by speaker sex and the emotional quality of the adjective. This perspective suggests that the variation is not random but orderly. Across the board, for both males and females, intensifiers are used more with emotional adjectives than emotionally-neutral adjectives (the exception is that females use very at the same rate for both). Furthermore, female speakers use a higher rate of the globally incoming forms really and so than males, consistent with Labov’s (2001: 292) observation that “women use higher frequencies of innovative forms than men do” in conditions of change from below, Principle 4. Thus, the Friends corpus demonstrates that televised media reflects the same kind of systemic patterning present in the spoken vernacular, just as Jankowski’s (2005) data shows for plays. The question now becomes, what is the direction of influence between broadcast media and the speech of everyday people? Indeed, if broadcast media does play a role in the spread of language change (i.e. if the influence flows from media to speaker), television shows with extensive global audiences would be prime candidates for the dissemination of linguistic innovation. We have just observed that Friends exhibits orderly heterogeneity with respect to the intensifiers system

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Derek Denis and Sali A. Tagliamonte

Figure 1. Distribution of intensifiers by sex and adjective quality in Friends. N = 508 so, 279 really, 156 very.

(Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005) making the case that this data can be usefully compared with “conventional speech data”. This is Sayers’ (2014: 193) first epistemological criterion for any study that seeks an answer to what role the media plays in language change. Table 2 displays the relative frequency of the three most common intensifying adverbs, so, really, and very, across data sets: the Friends corpus, Canadian English (Toronto) and British English (York) (Ito and Tagliamonte 2003; Tagliamonte 2008). The data from Toronto is given for the two age groups most comparable to the characters in Friends, individuals in their 20s and 30s. For each group the percent column represents the frequency of the relevant variant as a proportion of all intensified adjectives. Consider first the data from vernacular spoken registers. York English (on the far right) can be regarded as the most conservative (the interviews were conducted almost ten years before the Toronto data (1997) and these proportions combine speakers of all ages in the community). The next most conservative data would then be 30 year olds in Toronto and finally the 20 year olds in Toronto. Given this graded interpretation of these data sets several trends are apparent. First, both so and really appear to be on the rise. While British English and the Toronto 30 year olds have roughly similar rates of these two intensifiers, the frequencies for the Toronto 20 year olds is 7–8% higher. This increase is at the expense of very, which steadily declines from British English to the Toronto 30 year olds to the Toronto 20 year olds. The Friends data presents a nuance to this pattern. The most fre-

Language change and fiction  Table 2.

567

Frequency of top intensifiers (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005: 287–288; ­Tagliamonte 2008: 372)

 

Friends 1994–2002

Toronto English 2003–4 20 year olds

Toronto English 2003–4 30 year olds

York English 1996–7 All ages

Intensifier

N

%

N

%

N

%

N

%

so really

832 464

44.1 24.6

56 117

18.0 37.6

30 76

11.8 29.8

96 287

10.1 30.2

very

269

14.2

48

15.4

69

27.1

364

38.3

Others

321

17.0

90

28.9

80

31.4

203

21.3

 

950

 

Total

1886

 

311

 

255

quent form, at 44.1% is so, followed by really while the frequency of very is low. The heightened use of so marks the Friends data as most innovative of the four groups considered here. Evidence for the potential rapid recycling of intensifiers is also apparent. Within the telescoped time frame of these data sets, approximately 10 years, both really and so are increasing in vernacular speech while really has dropped in frequency in the mediated data at the expense of so. From this comparison it seems that mediated fiction is on the forefront of language change, potentially indicating a role for broadcast media in pushing forward current innovations. However, not all studies point to this conclusion. 3.2.

Quotatives in scripted media (Dion and Poplack 2007)

In a study design similar to Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005), Dion and Poplack (2007) consider the variable quotative system comparing vernacular speech from sociolinguistic interviews with mediated speech. Quotatives, which have been intensely studied in vernacular speech (Blyth, Recktenwald, and Wang 1990; Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009; Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2004, 2007; Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999), introduce direct speech or thought as in (10).20 (10) a. And now - nowadays the tooth-fairy gives out like five dollar bills, I’m like “I used to get a quarter, if I was lucky.” (Dion and Poplack 2007: 1, emphasis added) b. Doctor gives him an empty jar and says, “You bring this back tomorrow.” (Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2004: 494, emphasis in original)

20

Quotatives are of particular importance to the discussion of media innovations in that the be like quotative is almost always identified as one of the suite of globalizing features of English and is perhaps the most well-studied of such phenomena.

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Derek Denis and Sali A. Tagliamonte c. We thought, “Wow, this is really funny.” (Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2004: 494, emphasis in original)



The design of Dion and Poplack’s study is more complex than Tagliamonte and Roberts’ (2005) in that they consider vernacular speech from a community in which English is the majority language (Mainstream English; Oshawa-Whitby, Ontario, Canada) and a community in which English is a minority language (Minority English; Quebec City and Montreal, Quebec, Canada where French is the majority language). They also bring into the comparison mediated speech from both scripted (television and movies) and unscripted (interviewers with musicians aired on a Canadian music television channel) sources. This permits a four-way comparison between television speech and vernacular speech. Table 3 shows Dion and Poplack’s (2007) results for the distribution of the top quotative variants by the source of the data. Table 3.

Distribution of quotative variants according to the type of data (Dion and Poplack 2007: 2) Mediated Speech

 

Scripted

Variant

N

%

be like say zero go Others

8 125 44 3 33

3.8 58.7 20.7 1.4 15.5

Total

213

 

Vernacular Speech Unscripted

Minority

N

%

N

%

N

%

35.6 40.0 11.4 5.4 8.1

1266 1111 552 213 224

37.6 33.0 16.4 6.3 6.7

202 87 47 9 25

54.6 23.5 12.7 2.4 6.8

 

3366

 

370

 

53 59 17 8 12 149

Majority

The most frequent quotative variant in mediated speech is the standard, indeed conservative variant, say, compare 58.7%/40.0% to 33.0%/23.5%. For vernacular speech, the innovative be like is in the lead for both localities with the majority English-speaking community in the lead.21 While unscripted mediated speech does not appear to be too far behind the trend with more than two thirds of tokens realized as be like, the innovative variant hardly makes a dent in the distribution of variants for scripted media at only 3.8 percent. Dion and Poplack (2007: 1) conclude that be like is too infrequent in mediated speech “to serve as a model” for the otherwise isolated minority English communities.

21

More recent data from the Canadian context shows that be like has subsequently risen in frequency, potentially having reached a saturation point at around eighty percent (Gardner et al. 2013).

Language change and fiction 

569

The findings in Table 3 are quite different from those in Table 2. Whereas Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005) found their mediated data to be on the forefront of innovation with respect to the use of intensifiers, Dion and Poplack (2007) find that mediated speech, and especially scripted television and movies, lags substantially behind spontaneous vernacular speech (in both majority and minority contexts). Given these antithetic results we cannot make a definitive statement about the role of media in the spread of change. However, we have yet to consider studies that compare mediated data to vernacular data and also take into account the parasocial interaction between speakers in the real world and the media personalities and programs. We now turn to a review of Stuart-Smith et al. (2013), to date the only study that takes up Sayers’ (2014) call for accountability to parasocial interaction. 3.3.

Glaswegian and Cockney and EastEnders (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013)

The study that has tackled the question of the influence of broadcast media on language change with the most empirical force is Stuart-Smith et al. (2013). They consider the use of two innovations in both mediated speech and vernacular speech along with the parasocial engagement of the participants with media.22 The speech community is Glasgow, Scotland and the data comprise adolescents divided into three age groups (10–11, 12–13, and 14–15 year olds) along with a comparison group of adults (age 40+) from the same socio-economic neighbourhoods (low mobility urban wards). The innovative features considered are traditionally associated with the English of working class, south-east London (i.e. ‘Cockney’): TH-Fronting (the innovative realization of /θ/ as [f] in words such as think, bath varying with [θ] and local nonstandard [h]) and L-Vocalization (the vocalic realization of coda /l/ in words such as milk, people varying with [l] or [ɫ]). These features, among others, have been noted to be diffusing from the south of England to urban areas and then into the north where they are currently on the rise in Glasgow (Foulkes and Docherty 1999, 2001; Kerswill 2003; Trudgill 1986). These are the bundle of features that Williams and Kerswill (1999) have called UK ‘youth norms’. For Glaswegian adolescents, they index not ‘posh/middle-class’ but are associated with local nonstandard features (Stuart-Smith et al. 2007; Trudgill 1986). While sporadic use of these features has been reported in earlier studies of Scottish English, Stuart-Smith et al. (2013: 501) observe that “we seem to be witnessing the sharp ascent of the S-curve of two changes already in progress”. The critical question is what drives this recent rapid acceleration? Who (or what) are the agents of change, particularly for relatively immobile, adolescent, working-class

22

This paper is one of many that report on results of the Glasgow Media Project (Stuart-Smith 2006, 2011; Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2010; Stuart-Smith et al. in press).

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Glaswegians who have little contact with dialects beyond their own speech communities (i.e. they are unlikely innovators/early adopters of London-based features)? The inevitable hypothesis is that contact with broadcast media containing south-east London speech contributes to the diffusion of these features. To investigate this question Stuart-Smith et al. (2013) designed a singular study encompassing two key perspectives: (1) a comparison of vernacular Glaswegian speech data23 with mediated speech in the eminently popular soap-opera based in south-east London, EastEnders (branded ‘media-Cockney’); and, (2) inclusion of factors that measure the psychological (parasocial) engagement of the adolescent speakers with the program (among other potential factors in the diffusion of change) in a large regression analysis. Considering just the proportional frequency of occurrence of the innovative variants in the vernacular speech data, it is clear that they are increasing: adult speakers have only a marginal rate of innovative TH-fronting in spontaneous speech (1.5%), while this variant accounts for more than a third for adolescents (34.5%). While the adult/adolescent contrast is less marked, innovative L-vocalization in spontaneous speech accounts for 17.4% of adult realizations of coda /l/, while for adolescents the innovative variant accounts for 25.8% (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 512–513). These apparent time trends are further confirmed with a realtime comparison. However, a comparison of TH-fronting between spontaneous Glaswegian speech and ‘media-Cockney’ demonstrates that the Glaswegian speakers use more of the innovative variant in conversational speech than in the mediated speech (cf. Dion and Poplack 2007 on be like). This is particularly true for females who are on par with males in Glasgow but who hardly use the [f] variant in the mediated speech. In fact, the rate of use of the innovative feature in the mediated speech is strikingly low compared to conversational speech in London (Cheshire et al. 2008; Holmes 2010), just as be like accounted for little of the variant pool in Dion and Poplack’s (2007) scripted media data in comparison to both the English-majority community and the English-minority community. Moreover, the linguistic constraints on the variation (i.e. the favouring and disfavouring effect of phonological 23

Stuart-Smith et al. (2013) consider both spontaneous conversational speech and wordlist data. Here we report on only the conversational speech results but note that the wordlist data showed the same pattern as conversational speech with respect to the role of parasocial engagement. However, in comparison with conversational speech and wordlist data, the innovative variants exhibited an “inverted stylistic” pattern (Stuart-Smith 2014: 254). The innovative variants occurred more frequently in the wordlist task than spontaneous speech. The authors argue that such a pattern arises because the local, non-standard variants (e.g. [h] for /θ/ [h]ink) are disfavoured as attention-tospeech increases which results in a gap. This gap is filled by the innovative, rather than standard, variant.

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environment) are different with Glaswegian speech showing a “thoroughly local pattern[…]” distinct from the ‘media-Cockney’ (and south-east London generally) (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 515–516). The distance between the apparent epicenter of these diffusing innovations (London) and Glasgow, along with the relative (social, cultural and geographic) isolation of the Glaswegian adolescents still raises a critical question: how did these innovative features arrive in the speech community (or at least how was the rapid uptake triggered)? To examine the potential role of media, Stuart-Smith et al. (2013) construct a sophisticated regression model, making use of data gleaned from participant observation, formal interviews with each participant and a structured questionnaire that each participant completed. The model considers a multitude of internal and external predictors. The external predictors each belong to one of eight thematic categories that each potentially influence linguistic behaviour and in particular may play a role in the diffusion/adoption of change: dialect contact, attitudes to other accents, social practices, television, film, music, computing, and sports. Using a step-down model comparison technique (cf. Tagliamonte 2006), predictors from each of these categories were winnowed down to the most predictive which were then passed on to a final multifactorial model for each feature. The best model for TH-fronting included the following predictors (which reach at least a significance threshold of 5%): phonological environment (word-final vs. non-word-final position), contact with relatives in North England, reporting EastEnders as favourite program,24 watching Coronation Street, and percent of interview spent discussing TV. The model is presented in Table 4. Table 4.

Logistic regression model for [f] for (θ) in conversations (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 525); application value = innovative [f] (vs. all other realizations)

Predictor

EXP(β)

Magnitude

word-final position contact with relatives in North England EastEnders is favourite program watch Coronation Street % talking about TV in conversation intercept N Nagelkerke R2

10.67 0.91 1.38 0.67 0.97 0.97 1327 0.17

1067% –110% 138% –150% –103%

24

 

Importantly, this is in contrast with simply reporting watching the program. In essence, this predictor is a measure of parasocial engagement.

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The second column presents the exponentiated coefficients of the model (bound by 0 and positive infinity with coefficients above 1 favouring the application value and coefficients below 1 disfavouring) and the third column converts these coefficients into proportional change. The larger the absolute magnitude the stronger the effect; a positive change indicates a favouring of the application value ([f]) and a negative change disfavours the application value. The number of tokens and Nagelkerke R2 (a measure of goodness of fit of the model) are also reported. The predictor with the largest effect is the internal factor (with the local, Glaswegian pattern of word-final position highly favouring [f]). The only other predictor that positively correlates with innovative [f] is whether or not the speaker named EastEnders as their favourite program. If speakers reported watching Coronation Street (a rival program that takes place around Manchester and contains an entirely different mediated-dialect) or if they reported contact with relatives in North England, the probability of using innovative [f] decreases. The percentage of the interview that was spent discussing TV also negatively correlated with the innovative variant, though the effect size is small. Next, consider the best model for L-vocalization in Table 5. The significant predictors here are phonological environment (postconsonantal position vs. prepausal or preconsonantal), personal clothing choice (the modification of school uniforms to approximate Glasgow street style), naming EastEnders as favourite program, and percent talking about TV in the interview. Table 5.

Logistic regression model for [V] for (l) in conversations (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 526); application value = innovative [V] (vs. all other realizations)

Predictor

EXP(β)

Magnitude

post consonantal position personal clothing choice EastEnders is favourite program % talking about TV in conversation intercept N Nagelkerke R2

5.55 2.82 1.65 0.94 0.19 1015 0.17

555% 282% 165% –106%

 

Once again, the internal factor shows the greatest magnitude of effect and naming EastEnders as a favourite program is positively correlated with the innovative realization of coda (l). Additionally, the index of anti-authority, local, social practices (the modification of school uniforms) also positively correlated with [V] of (l).25 In

25

This factor was also significant in the model for TH-fronting from the wordlist data (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 524).

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fact, this effect has a larger magnitude than the parasocial engagement predictor. The authors take this as confirmation that for Glaswegian adolescents these features are indeed associated with localness, youth, and urban toughness, as has been reported elsewhere in the UK (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 527). Thus, Stuart-Smith et al. (2013) conclude that parasocial engagement with media is one among many factors in the diffusion of innovations consistent with other media-effects studies. The overwhelming effect of the internal constraints for both factors evidences the “gradual but persistent deep rooting into the linguistic system” of these features (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 526). While parasocial engagement is neither a “necessary nor sufficient” influence for triggering change (Stuart-Smith 2014: 256; Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 531),26 it is a significant predictor orthogonal to other extralinguistic effects.27 Therefore, although these innovations were present in the extant Glaswegian grammar prior to the airing of EastEnders (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 530),28 an array of new social meanings (linked with their supralocal indexical associations which are perhaps salient in mediated speech) might have been an accelerant of their local propagation (cf. Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2007 and Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009 on be like; Milroy 2007).29 We now consider this nuanced role for broadcast media in language change in more detail. 4.

Linguistic change and the broadcast media?

What combination of properties makes a linguistic feature available for diffusion from ‘off the shelf’? (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013: 530)? Most scholars agree that lexical items and lexicalized expressions are available for diffusion via media (Chambers 1993; Trudgill 1986). Chambers (1993: 139) argues that “the only obvious effect of mass communication on dialect is the diffusion of catch phrases”. Such catch phrases include Sylvester the Cat’s ‘sufferin’ succotash’, Homer Simpson’s ‘d’oh’, Roger and Ebert’s ‘two thumbs up’, Paris Hilton’s ‘that’s hot’, Donald Stuart-Smith (2014: 256) cites work by Kuhl, Tsao, and Liu (2003) that suggests that child acquisition of phonological contrasts cannot proceed through televised exposure alone and requires face-to-face interaction. 27 For example, shared social practices do not result in shared likelihood of parasocial engagement. 28 Tagliamonte (2014: 225–226) cautions researchers to be sensitive to comparisons between mediated speech and vernacular speech. If one were to investigate the role of media on the onset of be like, the only media that would be appropriate would be that available at the time of the inception of the innovation. 29 Labov (2001: 462): “acceleration of linguistic change logically begins when the incipient change is attached to or is associated with a particular style or social group”. 26

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Trump’s ‘you’re fired’, and Seinfeld’s ‘yada yada yada’, among many others. However, Chambers (1993: 139) suggests that such expressions merely “belong for the moment of their currency to the most superficial linguistic level” (as is evident with the examples just listed, innovating and obsolescing within a matter of years). While popular and widely-diffused catch phrases may be “ephemeral” (Chambers 1993: 139), there is no denying that the conduit of their diffusion was the broadcast media. Thus, the first property of what can be taken off the media shelf is linguistically superficial items such as words and expressions. Indeed, while Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005: 281) find that the media is a potential source for changes in the intensifier system of English, they also note that these features are “subject to fashion” (Peters 1994: 271) just as Chambers’ (1993) catch phrases are. We suggest that certain types of sound change can also diffuse this way. Unconditioned phonemic shifts seem to be ripe for adoption (or at least influence) through the media as demonstrated by Stuart-Smith et al. (2013). Sound change with linguistic complexity (a conditioned change, a change in the underlying phonemic contrasts in the phonological inventory or a change subject to probabilistic constraints on variation), are likely not easily diffused via the media, at least not without ‘imperfection’ in the conditioning (as Stuart-Smith et al. 2013 show for TH-fronting; see also Labov 2007). In defining this criterion, we are explicitly arguing in favour of Milroy’s (2007) distinction between ‘off the shelf’ and ‘under the counter’ changes. Milroy (2007) identifies several distinguishing properties of these kinds of changes, chiefly their linguistic complexity and their (supralocal) social meaning. These qualities reflect their availability for diffusion. Milroy (2007: 154) does not strictly associate ‘off the shelf’ changes with diffusion through broadcast media (nor does she suggest that such changes are the result of modern globalization). Instead she suggests that ‘off the shelf’ changes have properties that would allow them to be diffused through broadcast media. First, ‘off the shelf’ changes have little or no linguistic complexity (Milroy cites T-glottalization and L-vocalization) while ‘under the counter’ changes involve features which exhibit complex constraints (e.g. chain shifts, mergers, features constrained by a variable grammar). The latter require sustained local contact and face-to-face interaction to spread beyond the local. They do not diffuse (from media or otherwise) into spoken vernaculars without ‘imperfect’ replication (Labov 2007) and/or localization of constraints (Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009; see also Britain 2002; Meyerhoff and Niedzielski 2003). However, ‘off the shelf’ kinds of changes may indeed be available for mediated diffusion because they lack such complexity, just as we observed above. Second, Milroy (2007: 152) notes that ‘off the shelf’ changes are “relatively freely available to appropriate social actors as a stylistic/social resource”. We follow Milroy and suggest that features that have obvious supralocal social indexi-

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cality that is being represented in the media are more likely to be diffused from the media precisely due to their (local) usefulness. Indeed, Milroy (2007: 154–155) suggests a possible role for the media in the diffusion of ‘off the shelf’ changes: “the socially indexical characteristics of real speakers may be attributed to fictional speakers portrayed in broadcast or print media, which may in turn recursively constitute further sources of influence”. In other words, these social indexes are not only present in broadcast media, but are arguably fostered there and are recycled back into the speech community. Consider the following cases of change that seem to follow Milroy’s (2007) prediction. Kiesling (2004) argues that the term of address dude, typical in the speech of young North American males, indexes a stance of ‘cool solidarity’, simultaneously functioning to indicate both male-male camaraderie and casual non-intimacy. Within the dominant North American culture, which sanctions both hegemonic masculinity and heterosexism, dude is particularly useful for young men as its social meaning is defined “within this narrow range” delimited by both (Kiesling 2004: 283). Critically, Kiesling (2004: 288–289, 299) argues that this supralocal indexicality (and potentially its diffusion) was enhanced by its association with a particular character type found in the fiction of the 1980s and early 1990s – the “do-nothing, class-cutting, stoned surfer”, as represented by Jeff Spicoli of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Bill and Ted of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). Kiesling (2004: 289), borrowing from Eckert (2000), identifies these characters as ‘media linguistic icons’ that represented an archetypical identity type common to the lived experiences of North American youths. As icons, these characters represented an attractive ideal for young nonconformist males who wished to differentiate themselves from the dominant ‘yuppie consumerism’ of the 1980s (Kiesling 2004: 299). Among other ways of emulating these characters, young men adopted features of their speech, including dude. As Kiesling (2004) puts it: Many young men glorified Spicoli, especially his nonchalant blindness to authority and hierarchical division; in the early 1980s we often spoke with Spicoli’s voice. At first these quotes were only in stylized situations where we quoted from the movie, but eventually many of the features of Spicoli’s speech, especially dude, became commonplace as we endeavored to emulate the stance Spicoli takes toward the world. (Kiesling 2004: 289)

In other words, there was a gap in the social-indexical space for a linguistic feature that represented the new counterculture of the 1980s; dude was widely broadcast as associated with icons of this counterculture and was thus widely adopted.30

30

This is similar to the widespread adoption of words for new products or concepts. A semantic gap is present and that gap is filled by whatever is widely used. This does not preclude regional or idiolectal variation (cf. inter-speaker variation with respect to USB stick, USB key, flash drive, memory stick etc.).

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Denis (2013) has similarly argued that ‘media linguistic icons’ play a critical role in the wide diffusion of new social meanings (and potentially new features) but that sometimes these icons can be locally, rather than supralocally interpreted. In the early 21st century, the discourse marker eh has a range of social meanings associated with it. Within the broader North American context the form is associated with Canadian English and is widely represented in American television, with seemingly every Canadian character using eh or being taunted by an American character as an eh user (see South Park, Kroll Show, How I Met Your Mother, The Simpsons among many others). Denis (2013) argues that the spread of this indexical meaning of eh throughout the United States can be traced to its use by Bob and Doug McKenzie from the American sketch-comedy show SCTV. Bob and Doug are two eh-using, plaid-wearing, beer-drinking, rural, working-class Canadian brothers who host a talk show, The Great White North, in which they discuss very ‘Canadian’ topics such as ‘how to get a free two-four of beer’,31 ‘Quebec separatism and back bacon’, and ‘backpacking with beer on ski trips’. SCTV aired in both the United States and Canada, and while Bob and Doug, and by association eh, came to index ‘Canadian’ within the United States, a different meaning developed within Canada. Because Bob and Doug were not attractive ideals for the majority of Canadians, the characters and eh came to index a different identity type – the subset of Canadians which Bob and Doug represented – working class, rural male, or in Canadian vernacular usage ‘hoser’.32 As such, eh became widely available as a valuable stylistic resource, particularly in reflexive performance, whether as an index for ‘Canadian’ in the United States or for ‘hoser’ in Canada. In sum, the phonological variants sweeping the UK, including TH-fronting, and L-vocalization (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013) and iconic words such as dude and eh are all features that are portrayed in the media with an indexical meaning (‘youth/not posh/urban’, ‘cool solidarity’, ‘Canadian/hoser’) that is valuable to speakers either in their own constructions of what Eckert (2008) calls the ‘bricolage’ of identity or in reflexive performance of others’ identities (cf. Androutsopoulos 2001). The key facts are that these features are easily adopted without sustained face-to-face contact or have stylistic utility that makes them particularly prone to being picked up ‘off the media shelf’.

31 32

A ‘two-four’ is the Canadian English term for a case of twenty-four bottles of beer. The origin of the term hoser is not clear but it is roughly the Canadian word for what we might call ‘the lower-class (rural) other’ (cf. redneck, white trash [US], teuchter, ned [Scotland], bogan [Australia], skeet [Newfoundland]).

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5. Conclusion We have now surveyed several studies that offer key evidence for understanding the connection between language change and fiction. Fiction provides important data to historical linguistics for understanding language change in texts (e.g. letters, court transcripts, etc.). We have also argued that fiction proves to be particularly valuable for the historical pragmatic and historical sociolinguistic investigation of change because fiction reflects the ordered heterogeneity of language and the socio-pragmatic indexicality of that heterogeneity. We then addressed what Eckert (2003) calls the ‘elephant in the room’: what is the influence of broadcast media fiction on vernacular usage? We began with the well-known status quo in variationist sociolinguistics which holds that face-to-face interaction is required for linguistic change. Indeed, even with broadcast media everywhere in modern life there is still little evidence that the language of broadcast media can initiate or stop a linguistic change in progress. However, we have argued that certain types of linguistic change are actually highly prone to the influence of mediated language and that it does have an important impact on the acceleration of diffusion. The most compelling evidence available suggests that surface level lexical items, expressions and unconditioned sound changes, especially those which index locally useful social meanings, can spread in speech communities through the media conduit. However, television, the Internet and the gamut of new fictionalized varieties of media that lie at their intersection offer tantalizing new types of mediated interaction; the synchronic online discussion of episodes and characters via social media with other audience members (and in some cases even with cast members) and the blurring of characters and audiences in multiplayer video gaming are two examples from the frontier of new media. As media-based interactions and computer-mediated speech communities develop and as the experience of being in the audience becomes more social and less parasocial, the possibility exists for new pathways of diffusion to emerge and new sources of linguistic influence to develop. Labov’s (2001: 274) Principle 3, involving change from above, targets changes that come from outside the speech community through face-to-face contact; however linguistic interactions around the globe are becoming increasingly mediated and variegated in style and register. Today, the boundary between real and mediated interaction are becoming increasingly fuzzy and a whole new dimension of diffusion may be emerging. As new ways of communicating and new ways of interacting with media become increasingly pervasive these frontiers of fiction will become a linguist’s bounty.

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Lucas, Frank Laurence 1923, November 3  The Waste Land. New Statesman [Review]. 116–118. Meeker, Mary 2014 Internet trends 2014. Paper presented at Code Conference, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA, May 28. http://www.kpcb.com/blog/2014-internet-trends Méndez-Naya, Belén 2003 Intensifiers and grammaticalization: The case of swiþe. English Studies 84(4): 372–391. Meyerhoff, Miriam and Nancy Niedzielski 2003 The globalization of vernacular variation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4): 534–555. Milroy, Lesley 2007 Off the shelf or under the counter? On the social dynamics of sound changes. In: Christopher Cain and Geoffory Russom (eds.), Studies in the History of the English Language, Volume 3, 149–172. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Minkova, Donka 2014 A Historical Phonology of English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960 A Middle English Syntax. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevalainen, Terttu 2006 Historical sociolinguistics and language change. In: Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds.), The Handbook of The History of English, 558–588. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Peters, Hans 1994 Degree adverbs in Early Modern English. In: Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Studies in Early Modern English, 269–288. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Poplack, Shana and Anne St-Amand 2007 A real-time window on 19th century vernacular French: The Récits du français québécois d’autrefois. Language in Society 36(5): 707–734. Ringe, Donald 2006 From Proto-Indo-Europan to Proto-Germanic. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Rubin, Alan M., Elizabeth M. Perse and Robert A. Powell 1985 Loneliness, parasocial interaction, and local television news viewing. Human Communication Research 12(2): 155–180. Sayers, Dave 2014 The mediated innovation model: A framework for researching media influence in language change. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2): 185–212. Schneider, Edgar 2002 Investigating variation and change in written documents. In: J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schillings-Estes (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 67–96. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Sell, Roger D. 1992 Literary texts and diachronic aspects of politeness. In: Richard J. Watts, Sachiko Ide, and Konrad Ehlich (eds.), Politeness in Language: Studies in Its History, Theory and Practice, 109–129. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Standford, Lois M. and Sarah Tsiang-Starcevic 1998 Discourse functions as a significant variable in do-support alternation in Shakespeare’s English. LACUS Forum 24: http://www.lacus.org/volumes/24 Stuart-Smith, Jane 2006 The influence of media on language. In: Carmen Llamas, Louise Mullany and Peter Stockwell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics, 140– 148. London: Routledge. Stuart-Smith, Jane 2011 The view from the couch: Changing perspectives on the role of the television in changing language ideologies and use. In: Tore Kristiansen and Nikolas Coupland (eds.), Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe, 223–239. Oslo: Novus. Stuart-Smith, Jane 2014 No longer the elephant in the room. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2): 250– 261. Stuart-Smith, Jane, Gwilym Pryce, Claire Timmins and Barrie Gunter 2013 Television can also be a factor in language change: Evidence from an urban dialect. Language 89(3): 501–536. Stuart-Smith, Jane and Claire Timmins 2010 The role of the individual in language variation and change. In: Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt (eds.), Language and Identities, 39–54. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins, Gwilym Pryce and Barrie Gunter in press Mediating the Local: The Role of Television for a Changing Urban Vernacular. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins and Fiona Tweedie 2007 ‘Talkin Jockney?’: Accent change in Glaswegian. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(2): 221–261. Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker 2015 Twenty years of historical pragmatics: Origins developments and changing thought styles. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 16(1): 1–24. Tagliamonte, Sali A 2003 “Every place has a different toll”: Determinants of grammatical variation in cross-variety perspective. In: Günter Rhodenberg and Britta Mondorf (eds.), Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English, 531–554. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2006 Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2008 So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Canadian English. English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 361–394. Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2014 Situating media influence in sociolinguistic context. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2): 223–232. Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Alexandra D’Arcy 2004 He’s like, she’s like: The quotative system in Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(4): 493–519.

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Bionotes   Michael Adams is Provost Professor of English Language and Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he teaches courses on language attitudes, dictionaries, and World Englishes, among others. He has written, edited, co-written, or co-edited eight books, including Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon (2003), Slang: The People’s Poetry (2009), and In Praise of Profanity (2016). He is also editor of From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (2011). He was for some time editor of Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America and recently retired as editor of the quarterly journal American Speech. He is currently writing books about the Dictionary of American English and the Dictionary of American Regional English. Monika Bednarek is Associate Professor in Linguistics at The University of Sydney, Australia. She works on language use in the mass media, with particular interests in news (Evaluation in Media Discourse, 2006; News Discourse, 2012, with co-author Helen Caple) and television series (The Language of Fictional Television, 2010; Telecinematic Discourse, 2011, with co-editors Roberta Piazza and Fabio Rossi). She is currently working on a corpus linguistic project on television dialogue, analyzing the Sydney Corpus of TV Dialogue. Another research interest concerns the relationship between language and emotion (Emotion Talk Across Corpora, 2008). Wolfram Bublitz is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Augsburg, Germany. He received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg and his habilitation from the University of Trier, Germany. He has also been Full Professor at the University of Braunschweig (Germany), Exchange Professor at Northern Illinois University (USA) and Visiting Professor at the Universities of Pittsburgh (USA) and Hamburg (Germany). His research interests concern most areas of text analysis, (constructivist) pragmatics and CMC. His (edited) books include The Pragmatics of Quoting Now and Then (with J. Arendholz and M. Kirner-Ludwig, 2015), Foundations of Pragmatics (with N. Norrick, 2011), Englische Pragmatik (2nd ed., 2009), Metapragmatics in Use (with A. Hübler, 2007), Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse (with U. Lenk, E. Ventola, 1999). Beatrix Busse is Professor of English Linguistics at Heidelberg University. Her research interests include the history of English, English historical linguistics and Shakespeare studies (Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare,

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Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2006), stylistics and corpus linguistics (Dan McIntyre and Beatrix Busse (eds), Language and Style. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). She is the reviews editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. One of her current research projects is about patterns of discursive place-making in Brooklyn, New York. Jonathan Culpeper is Professor of English Language and Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. His work spans pragmatics, stylistics and the history of English, and his major publications include Language and Characterisation in Plays and Other Texts (2001, Longman), Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing (2010, CUP; co-authored with Merja Kytö), and Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence (2011, CUP). He is currently leading the Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language project, which will provide evidence-based and contextualised accounts of Shakespeare’s language, insights into what Shakespeare’s language meant to his contemporaries, and the linguistic thumbprints of characters, plays, themes and more. Derek Denis is Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research considers the mechanisms of actuation and transition in language change both with respect to the internal architecture of the language faculty and the social and sociohistorical context in which changes are embedded. Much of this work, including publications in Language and American Speech considers innovation and the diffusion of change in Canadian English. Marta Dynel is Associate Professor in the Department of Pragmatics at the University of Łódź. Her research interests are primarily in pragmatic and cognitive mechanisms of humour, neo-Gricean pragmatics, the pragmatics of interaction, (im)politeness theory, the philosophy of overt and covert untruthfulness (irony and deception), as well as the methodology of research on film discourse. She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes, contributing over 60 articles in the space of the past 10 years. She also authored Humorous Garden-Paths: A Pragmatic-Cognitive Study (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009) and edited The Pragmatics of Humour across Discourse Domains (John Benjamins, 2011), Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory (John Benjamins, 2013), as well as Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions (with Jan Chovanec, John Benjamins, 2015). Carolina Fernandez-Quintanilla is currently finishing her PhD in Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, where she works as Associate Lecturer. Her doctoral research is an empirical con-

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tribution to the study of empathy with characters (narrative empathy) from a linguistic-stylistic perspective. She is a member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL). Janet Giltrow is Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Taking rhetorical and linguistic approaches to discourse studies, she has published on literary and non-literary stylistics; genre theory; ideologies of language; law and language; emerging genres and new technologies; and writing in the research genres, including two textbooks (Academic Writing: Writing and Reading in the Disciplines, 3rd ed. 2001; Introduction to Academic Writing, 3rd ed. 2014). Marie-Noëlle Guillot is a Senior Lecturer in French, Linguistics and Translation Studies at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, in the UK. Her research in audiovisual translation (AVT) and cross-cultural pragmatics has focused on questions of cross-cultural representation in film subtitling, a question she has also explored in museum translation. She was the main organiser of the Cross-cultural Pragmatics at a Crossroads conference series at the UEA – ‘Speech Frames and Cultural Perception’ (2006), ‘Linguistic and Cultural Representation across Media’ (2011), ‘Impact: Making a Difference in Intercultural Communication’ (2013) and guest-edited the special issues of research journals that arose from each (Journal of French Language Studies 20.1, 2010; Language and Intercultural Communication 12(4), 2012; Multilingua 34(6), fc. 2016). She is the principal investigator of a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded network project to run March 2015-September 2016, entitled Tapping the Power of Foreign Language Films: Audiovisual Translation as Cross-cultural Mediation (grant AH/N007026/1). Christian R. Hoffmann is senior lecturer for English Linguistics at the University of Augsburg, Germany. He has worked on narratives in old and new media (Narratives revisited, 2011) as well as on the pragmatics of digital communication (Meaning and interaction in blogs, 2013). Currently, Christian Hoffmann is co-editing de Gruyter’s eleventh instalment of the handbook of pragmatics series (The Pragmatics of Social Media). He is also editing a collective volume describing new trends in the pragmatics of telecinematic discourse. His research efforts are largely devoted to compiling a comprehensive, cross-generic corpus of annotated television transcripts, while writing a monograph on the pragmatics of film practice (How to Do Things with Films). Andreas H. Jucker is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich and currently also Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Previously he taught at the Justus Liebig University, Giessen. His current research interests

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include historical pragmatics, politeness theory, speech act theory, and the grammar and history of English. His recent publications include Handbook of Historical Pragmatics (Mouton, 2010) co-edited with Irma Taavitsainen, Communicating Early English Manuscripts (Cambridge University Press, 2011) co-edited with Päivi Pahta, English Historical Pragmatics (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) co-authored with Irma Taavitsainen, Communities of Practice in the History of English (Benjamins, 2013) co-edited with Joanna Kopaczyk and Diachronic Corpus Pragmatics (Benjamins, 2014) co-edited with Irma Taavitsainen and Jukka Tuominen. Currently he is working on a large-scale study of politeness in the history of English. Urszula Kizelbach is Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Culture at the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She specializes in literary pragmatics, in particular the pragmatic analysis of Shakespearean drama. She is a contributor to the volume Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance published in 2013 by Palgrave. She is Associate Editor of Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, a quarterly journal issued by the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University. She published a book on power in politics in Shakespeare’s chronicle plays viewed from the perspective of sociological role-theory and linguistic politeness and impoliteness titled The Pragmatics of Early Modern Politics: Power and Kingship in Shakespeare’s History Plays, which was published by Rodopi/Brill in 2014. Her research interests have recently focussed more strongly on historical pragmatics and stylistics. Daniela Landert is a post-doctoral researcher in English linguistics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research interests include historical pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, stance, mass media communication and computer-mediated communication. She is currently working on a project in historical corpus pragmatics, in which she studies epistemic and evidential stance in Early Modern English. In this project, she investigates the context-dependency of stance expressions on the basis of several Early Modern English corpora and she explores new methods for analysing pragmatic meaning in corpora. Previously, she worked on public and private aspects of mass media communication. As part of this research, she developed a model that differentiates and integrates various dimensions of personalisation in online news (Personalisation in Mass Media Communication, 2014). Andreas Langlotz is Privatdozent (Reader) in English and General Linguistics at the University of Basel, Switzerland and he teaches English and German at a secondary school. His research interests include cognitive linguistics, interpersonal pragmatics, verbal humour, conflict talk, language and emotion and phraseology.

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He is the author of the monographs Idiomatic Creativity (John Benjamins, 2006) and Creating Social Orientation Through Language (John Benjamins, 2015). With Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet he has published the edited volume Emotion, Affect, Sentiment: The Language and Aesthetics of Feeling (Narr, 2015). Recently, he has been exploring the interconnections between communication and emotion in relational work in close collaboration with Miriam A. Locher. Miriam A. Locher is Professor of the Linguistics of English at the University of Basel, Switzerland. In her work she combines an interest in interpersonal pragmatics, relational work, (im)politeness, and advice-giving in health and CMC contexts. Her monographs are Power and Politeness in Action (2004), Advice Online (2006) and Reflective Writing in Medical Practice (2017). Her edited work includes Impoliteness in Language (2008, with D. Bousfield), Standards and Norms of the English Language (2008, with J. Strässler), Interpersonal Pragmatics (2010, with S. Graham), Teaching and Learning (Im)politeness (2015, with B. Pizziconi) and Narrative Matters across Disciplines in Medical Contexts (2015, with F. Gygax) as well as special issues on CMC and politeness. She is currently working on an SNF project on Language and Health Online and on the connection between emotional display and relational work with A. Langlotz. Thomas C. Messerli is a research and teaching assistant at the University of Basel, Switzerland, where he is writing his doctoral thesis on repetition and humour in telecinematic discourse. He has an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Zürich (thesis on the dubbing of humour in the sitcom The Big Bang Theory from English to German), and an M.A. in Film Studies from the Réseau Cinéma CH (Universities of Zürich and Lausanne, thesis on Hollywood adaptations of Japanese horror films). His current research interests are in telecinematic discourse, and in humour research – with a particular focus on the interface between humour and repetition. Gaëlle Planchenault is an Associate Professor in French Linguistics and Culture at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. As a result of an education both in Film Studies and in Linguistics, her work is defined by an approach that is resolutely interdisciplinary. In her research, she examines linguistic practices in films in order to study the language ideologies that they point out, as well as their role in sustaining beliefs, attitudes and prejudices towards social groups. She has published on subtitling and dubbing in French, on multilingualism in French cinema (in Polyglot cinema: Migration and transcultural narration in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, 2011), on accented voices in French films (in Multilingua). Her last book focuses on the performances of social, ethnic or gendered voices in the media (such as films and the internet) as sites of linguistic tension and negotiation (Voices in the Media: Performing French Linguistic Otherness, Bloomsbury, 2015).

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Sali A. Taliamonte is a Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Toronto, Canada. She has published on African American varieties, British, Irish and Canadian dialects, teen language and television. Her ongoing research focuses on Ontario dialects with a focus on morpho-syntactic and discourse-pragmatic features and using cross-variety and apparent time comparisons in synchronic corpora to explore linguistic change. Roberto A. Valdeón has a Master’s degree in English Literature and Translation (University of Glasgow) and a Ph. D. in English Studies (University of Oviedo). His work has appeared in international journals such as Perspectives, Across Languages and Cultures, Meta, Language and Intercultural Communication, Terminology, Target, Babel, Translation Studies, Philological Quarterly, The Translator, Languages in Contrast, Intercultural Pragmatics, Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Translating and Interpreting Studies. He is a member of the international advisory board of Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics (University of Vigo) and John Benjamins’s Handbook of Translation Studies and Forum. Since July 2011 he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives Studies in Translatology. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a visiting professor at the University of Leuven. In 2013 Spain’s Ministry of Education accredited him as Full Professor. He is also a Research Associate at the University of the Free State (South Africa) and has been appointed Honorary Professor at Jinan University, China. His book Translation and the Spanish in the Americas was published by John Benjamins in 2014.

Index of authors of scholarly work

A Abecassis, Michaël  276, 285 Abrams, M. H.  425 Adams, Jon-K.  55, 61–62, 69, 70, 72, 376 Adams, Michael  15, 138, 139, 300, 306, 311, 333, 348, 357, 370, Ch. 11 Adamson, Sylvia  271–272 Adedun, Emmanuel Adedayo  289 Adleman, Daniel  80 Adler, Silvia  213 Agha, Asif  214, 266–267, 298 Agost Canós, Rosa  412 Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.  492 Alba-Juez, Laura  176, 491–492 Alexander, Marc  203 Allbritton, David W.  93, 103 Allen, R. T.  544 Alvarez-Pereyre, Michael  11, 14, 243, 275, 299, 458, 464, 545 Alves, Fabio  367 Amador Morena, Carolina P.  315–316 Andersen, Peter A.  542 Andersen, Susan M.  99 Andersson, Lars-Gunnar  381 Androutsopoulos, Jannis  11, 14, 33, 211, 270, 275–276, 277, 279, 282, 283–284, 285, 299, 311–312, 458, 459, 503, 576 Anton, Corey  245 Archer, Dawn  208 Aristotle 515 Armstrong, Nigel  284, 288 Árnason, Kristján  560 Arnaut, Karel  216 Arndt, Horst  427 Arundale, Robert  434 Asch, Solomon E.  99 Atkinson, David  285 Auerbach, Erich  343 Austin, John L. v, 2, 111, 198, 203, 333, 357, 372 Austin, Paddy  429, 443, 445, 456 Axelsson, Karin  208 Azevedo, Milton M.  383

B Bach, Kent  197 Bach, Michaela  183, 184 Baker, Mona  367 Baker, Paul  145 Bakhtin, Mikhail M.  55, 63, 68, 76, 77, 78, 84–85, 207, 267, 274 Bal, Mieke  163, 168, 211 Baldrick, Chris  56, Ballesteros Martín, Francisco J.  376 Bally, Charles  202 Bannon, David  414 Baños, Rocío  129, 369, 374, 415 Baños-Piñero, Rocío  375 Bänziger, Tanja  533 Baron-Cohen, Simon  116 Barron, Anne  243 Barthes, Roland  268 Bartlett, Frederick C.  99, 102 Bartrina, Francesca  379, 399 Bateman, John A.  212 Bauer, Joachim  544 Bauman, Richard  265, 279, 288 Bax, Stephen  57–59 Baxter, Katherine Isobel  316 Bazin, André 183, 266–267 Beaugrande, Robert de  243, 373 Bednarek, Monika  11, 13, 25, 33, 34, 37, 39–40, 43, 45, 93, 94, 111, 113, 115, 131, 132, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 176, 212, 243, 248, 250, 253, 256, 279, 401, 402, 458, 463, 464, 468, 469, 491, 495, 496, 499–500, 503, 504, 516, 517, 525, 526–529, 532, 534–535, 539, 545, Ch. 5 Beebe, Leslie M.  456 Bell, Alice  213 Bell, Allan  277, 279, 280, 287, 402, 471 Ben-Shaul, Nitzan  183 Berger, Manuel  211 Berlina, Alexandra  332, 334 Berliner, Todd  299, 464 Bernaerts, Lars  173

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Index of authors of scholarly work

Biber, Douglas  9, 59, 243, 253, 374, 357, 378, 379, 490, 491–492, 494, 495, 555, Bierma, Nathan  306 Birch, David  207 Bitzer, Lloyd  62–63, 65 Black, Elizabeth  11, 48, 55, 63, 69, 72–74, 76, 77–78, 81–82, 83, 85, 86, 171, 202 Blake, Norman Francis  206 Blakemore, Diane  2 Blas Arroyo, José Luis  460, 476 Bleichenbacher, Lukas  282, 298, 301, 302, 305, 307, 310, 311, 312–313, 503 Blommaert, Jan  307 Blyth, Carl  567 Boase-Beier, Jean  369, 372, 381, 387 Bockting, Ineke  108, 176 Bolander, Brook  114–115 Bollettieri Bosinelli, Rosa Maria  316 Bonsignori, Veronica  414 Booth, Wayne C.  48, 98, 427 Bordwell, David  183–184, 503 Bortolussi, Marisa  93, 95, 116 Bös, Birte  471 Bou-Franch, Patricia  457, 460, 476 Bourhis, Richard Y.  307 Bourne, Julian  376, 377 Bousfield, Derek  94, 203, 206, 249–250 Bow, Catherine  65–66 Bradley, Andrew C.  210 Branigan, Edward  184 Bray, Joe  160, 211 Bredella, Lothar  2, 7 Brewer, John  437 Brewer, Marilyn B.  104 Brinton, Laurel J.  561 Britain, David  574 Brock, Alexander  32, 34, 40, 43–47, 50, 131, 149, 402 Brogan, T. V. F.  314 Brooker, Peter  428 Brown, Gillian  241, 243, 247, 254 Brown, Penelope  109, 113, 206, 350, 380, 403, 426–427, 429, 430, 444, 445–446, 456–457, 463 Brown, Roger  10, 428, 429 Brown, Tom  504 Brumme, Jenny  375–376, 378 Bruti, Silvia  369, 379, 410, 412–413, 414, 415 Bubel, Claudia  33–43, 45, 49, 114, 131, 137, 145, 149, 243, 276, 402, 471, 500, 501,

Bublitz, Wolfram  14, 32, 146, 186, 239, 242, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250, 253, 268, 271, 373, 374, 378, 500, Ch. 8 Bucaria, Chiara  382–383 Bucholtz, Mary  114, 277, 285–286, 287, 493, 503 Buchstaller, Isabelle  567, 573, 574 Bühler, Karl  245, 252 Burger, Harald  33 Burke, Kenneth  62, 63 Burke, Michael  11, 201, 209, 516 Burkhead, Cynthia  151 Burnard, Lou  494 Burroway, Janet  288 Burton, Deirdre  94, 243, 253 Buscombe, Edward  277 Busse, Beatrix  58, 172, 200, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 213, 214, 254, 274, 342, 443, Ch. 7 Busse, Ulrich  13, 208 Butler, Judith  203 Bye, Daniel  267 C Cadera, Susanne M.  375, 377–378 Caffi, Claudia  115 Caimi, Annamaria  401 Caink, Andrew  443 Callahan, Laura  312, 318 Camarca, Silvia  305, 308, 312, 313, 314 Canning, Patricia  207 Carroll, Heather B.  284 Carroll, Noël  179 Carter, Philip  437 Carter, Ronald  48, 200, 201, 374, 429, 443, 446 Casarini, Alice  414 Chafe, Wallace  55, 70–71, 251–252 Chambers, J. K.  282, 573, 574 Channell, Joanna  490 Chapman, Siobhan  1, 11, 171, 197, 201, 202, 205, 429, 443, 446, 462, 479 Chatman, Seymour  161, 184, 185 Chaume, Frederic  375, 382, 384, 399, 400, 401, 405, 410, 412 Chen, Chapman  383 Chen, Shen-Jie  382, 383 Cheshire, Jenny  214, 570 Chesterman, Andrew  370 Chiarella, Tom  268 Chiaro, Delia  382, 399, 412

Index of authors of scholarly work  Chion, Michel  161, 185, 186, 265, 273 Chotiner, Isaac  141 Chovanec, Jan  33, 464 Christie, Christine  212 Chung, Hye Seung  277, 282 Clark, Billy  11, 171, 186, 201, 202, 204, 429, 443, 444, 446, 462 Clark, Herbert H.  33, 35, 36, 37, 42, 55, 71, 73, 76, 245–246, 247, 515–516, 533, 535 Clayman, Steven  460 Clift, Rebecca  524 Cohen, Ralph  68 Cohn, Dorrit  198 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  7, 436 Conrad, Susan  59, 316, 490, 495 Cook, Guy  99, 208 Cooper, Marilyn M.  93 Coplan, Amy  116 Cortazzi, Martin  176, 186, 489 Coulthard, Malcolm  243 Coupland, Nikolas  279, 282, 284, 285, 469, 472, 563 Craig, Robert T.  456, 457, 471 Crystal, David  201, 374, 561 Csomay, Eniko  129 Cuenca, Maria-Josep  410 Culler, Jonathan  197 Culpeper, Jonathan  11, 12, 31, 93, 94, 95, 96–97, 100, 103, 105–107, 111, 113, 116, 136, 144, 162, 173, 186, 198, 199, 201, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 247, 254, 268, 270, 272, 273, 274–275, 281, 283–284, 300, 308, 374, 377, 380, 381, 428, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 444, 446, 456, 457, 459, 460, 463, 468, 469, 470, 471, 476, 500, 502, 539, 561, Ch. 4 Currie, Gregory  197, 198 D D’Arcy, Alexandra  564, 567–568, 573, 574 Dahlgren, Marta  369 Damasio, Antonio  517, 518, 519 Davidson, Jenny  438–441 Davies, Bronwyn  114, 502–503 Davies, Christie  384 Davies, Mark  494 Davis, Rib  147, 268, 289 Davy, Derek  201 Dawkins, Marian Stamp  72 Dayter, Daria  213 De Bonis, Guiseppe  318–319

593

De Meo, Mariagrazia  414 de Vignemont, Frédérique  116 de Waal, Frans B. M.  116 Deepadung, Sujaritlak  375 Delabastita, Dirk  300, 307, 310, 315, 384, 385 Denis, Derek  554, 555, 576, Ch. 18 Denison, Rayna  415 Desilla, Louisa  34, 94, 403, 408, 410 Detenber, Benjamin H.  536, 538 di Pellegrino, Giuseppe  544 Díaz Cintas, Jorge  398, 399, 401, 403, 410, 412 Dijkstra, Katinka  116, 519, 542, 544 Diller, Hans-Jürgen  312, 314 Dillon, George L.  208 Dimock, Wai Chee  68 Dion, Nathalie  554, 563, 567–569 Dixon, Dixon  93, 95, 116 Djonov, Emilia  112 Docherty,Gerard 569 Donaher, Patricia  287 Dossena, Marina  210 Douglas, Pamela  143 Dressler, Wolfgang U.  243, 373 Du Bois, John W  491, 493, 500–501, 503, 516, 517, 520 Duncan, Starkey  248, 249, 431 Dürscheid, Christa  240 d‘Ydewalle, Géry  401 Dynel, Marta  15, 33, 34, 40–43, 45, 49, 94, 111, 113, 131, 144, 145, 149, 206, 380, 401, 402, 415, 456, 457, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 468, 469, 471, 472, 533, Ch. 15 E Eckert, Penelope  298, 553–554, 575, 576, 577 Eder, Jens  94, 105–106, 115–116 Edlund, Jens  250 Edmondson, Willis  247 Eelen, Gino  456, 457, 471 Ehlich, Konrad  471 Eisenlauer, Volker  252 Ekman, Paul  516, 518, 524 Ellegård, Alvar  555 Emmison, Michael  464 Emmott, Catherine  95, 116, 203, 208, 216 Englebretson, Robert  492 English, Parker  203

594 

Index of authors of scholarly work

Enkvist, Nils Erik  201 Epstein, B. J.  278 Epstein, Edward Jay  71 Erman, Britt  247 Escandell-Vidal, Victoria  492 Espunya, Anna  375, 376, 378 Estebas-Vilaplana, Eva  492 Eysenck, Michael W.  99 F Faflak, Joel  531 Fagyal, Zsuzsanna  285 Fairclough, Norman 279 Faller, Martina T.  492 Farhoudi, Mona  375 Farner, Geir  197 Fauconnier, Gilles  161, 173 Fawcett, Antoinette  387 Federici, Franco  284 Feng, Dezheng  178 Fernández Dobao, Ana M.  375, 383 Fernández Fernández, M. Jesús  384 Fernández Gavela, Dolores  387 Fernandez-Quintanilla, Carolina  12, 117, 136, 144, 162, 173, 210, 254, 272, 300, 308, 431, 502, 510, 539, Ch. 4 Fiehler, Reinhard  522, 525, 529, 533 Filmer, Denise  384 Finegan, Edward  59 Fish, Stanley Eugene  208 Fiske, Susan T.  99, 103 Fitzmaurice, Susan  428, 436, 437 Flores, Lauro  318 Fluck, Winfried  318 Fludernik, Monika  106, 109, 173, 427–428, 516 Foolen, Ad  516 Forceville, Charles  161, 178, 179, 180, 181, 212 Forchini, Pierfranca  379, 414, 464, 468, 150 Forster, Edward M.  103 Forster, Leonard  314 Foulkes, Paul  569 Fowler, Roger  106–108, 161, 162, 172, 173, 176, 207, 211, 496 Fraile Vicente, Esther  382 Fraser, Bruce  427, 433 Freddi, Maria  379, 410, 415 Friesen, Wallace V.  515, 518, 524 Frijda, Nico  517, 518

Fromonot, Jacqueline  375 Frow, John  68–69 Fuentes Luque, Adrián  412 Furukawa, Gavin  277, 282–283 G Gal, Susan  287, 279 Gallagher, Shaun  116 Gambier, Yves  368, 398, 399, 401 Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar  380, 456, 457, 459, 460, 476 García-Pastor, Maria Dolores  460 Gardner, Matt  568 Gavins, Joanna  198, 208, 333 Genette, Gérard  98, 106, 160, 163–165, 167, 516 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra  276 Gernsbacher, Morton Ann  95 Gerrig, Richard J.  71, 93, 103, 116 Geyer-Ryan, Helga  207 Ghia, Elisa  410 Giannetti, Louis  184 Gibbons, Alison  198, 210, 212, 213 Gibson, Andy  277, 280, 287 Giles, Howard  279, 282 Gilliver, Peter  335 Gilman, Albert  10, 428 Giltrow, Janet  2, 3, 7, 12, 16, 55, 65, 66, 101, 209, 330, Ch. 3 Giovanni, Elena Di  410 Goldman-Eisler, Frieda  249 Goldsmith, Ulrich K.  314 Gonçalves, José Luiz  367 Goodwin, Charles  249, 524, 525, 533 Goodwin, Marjorie H.  525, 533 Gordon, Cynthia  460 Gordon, Elizabeth  308 Gordon, Eric V.  556–557 Gorman, David  197 Gottlieb, Henrik  399, 412 Graesser, Arthur C.  95 Graham, Sage L.  113 Grant, Lynn E.  129 Gray, Bethany  492, 495 Greenall, Annjo K.  384 Gregori Signes, Carmen  145 Gregoriou, Christiana  159, 203, 211 Gregory, Michael  201, 268, 374, 375 Grice, Herbert P.  55, 69, 70, 80, 109, 197, 199, 203, 204, 205, 206, 344, 345, 348, 350, 354, 357, 371, 372, 425, 426, 428,

Index of authors of scholarly work  429, 430, 431, 443, 444, 446, 456, 457, 470 Grimshaw, Allen  470 Grutman, Rainier  298, 300, 307, 310 Guerrero, Laura K.  542 Guillot, Marie-Noëlle  15, 284, 300, 306, 318, 379, 401, 402, 404, 410, 413, 414, Ch. 13 Gumperz, John J.  245, 246, 247, 248 Gunter, Barrie  563 Günthner, Susanne  84 Guthrie, John T.  104 Gutt, August-Ernst  367, 370–371, 372 H Hale, John K.  298, 314, 315 Hall, Kira  114, 273, 493, 503 Hall, Stuart  39–40, 273, 279, 287 Halliday, Michael A. K.  162, 172, 173, 207, 212, 243 Hamilton, David L.  99 Hamilton, Heidi E.  243 Han, Chong  383 Hardaker, Claire  470 Harkins, Jean  519 Harré, Rom  114, 503, 519, 522, 528 Hatcher, Jordan S.  403 Hatim, Basil  367–368, 372–373, 374, 379, 380, 403–405, 407, 412 Haugh, Michael  113, 377, 456, 457, 462, 463, 470, 471 Haverkate, Henk  376 Hayward, Susan  508 Heiss, Christine  384, 386 Heldner, Mattias  250 Herman, David  173 Herman, Lewis  269, 280 Herman, Marguerite  269, 280 Herman, Vimala  46, 47, 93, 94, 466 Hermans, Theo  370 Hernández-Flores, Nieves  460 Hertel, Ralf  374 Hervey, Sándor G. J.  373 Herzog, Marvin  557, 565 Heslop, Oliver Richard  555 Hess-Lüttich, Ernest W. B.  47, 426 Hickethier, Knut  184 Hickey, Leo  201, 202, 368, 371 Higbee, Will  286 Higgins, Christina  277, 282–283 Higgins, Ian  369 Hill, Annette  461

595

Hill, Jane H.  279, 282, 285 Hochschild, Arlie R.  519 Hodson, Jane  11, 213, 268, 269, 273, 274, 275, 277, 280, 285, 287, 298, 299, 306, 308 Hoenselaars, Ton  315, 385 Hoey, Michael  489 Hoffmann, Christian R.  13, 77, 150, 209, 211, 252, 267, 342, 445, 496, 504, 539, Ch. 6 Holly, Werner  239 Holmes, Oliver  460, 476 Holmes, Sophie  570 Holquist, Michael  331, 336 Holt, Elizabeth  84 Holtgraves, Thomas  112, 113 hooks, bell  279 Hoover, David L.  110, 208 Hope, Jonathan  556 Hostetter, Carl  349, 357 House, Juliane  368–369, 380, 381 Hsy, Jonathan  297, 314–315 Huang, Yan  1 Hübler, Axel  245 Hudson, Rachel  567 Humphrey, Nicholas  72 Hunston, Susan  176, 489, 490, 491, 492–493, 494 Hurst, Mary Jane  93, 112 Hutchby, Ian  41 Hymes, Dell  57, 255 I Ide, Sachiko  456, 471 Igelström, Ann  130 Ioannidou, Elena  277 Irvine, Judith  279 Iser, Wolfgang  48, 198, 516 Ito, Rika  564, 565, 566 J Jääskeläinen, Riita  382 Jackson, Howard  339, 341 Jackson, Rosemary  357 Jacob, Benjamin  383 Jacob, Pierre  116 Jacobs, Andreas  561 Jaeckle, Jeff  13, 131 Jaffe, Alexandra  270, 492 Jahn, Manfred  13, 184, 185, 211, 299 Jakobson, Roman  5, 138, 173, 202, 203, 244–245, 331, 347, 357, 523 James, William  517

596 

Index of authors of scholarly work

Jankowski, Bridget L.  557, 558, 559, 565 Janney, Richard W.  115, 427 Jaszczolt, Kasia  470 Jauss, Hans Robert  59 Jaworski, Adam  284 Jefferson, Gail  31, 36, 51, 243, 249 Jeffries, Lesley  11, 207 Jenkins, Alice  357 Jiménez Carra, Nieves  386 Jin, Lixian  176, 186, 489 Jobert, Manuel  380, 381, 463 Johnson, Mark  178 Johnson, Sally  275 Johnstone, Barbara  214 Johnstone, Tom  518 Jones, Edward  97, 102, 266 Jonsson, Carla  297, 312, 318, 556 Jucker, Andreas H.  1, 9, 10, 59, 186, 199, 202, 207, 208, 210, 211, 240, 242, 243, 247, 248, 425, 426, 428, 429, 442, 446, 459, 463, 468, 553, 559, 561, 562, Ch. 1 K Kádár, Dániel Z.  113, 456, 457, 463 Kager, Maria  316 Kantara, Agyro  463, 469, 472 Karjalainen, Markus  382 Kärkkäinen, Elise  490, 491, 492, 493, 500, 501, 503, 516, 517, 520 Kasper, Gabriele  427 Katan, David  412 Katz, Ephraim  458 Katz, Seth  287 Kayahara, Matthew  403 Kazimierczak, Karolina  349 Keane, Mark T.  99 Kecskes, Istvan  368, 378, 379, 380 Keen, Suzanne  95, 117 Keisanen, Tiina  490, 491, 492, 493, 500, 503 Keller, Eric  247 Kelley, Harold H.  111 Kelly-Holmes, Helen  285 Kendon, Adam  249, 524 Kennedy, Chris  207 Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine  460 Kerswill, Paul  569 Keutzer, Oliver  536 Kienpointner, Manfred  460 Kiesling, Scott F.  554, 575 Kizelbach, Urszula  15, 111, 206, 380, 427, 428, 434, 446, 459, 462, Ch. 14

Klauk, Tobias  6, 7, 197, 198 Klein, Lawrence E.  435, 436 Kleinke, Sonja  471 Kliger, Ilya  331, 336 Knights, Lionel C.  210 Koch, Peter  240, 252, 376 Konrad, Eva-Maria  8 Koolstra, Cees M.  401 Kopaczyk, Joanna  561, 562 Köppe, Tilmann  6, 7, 197, 198 Kopytko, Roman  428, 429, 434 Korg, Jacob  316 Kovanic, Irena  382 Kövecses, Zoltán  525, 527 Kozinski, Rose Ann  516, 531 Kozloff, Sarah  13, 14, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 44, 45, 129, 131–138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 149, 161, 184, 185, 186, 243, 244, 250, 251, 255, 257, 266, 267, 268, 284, 299, 307, 401, 458, 464 Kremnitz, Georg  298, 314, 316–317, 318 Kress, Gunther  133, 182,-183, 212 Kripke, Saul  333, 335 Kuhl, Patricia K.  573 Kuhn, Markus  11 Kvam, Sigmund  369 Kytö, Merja  198, 207, 500, 561 L Labate, Simon  385 Labov, William  164, 554, 557, 565, 573, 574, 577 Lachenicht, Lance  456, 457 Lahey, Ernestine  210 Lakoff, George  161, 173, 178 Lakoff, Robin  239, 456, 464 Lalor, Doireann  316 Lambrou, Marina  146, 149, 150, 205, 247, 500 Landert, Daniela  15, 77, 111, 115, 173, 239, 240, 247, 252, 253, 272, 415, 523, 531, 534, Ch. 16 Landry, Rodrigue  307 Lang, Annie  536, 538 Langacker, Ronald W.  535, 538, 539 Langeland, Agnes Scott  305, Langford, Paul  436, 437, Langlotz, Andreas  7, 16, 111, 115, 176, 516, 517, 520, 523, 524, 525, 526, 529, 532, 533, 534, 535, 541, Ch. 17 Lass, Roger  560

Index of authors of scholarly work  László, János  117 Lauer, Gerhard  544, 545 Lavery, David  151 Laviosa, Sara  382 Lazarus, Richard S.  517, 518 LeDoux, Joseph  517 Leech, Geoffrey N.  11, 94, 97, 98, 108, 110, 113, 161, 162, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 211, 268, 271, 272, 274, 280, 427, 434, 445, 456, 457, 496, 497 Lenk, Uta  247 Lenos, Melissa  536 Levinson, Stephen C.  55, 57, 60, 64, 109, 113, 206, 208, 255, 350, 380, 403, 426–427, 429, 430, 444, 445, 446, 456, 457, 463 Liberman, Esther  316 Lillian, Donna  335 Lim, Tae-Seop  434 Limberg, Holger  460 Lindsay, David W.  442 Linell, Per  405 Lippi-Green, Rosina  275, 276, 279, 283, 310 Liu, Huei-Mei  573 Livingstone, Sonia  102 Locher, Miriam A.  15, 113, 114, 115, 144, 199, 202, 206, 215, 242, 282, 384, 428, 437, 444, 456, 457, 459, 470, 471, 516, 517, 520, 523, 525, 526, 529, 532, 533, 534, 535, 541, 553, Ch. 1, Ch. 10 Lodge, R. Anthony  281 Logsdon, Lorelei  335 Lohmeier, Anke-Marie  184 Longo, Abele  114 Lopez, Qiuana  277, 286 Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria  457, 460, 476 Lowe, Valerie  93 Lucas, Frank Laurence  562 Lugea, Jane  93 Luginbühl, Martin  33 Lyons, John  242, 371 M Machan, Tim William  314 Macrae, Andrea  210 Maher, Brigid  375 Mahlberg, Michaela  208, 211 Mahootian, Shahrzad  298 Maiorani, Arianna  212 Maley, Alan  493

597

Malmkjær, Kirsten  367, 371–372 Mandala, Susan  113, 137, 138, 144, 145, 357, 463 Manhart, Sybille  401 Marcone, Jorge  374 Mareš, Petr  302 Margolin, Uri  95, 96, 109, 173 Mariotti, Cristina  401 Mariottini, Laura  462 Marrero Aguiar, Victoria  492 Marshall, Jeremy  335, 346 Martín, Desirée A.  318 Martin, Holly E.  311, 312, 313, 318 Martin, James R.  176, 407, 490, 491, 496 Martin, Wallace  95 Martínez Sierra, José 412 Martínez, Matias  164, 165, 168 Martínez-Cabeza Lombardo, Miguel A.  113 Masi, Silvia  414 Mason, Ian  367, 372, 373, 374, 379, 403, 404, 405, 407, 412 Masson, Cynthea  357 Matamala, Anna  410, 414 Mateo, José 369 Mateo, Marta  374, 377 Mathews, Richard  334 Matoesian, Gregory M.  533 McCarthy, Michael  374 McHoul, Alec  464 McIntyre, Dan  11, 93, 94, 118, 150, 162, 179, 206 208, 210, 211, 249–250, 298, 299, 306, 426, 445, 446, 458, 463, 516, 538 McNeill, David  177 Medendorp, Liz  357 Medway, Peter  63 Meek, Barbra A  276, 282 Meeker, Mary  563 Meier, Paul  269, 272 Melchers, Gunnel  271, 274 Mellmann, Katja  116 Méndez-Naya, Belén  564 Mendlesohn, Farah  357 Merino, Raquel  375 Messerli, Thomas C.  2, 12, 60, 73, 97, 149, 159, 205, 209, 255, 330, 402, 415, 128, 460, 462, 496, 516, 535, Ch. 2 Metsala, Jamie L. et al. Mey, Jacob L.  2, 55, 63, 69, 72, 77, 78, 79, 81, 85, 209 Meyerhoff, Miriam  554, 574 Meylaerts, Reine  384, 385

598 

Index of authors of scholarly work

Miall, David  98 Michael, Ian  437 Michael, John  116 Milani, Tommaso M.  275 Millán-Varela, Carmen  399 Miller, Carolyn  63, 64, 65 Miller, J. Hillis (= Joseph Hillis) 2, 203, 332, 333 Mills, Sara  113, 114, 427, 457, 471 Milroy, Lesley  554, 555, 573, 574, 575 Minkova, Donka  559 Mittell, Jason  151 Mittmann, Brigitta  146, 243 Moati, Raoul  198 Mofin Noussi, Marie Chantale  317 Mondada, Lorenza  51 Monod, Sylvère  316 Montes-Alcalá, Cecilia  312 Monti, Silvia  386 Montoro, Rocío  11, 161, 163, 172, 176, 177, 178, 179, 182, 186, 200, 208, 211 Moretti, Franco  12, 55, 56, 67–68, 81, 84, 85 Morini, Massimiliano  376, 378 Morris, Charles v, 201 Mubenga, Kajingulu Somwe  410 Mukarovský, Jan  173 Müller, Sabine  504 Munday, Jeremy  367 Muñoz Sánchez, Pablo  403 Murphy, Paul  464 Murray, Susan  461 Mustanoja, Tauno F.  564 Myers, David G.  517 Myers, Greg  84 Myers, Victoria  357 N Naremore, James  503, 504 Nash, Walter  201 Nassar, Joseph  316 Neary, Clara  160, 267, 175, 496 Nerlich, Brigitte  197 Nestruck, Kelly  273 Neuberg, Steven L.  103 Nevalainen, Terttu  342, 561 Neves, Josélia  387, 398, 410 Newmark, Peter  381–382 Nicholas, Nick  349 Niederehe, George  249 Niederhoff, Burkhard  496 Niedzielski, Nancy  270, 271, 554, 574

Nilsson, Åsa  461 Nolan, William  433 Nørgaard, Nina  11, 172, 200, 207, 211, 212, 498 Nornes, Abé Mark  402 Norris, Sigrid  534 Nünning, Ansgar  442 Nünning, Vera  442 O O’Connell, Erin  399 O’Halloran, Kay  178, 186 O’Sullivan, Carol  385, 386, 399 Oatley, Keith  515, 545 Ochs, Elinor  111, 112, 525, 533 Oesterreicher, Wulf  240, 252, 376 O‘Halloran, Kay  178, 186 Ohmann, Richard  2, 197 Okrand, Marc  311, 148, 357 Okrent, Arika  348 Ong, Walter J.  241 Östman, Jan-Ola  247 Otsuji, Emi  215 Ouellette, Laurie  461 Overbey, Karen Eileen  357 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi  444, 445 Ozoux, Mireille  442 P Page, Ruth  209, 210, 213 Pahta, Päivi  274 Palmer, Alan  109, 159, 173 Paltridge, Brian  144, 145 Panagiotidou, Maria-Eirini  444 Parnell, Michael  345 Paul Kerswill  569 Pavesi, Maria  379, 383, 401, 410, 413, 415 Pedersen, Jan  411 Peeters, Allerd L.  401 Peirce, Charles S. v, 111, 212 Penman, Robyn  456 Pennycook, Alastair  215 Peplow, David  48 Pérez González, Luis  379, 398, 399, 401, 402, 403, 405, 407, 408, 410, 415, 416 Pérez Ocón, Pilar  492 Pérez-González, Luis  398, 399, 401, 402, 403, 405, 407–408, 410, 415, 416 Perse, Elizabeth M.  563 Peters, Hans  286, 346, 574 Peterson, David J.  346

Index of authors of scholarly work  Petrović, Marija  130 Petrucci, Peter  284, 410 Pettegree, Andrew  85 Pfister, Manfred  111, 185, 431 Piazza, Roberta  11, 25, 34, 94, 131, 458, 463, 464, 466, 467, 503, 532 Piirainen-Marsh, Arja  460 Pilkington, Adrian  2, 3, 55, 63, 72, 81, 85, 86, 443 Pillet-Shore, Danielle  525 Pillière, Linda  380, 463 Pinto, Derrin  399, 410, 412 Planalp, Sally  515, 517, 518, 519, 524, 533, 535, 542, 543 Planchenault, Gaëlle  11, 14, 77, 111, 136, 147, 254, 267, 270, 272, 277, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 300, 308, 309, 377, 411, 415, 503, 561, Ch. 9 Plutchik, Robert  517, 518, 519 Poplack, Shana  554, 555, 563, 567, 568, 569, 570 Popova, Yanna  101, 106 Porter, Joseph A.  428 Portnow, James  335 Pousada, Alicia  316 Powell, Robert A.  563 Pratt, Mary Louise  2, 199–200, 203, 344– 345, 348, 445 Preston, Dennis  270, 271 Preston-Matto, Lahney  357 Price, Jack  143, 144 Price, Steven  130 Prince, Ellen F.  74 Prince, Gerald  198 Propp, Vladimir  101 Punday, Daniel  212 Puschmann, Cornelius  57 Q Quaglio, Paulo  131, 146, 147, 243, 374, 378, 458, 468, 495, 500 Queen, Robin  135, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 318 Quirk, Randolph  9, 236, 465 R Rabkin, Eric S.  332, 336, 356, 357 Radden, Günter  527 Raible, Wolfgang  252 Ramière, Nathalie  412 Ramos Pinto, Sara  399

599

Rampton, Ben  278, 279, 284, 286 Ranzato, Irene  414 Raymond, Chase W.  140, 145 Razumova, Lyudmila L.  316 Reber, Elisabeth  525 Recktenwald, Sigrid  567 Remael Aline  369, 399, 400, 403, 405, 406, 407, 408, 412 Révis, Joanna  272 Rey, Jennifer M.  145, 467 Reyes, Angela  285 Richardson, Bill  369 Richardson, Kay  34, 41, 45, 94, 113, 118, 130, 138, 144, 145, 147, 150, 279, 458, 463, 464, 468 Riddle Harding, Jennifer  48, 49 Riffaterre, Michael  208 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith  111, 166, 496 Ringe, Donald  557 Rivera, Juan Pablo  318 Roberts, Chris  131, 253, 495, 554, 563, 564, 565, 566, 567, 568, 569, 574 Robinson, Douglas  370 Rochester, Sherry R.  249 Rodgers, Michael P. H.  129 Romero Fresco, Pablo  412, 414 Romero-Trillo, Jesús  374 Ronan, Patricia  524, 525, 526 Rong, Rong  462 Rosch, Eleanor  164 Rose, Kenneth  464 Rossi, Fabio  11, 14, 25, 34, 243, 248, 255, 275, 299, 458, 503, 532 Rubin, Alan M.  563 Rudanko, Juhani  428, 429, 430, 431, 464, 469, 472 Ruddell, Caroline  357 Ryan, Marie-Laure  198, 203 Ryan, Michael  536 S Sacks, Harvey  31, 36, 243, 249, 253 Saeed, John  333 Saeed, Tanzeela  286, 287 Safariants, Rita  316 Salmon, Vivian  9, 10 Sanchez, Julia  520 Sanchez, Nicolas  385 Sanford, Anthony J.  116 Santaemilia, José 382, 384 Sayers, Dave  554, 563, 566, 569

600 

Index of authors of scholarly work

Sbisà, Marina  235 Scannell, Paddy  131 Schaefer, Edward F.  35, 36 Scheffel, Michael  164, 165 Schegloff, Emanuel A.  31, 36, 243, 249 Scherer, Karl R.  533 Scherer, Klaus  517, 518 Schieffelin, Bambi  525, 533 Schiewer, Gesine L.  518 Schiffrin, Deborah  243, 247, 274 Schmid, Wolf  539–540 Schnall, Simone  515 Schneider, Edgar  555 Schneider, Klaus P.  243, 466 Schneider, Ralf  93, 103, 116 Schourup, Lawrence C.  247 Schrauf, Robert W.  520 Schubert, Christoph  243 Schwarz-Friesel, Monika  519, 523, 525, 526 Schwitalla, Johannes  241 Scollon, Ron  301 Scollon, Suzie Wong  301 Searle, John R.  6, 7, 111, 197, 198, 203, 372, 425, 426, 429 Sebba, Mark  297 Selden, Raman  428 Sell, Roger D.  2, 49, 75, 198, 204, 206, 425, 427, 562 Semino, Elena  82, 83, 84, 93, 99, 107–110, 161, 162, 172–174, 179, 199, 201, 203, 208, 211 Semple, David  177 Serban, Adriana  384, 385, 410 Shankar, Shalini  278 Shen, Dan  163, 167, 211 Sherman, Jeffrey W.  99 Shklovsky, Viktor  330–333, 334, 336, 338, 347, 357 Shorr, Angela  518 Short, Mick H.  11, 33, 36, 47, 48, 97, 98, 107–108, 110, 111, 131, 150, 161, 162, 166, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 203, 204, 206, 207, 209, 210, 211, 249, 268, 271, 272, 274, 280, 427, 429, 445, 496, 497 Sieber, Peter  240 Silverstein, Michael  111, 279 Simpson, Paul  94, 107, 113, 163, 167, 172, 174, 175, 176, 200, 206, 207, 208, 429, 443, 445, 446, 468, 496 Sinkeviciute, Valeria  460, 461, 462, 471, 476 Sklar, Howard  116, 516

Smith, Jennifer  213, 214 Smith, Murray  116 Smogyvári, Ildikó  117 Smyth, Roger  177 Snell, Julia  93, 100 Sollors, Werner  297, 318 Soltysik Monnet, Agnieszka  516, 520 Sotirova, Violeta  11 Sparrow, Tom  199 Spencer, John  201 Spencer-Oatey, Helen  114, 434, 444 Sperber, Dan  2, 3, 55, 57, 69, 80, 81, 97, 104, 205, 443 Spinhof, Herman  401 Spisak, Frances  456, 457, 471 Spitz, Alice  145, 146, 149, 235, 243, 244, 250, 253, 255, 256, 464, 466 Spitzer, Leo  202 St-Amand, Anne  555 Stanford, Lois M.  556 Stapleton, Karyn  381 Stein, Dieter  437 Stenström, Anna-Britta  247 Sternberg, Claudia  130 Sternberg, Meir  301, 302, 306, 316 Stets, Jan E.  517 Stivers, Tanya  503 Stöckl, Hartmut  239 Stockwell, Peter  11, 208 Stokoe, Elizabeth  149, 466 Strader, Andrew  549 Strasberg, Lee  520 Streeck, Jürgen  524 Stuart, Susan  357 Stuart-Smith, Jane  554, 563, 569–573, 574, 576 Stubbs, Michael  241, 243 Sturge, Kate  381 Suvin, Darko  331–332, 357 Svartvik, Jan  236 Swales, John M.  58, 59 Swindlhurst, Kate  108, 162, 172–174, 179 Szarkowska, Agnieszka  415 T Taavistsainen, Irma  1, 9, 58, 59, 81, 115, 207, 208, 271, 274, 428, 442, 559, 562 Tagliamonte, Sali A.  16, 131, 146, 253, 495, 554, 558, 563, 564–567, 569, 571, 573, 574, Ch. 18 Tamborini, Ron  518

Index of authors of scholarly work  Tan, Ed S.-H.  539, 541 Tannen, Deborah  71, 84, 170, 243, 244, 253, 464 Taylor, Christopher  146, 399 Taylor, Juliette  316 Taylor, Shelley E.  84 Taylor-Batty, Juliette  297, 301, 306, 307, 314, 316 Terkourafi, Marina  428 The White House  141 Thomas, Bronwen  213 Thompson, Geoff  176, 489, 490, 491, 492 Thompson, Kristin  503 Thorne, James  73 Tihanov, Galin  331, 336 Timmins, Claire  569 Toda, Fernando  384 Todd, Cain  542 Todd, Loreto  317 Todorov, Tzvetan  163 Tomaszkiewicz, Teresa  412 Toolan, Michael  99, 131, 147, 148, 160, 163, 167, 168, 207, 210, 244, 250, 251, 458, 496 Tottie, Gunnel  247 Toury, Gideon  382 Tracy, Karen  456, 457, 460, 471 Traugott, Elizabeth Closs  9, 561 Tredell, Nicolas  179 Trilling, Lionel  440 Trodd, Zoe  531 Trudgill, Peter  268, 280, 381, 569, 573 Tsao, Feng-Ming  573 Tsiang-Starcevic, Sarah  556 Tsiplakou, Stavroula  277 Tuchman, Gaye  71 Turner, Jonathan H.  517 Turner, Ken  235, 456 Turner, Mark  161, 173 U Uchida, Seiji  2, 3 Urios-Aparisi, Eduardo  149 Uspensky, Boris  107, 161, 174 V Valdeón, Roberto A.  15, 284, 300, 318, 383– 385, 387, Ch. 12 Van de Poe, Marikje  401 Van den Avenne, Cécile  276 Van Djik, Teun A.  2, 99, 204

601

van Leeuwen, Theo  133, 182, 183, 184, 212 van Oort, Richard  203 van Peer, Willie  96, 208 Vandaele, Jeroen  381, 382, 412 Vandenabeele, Bart  198 Vanoye, Francis  34, 402 Venuti, Lawrence  402 Verdonk, Peter  210 Verschueren, Jef  476 Vertovec, Steven  216, 289 Vološinov, Valentin  55, 69, 77–79, 81 W Wagner, Manuela Maria  149 Wales, Katie  98, 202, 207, 208 Walker, Brian  208 Walshe, Shane  143, 145, 147, 149 Walton, Kendall L.  7, 198 Walton, Shana  270 Wang, Jenny  567 Wang, Kenny  383 Warner, Chantelle  171, 198, 200, 202, 205, 443, 444, 445 Warnke, Ingo  213 Watson Greg  171 Watts, Richard J.  114, 206, 427, 428, 436, 437, 442, 456, 457, 470, 471 Waugh, Linda R.  5 Webb, Stuart  129 Weber, Jean Jacques  207 Weibull, Lennart  461 Weiner, Edmund  335, 346 Weinreich, Uriel  557, 565 Wells, Stanley  211, 556 Werth, Paul  198, 208 Wesker, Arnold  375 White, Peter R.  176, 491, 496 Whiteley, Sara  11, 210, 542 Wichmann, Anne  206, 456, 457, 459, 460, 470 Widdowson, Peter  428 Wierzbicka, Anna  519 Wilce, James E.  522, 533 Wildfeuer, Janina  212 Williams, Ann  569 Williams, Mark  308 Wilson, Deirdre  2, 3, 55, 56, 57, 69, 80, 81, 84, 97, 104, 205, 370, 443 Wilson, Philip  387 Wodak, Ruth  95, 101, 144, 145 Wright, Will  101

602 

Index of authors of scholarly work

Wyer, Robert S.  113 Wyler Lia  412 Y Yaeger-Dror, Malcah  525 Yau, Wai-Ping  399 Yule, George  241, 243, 247, 254 Z Zabalbeascoa, Patrick  412 Zabus, Chantal  317

Zacher, Samantha  314 Zanotti, Serenella  369, 415 Zappavigna, Michele  213 Zauberga, Ieva  382 Zhao, Sumin  212 Zhou, Jianglin  490 Ziman, Han  381 Zink, Michel  314 Ziv, Yael  247 Zlateva, Palma  369

Index of authors of fictional work

A Achebe, Chinua  317 Adams, Richard  94 Austen, Jane  72, 81, 86, 376, 428, 438, 440–441, 497, 502 B Banks, Iain  445 Bataille, Georges  383 Beckett, Samuel  314, 316 Bond, Michael  381 Brontë, Charlotte  103 Buero Vallejo, Antonio  370 Burgess, Anthony  341 Burgess, Melvin  520, 521, 523, 528 Burke, Edmund  438 C Canavan, Trudi  311 Canetti, Elias  316 Celan, Paul  316 Cervantes, Miguel de  369 Chaucer, Geoffrey  208, 315, 316 Chekhov, Anton  444 Clarke, Arthur C.  334–335 Coleridge, Samuel T.  7, 37, 426 Compton-Burnett, Ivy  112 Conrad, Joseph  107, 316 D de Sade, Donatien Alphonse François  383 Defoe, Daniel  98 Dickens, Charles  110, 166, 498, 561 E Elgin, Suzette Haden  335 Eliot, George  497–498 Eliot, T. S.  314 F Faulkner, William  108, 173, 383 Fielding, Henry  334, 440

G Godwin, Francis  346 Golding, William  77, 173, 207, 444 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm  74 H Haddon, Mark  109 Harris, Eve  307 Hemingway, Ernest  74–76 Hitchcock, Alfred  98, 180–181, 318 Hume, David  438 I Infante, Cabrera  377 Ionesco, Eugène  445, 446 J James, Henry  303–305 Jónsson, Finnur  556 Joyce, James  314, 316 K Kesey, Ken  107, 173 L Leigh, Mike  406, 408 Lillo, George  442 Linklater, Eric  343–345 Loach, Ken  285 Locke, John  438 Lovecraft, H. P.  334, 335 M Mandeville 438 Mansfield, Katherine  167 Mantel, Hilary  343 Margwilaschwili, Giwi  316 Marías, Javier  315 McEwan, Ian  72, 176, 177, 179 Mda, Zakes  317 Melville, Herman  165–166 Miéville, China  330, 351, 356 Miller, Arthur  100, 275 Milton, John  298, 315–316

604 

Index of authors of fictional work

Mitchell, David  340, 349, 356 Moon, Elizabeth  109 Morrall, Clare  109 Muñoz Molina, Antonio  315 Murdoch, Iris  425 Murnau, F. W.  504 N Nabokov, Vladimir  98, 316 O Ortiz, Simon J.  317 Orwell, George  337, 339, 340, 341 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi  444–445 P Peake, Mervyn  107 Pessoa, Fernando  316 Pinter, Harold  375 Pound, Ezra  314 Pullman, Philip  336 R Rhys, Jean  314 Ricci, Nino  305, 308, 313, 314 Richardson, Samuel  81, 438–440 Rushdie, Salman  317 Russell, Willy  490 S Salinger, J. D.  382 Scorsese, Martin  463, 538 Shakespeare, William  9–10, 86, 100, 105, 208, 210, 274, 348, 349, 374, 375, 384, 385, 428, 429–435, 494, 555, 556, 559, 561

Shaw, Bernard  375 Shelley, Mary  529, 531 Sidney, Philip  425 Silko, Leslie Marmon  317 Smith, Zadie  213–215 Spark, Muriel  443 Steele, Richard  436, 442 Stendhal 371 Swift, Jonathan  436–438 T Tempest, Kate  213–215 Thackeray, William M.  375 Todd, Loreto  317 Tolkien, J. R. R.  311, 335–336, 337, 339, 340, 342, 345–349, 350, 355, 357 Trollope, Joanna  86, 376 Tschinag, Galsan  316 Twain, Mark  78–79, 81 V Vargas Llosa, Mario  378 W Wasserstein, Wendy  236 Webb, Belinda  341 Wekser, Arnold  375 Welsh, Irvine  77, 445, 561 Werst, Frédéric  350–351 Wollstonecraft, Mary  441 Woolf, Virginia  75, 78, 79

Index of fictional sources

24 134 1984 337, 338, 341, 343 2001: A Space Odyssey  334 50 First Dates  283 7th Heaven  139 A ‘Allo ‘Allo  385 A Bear Called Paddington  381 A Clockwork Apple  341 A Clockwork Orange  341 A Family and a Fortune  112 A Game of Thrones  139, 311, 346 A Midsummer Night’s Dream  429 A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Lan­ guages  347 A Tale of Two Cities  110 A View from the Bridge  100 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman  440 Ada  316 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  80 Ae Fond Kiss  386 Alice in Wonderland  378 American Psycho  80, 182 An apology for poetry  425 Annie Hall  184 At the bay  167 August: Osage County  466, 473 B Bend it Like Beckham  386 Bienvenue chez les ch’tis  280 Big Brother  341, 343, 461 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure  575 Billy Elliot  515–545 Bleak House  272 Bones  129, 132, 134–136, 138 Breaking Bad  129, 136, 137, 139, 141 Breathless  183 Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason  408 Bridget Jones’ Diary  384, 408, 409 Buffy The Vampire Slayer  138, 147, 357

C Caché/Hidden  413 Californication  383 Call the Midwife  139 Carlota Fainberg  315 Clarissa  81 Clear and Present Danger  313 Close Encounters of the Third Kind  385 Cloud Atlas  340–341, 349, 356 Corazón tan Blanco  315 Coriolanus  429 Coronation Street  102, 571–572 D Dances with Wolves 386 Days of our Lives  147 Dead Like Me  383 Desperate Housewives  129, 133, 147 Don Quijote de la Mancha  369 Downton Abbey  475 E EastEnders  102, 569–573 Educating Rita  490 Elysium  311 Embassytown  330, 351–356 Emma  376, 497, 502 Enduring Love  176 Erin Brockovich  100 F Fast Times at Ridgemont High  575 Father Ted  147 Fawlty Towers  380 Fellowship of the Ring  339, 347 Firefly  139, 311, 357 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus  529, 531, 543 Friends  146, 147, 237, 238, 378, 465, 495, 563, 564–567 G Game of Thrones  139, 311, 346 Gilmore Girls  39, 115, 118, 139, 142, 145, 147, 495, 499, 504, 534, 539

606 

Index of fictional sources

Glee  147 Goodfellas  463, 538 Gran Torino  384, 386 Great Expectations  166, 498 Grey’s Anatomy  147 H Hamlet  348, 429, 561 Hansel and Gretel  74, 78, 83 Harry Potter  95, 142, 287, 411 Heart of Darkness  107 Highway to Heaven  139 His Dark Materials  336 Histoire de l’œil  383 History of Sir Charles Grandison  81 Homeland  141 Homesman  102 House M. D.  383, 468 House of Cards  141, 147 How I Met Your Mother  576 Huasipungo 378 J James Bond  142, 531 Jane Eyre  103 Jaws  518, 519 Julius Caeser  430, 560 K King Henry IV  432, 433, 555, 559 King Henry V  434–435, 585 King Henry VIII  556 King Lear  429, 561 King Richard III  432, 556 Kroll Show  576 L Ladybird, Ladybird  285 Las meninas  370 Le rouge et le noir  371 Les cents vingts journées de Sodome 383 Lilyhammer  147 Little Lord Fountleroy  475 Lolita  98 Lord of the Flies  77 Lord of the Rings  336, 339, 342, 346, 348, 349, 350, 354 Los cachorros 377 Lost in Translation  412 Love Actually  303

M Mansfield Park  438, 440, 441 Middlemarch  497 Moby Dick  165–166 Moll Flanders  98 Monty Python and the Holy Grail  266 Morgoth’s Ring  335 Morkinskinna  556 Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown  75 Mr. Robot  504–509 Mrs Dalloway  73 My Fair Lady  475 My Heart so White  315 N NCIS  129, 135 Né quelque part  286 Northern Exposure  144 Nurse Jackie  129, 130 NW  213, 214 O One Flew over the Cockoo’s Nest  107, 173 Orange is the New Black  129, 140, 141, 147 Orphan Black  141 Othello  429, 430, 556 Our Friends in the North  140 P Pamela  438–441 Paris  413 Park patrol  77 Peep Show  44 Pink Panther 385 Portal  335 Psycho  180 Pulp Fiction 383 Pushing Daisies  383 R Reflections on the Revolution in France  438 Richard III  432, 556 Roman Holiday  475 Romeo and Juliet  556 S Sabrina  475 Scent of a Woman  113, 380 Second Life  16 Secrets & Lies  406, 408

Index of fictional sources  Seven  101 Shamela  440 Sherlock  415, 468–469 Sherlock Holmes  468 Singing in the Rain  273 Six Feet Under  382, 383 Slumdog Millionare  415 Sophie’s Choice  467 South Park  384, 576 Southland  139 Spanglish  386 Speed of Dark  109 Stage Fright  98 Star Trek  95, 139, 309, 310, 311, 337–339, 341, 348, 357, 463 Star War  330, 337–339, 340 Süperseks  277, 283–284, 311–312, 318 Sur Mes Lèvres  404, 414 T The Academy  461 The American  303–305, 308 The Americans  141 The Big Bang Theory  139, 142, 148 The Birth of a Nation  272 The Book of Life  287 The Bricks That Built the Houses  213–214 The Canterbury Tales  115, 316 The Cantos  314 The Catcher in the Rye  282 The Color Purple  381 The Comfort of Strangers  179 The Conscious Lovers  442 The Crow Road  445 The Crucible  275 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime  109 The Golden Compass, see His Dark Materials The Great White North  576 The Heart of Redness  317 The Heidi Chronicles: Uncommon Women and Others & Isn’t It Romantic  237 The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling  334 The Hobbit  339, 348, 349, 350 The Hunt for Red October  313 The I. T. Crowd  384 The Imitation Game  464 The Inheritors  173, 207, 444 The Iron Lady  95 The Lady with the Little Dog  444 The Language of Others  109

607

The Last Laugh  504 The Lesson  445, 446 The London merchant, or the history of George Barnwell  442 The Man in the Moone  346 The Marrying of Chani Kaufman  307 The Men and the Girls 376 The Men of Ness  343, 345 The Merchant of Venice  429 The Mill on the Floss  498 The Old Man and the Sea  529, 531 The Ozark Trilogy  335 The Passion of the Christ  306 The Princess Diaries  475 The Rogue. Book Two of the Traitor Spy Tril­ ogy The Seinfeld chronicles  27–30 The Shield  134, 137, 138 The short happy life of Francis Macomber  496, 498–499, 501 The Silmarillion  350 The Simpsons  142 The Snows of Kilimanjaro  74, 76, 78, 83 The Sopranos  383 The Sound and the Fury  108, 173, 383 The Spectator  436 The Subtle Knife  336 The Taming of the Shrew  100, 429 The Tatler  436 The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories  334, 335 The Traitor Spy Trilogy  311 The Tudors  342 The Ultimate Viking  344 The United States of Tara  141 The Waste Land  314, 562 The Weakest Link  460 The West Wing  95, 101, 145 The Wire  130, 134, 140, 147, 148 Timon of Athens  429 Titus Groan  107 To Catch a Thief  409 Todas las Almas  315 Tootsie  413 Tres tristes tigres  377 True Grit  102 Twelfth Night  429, 443 Two Gentlemen of Verona  556 U Un Coeur en Hiver  404

608 

Index of fictional sources

V Vanity Fair 375 Volver  413, 414 W Ward: Ier – IIe Siècle  350–351 Watership Down  94, 334

Weeds  383 Will & Grace 383 Wolf Hall  343 World of Warcraft  16

Subject index

A a-synchrony  401, 402, 412, 413 accent  136, 147, 148, 162, 214, 215, 254, 265–289, 298, 301,302, 305, 309, 310, 377, 385, 386, 410, 467, 571 accommodation  69, 79, 83 accountability  470, 569 acculturation 402 activity type  12, 55, 57, 60, 64, 255 address terms, see terms of address addressivity  78, 79, 298 advice  60, 411, 412, 427, 589 affective stance, see stance alignment  116, 145, 255, 286, 348, 399, 407, 411, 489, 490, 493, 500–503 anchorage of diegesis  13, 132, 307 animator  32, 254 anime 403 anthropology  9, 111 appraisal theory  186, 522 artlang  347, 348 attribution theory  97, 111, 112 audiovisual fiction  379, 382 audiovisual translation  15, 383, 387, 397–416, 587 – features  367, 374, 382, 397, 399–403 authenticity  14, 137, 146–148, 170, 214, 215, 235, 242, 256, 268, 273, 275, 280, 285, 287, 297–299, 316, 319, 336, 346, 349, 371, 375, 376, 378, 407, 409, 415, 464, 520, B bilingualism  282, 312, 386 blending theory  161, 186 Bollywood  278, 289, 296 bystander  31, 35, 36, 255 C catchphrase  142, 143 catharsis 515 characterization  12, 13, 15, 39, 93–118, 129, 143–151, 162, 186, 207–210, 266, 272, 274, 300, 305, 308, 431, 357, 397, 399,

403–408, 412, 415, 425, 426, 428,431, 433, 442, 445, 462, 469, 475, 489, 497– 499, 502, 509 cue  105, 106, 117, 144, 150, 162, 186, 274, Chicano English  318 Cockney  272, 569–573 code-switching  14, 77, 144, 269, 282, 300, 308, 312, 313, 316, 384, 386 cognitive metaphor theory  109, 208 cognitive poetics  208, 212, 516 cognitive style  173 cognitive stylistics, see stylistics comedy  34, 43, 45, 80, 100, 115, 118, 130, 149, 269, 277, 280, 283, 284, 378, 383, 385, 442, 458, 465, 515, 557, 576 common ground  35, 38, 61, 72, 74, 75, 79, 86, 242, 405, 472 communicative circles  33 communicative context  11, 32, 62, 515 communicative distance  240, 252 communicative immediacy  240, 252 communicative practice  15, 397, 399, 402, 409–414, 459 compliment  379, 411–413, 458, 475 conceptual metaphor, see metaphor conceptual metaphor theory  161, 186 contextualization cue  246 conversation analysis  4, 94, 146, 243, 500, 503, 533 conversational maxim  69, 70, 80, 109, 149, 150, 204, 206, 371, 428, 456 Cooperative Principle  69, 80, 197, 199, 204, 348, 371, 428, 431 corpus linguistics  4, 39, 109, 129, 142, 146, 172, 208, 278, 494, 526, 527 Correspondent Inference Theory  97, 111, 112, 114, 117 courtship romance  56 Critical Discourse Analysis  59, 99, 279, 367, 425, 426, 429, 443, 444, 446 cross-cultural pragmatics, see pragmatics crossing  279, 286, 289 cultural a-synchrony  401, 402, 412, 413 cultural enrichment  305, 307, 308

610 

Subject index

cultural filter  368 Cultural Materialism  443 cushioning 305 Czech Formalism  347 D defamiliarization  203, 307, 311, 341 deictics  83, 107, 177, 246, 247, 254, 379 detachment  243, 251, 253 detective novel  56, 104 dialect  14, 15, 77, 85, 135, 147, 148, 162, 254, 265–289, 298, 308, 318, 349, 350, 374, 377, 407, 414, 436, 555, 560, 570– 573 dialect, eye  265, 268, 269, 271, 272, 274, 275, 287, 560 dialectal variation, see variation dialogism  76, 405 dialogue dysfluency  243 diaspora literature  300, 307, 317, 318 diegesis, anchorage of  13, 132, 133, 307 diegetic effect  541, 542 discourse marker  9, 14, 59, 214, 238, 243, 247, 248, 253, 374, 375, 378, 379, 411, 412, 501, 576 discourse mode  58 discourse topic  250 discursive turn  457 disparagement humor  462 dispersive turn  9 distant reading  12, 55, 56, 67 doctor-patient interview  60, 61, 64–66, 71 docudrama 461 documentary  71, 183, 459 docusoap 459–461 domestication  402, 403, 411 Dothraki  139, 311, 346 double framework  33 double plane of communication  34 drama  1, 2, 10, 25–27, 33, 46–48, 50, 93, 95, 97, 106, 115, 118, 129, 130, 134, 143, 144, 147, 150, 209, 210, 212, 240, 243, 248, 249, 251, 253, 255,269, 315, 342, 375,382, 426, 428, 429, 431, 433, 437, 443–446, 461, 466, 467, 515, 516, 520, 523, 557 dramatic dialogue  47, 146, 240, 255, 431, 458 dramatic discourse  26, 27, 33, 46–50, 243, 458 dramatic recategorization  100 dramedy 149

dubbing  15, 16, 131, 273, 284, 300, 307, 316, 319, 379, 382–386, 397–416, 563 E Early Modern English  10, 208, 428, 429, 555, 561 eaves-dropper  31, 36, 36, 41, 60, 73, 255 elimination 302 Elvish  335, 336, 339, 346–350 embeddedness  33, 242 emic 471 emote  517, 527, 528, 542, 543 emotion  7, 16, 37, 72, 73, 95, 111, 113, 115, 116, 118, 132, 135, 136, 141–144, 146, 159, 164–166, 172, 174, 176, 177, 182, 248, 253, 256, 332, 333, 347, 381, 386, 403, 411, 431, 435, 441, 469, 474, 489– 491, 495, 504, 515–545, 561, 563, 565 – artefact  541, 544 – classification 519 – definition  516, 517 – talk  517, 523, 526, 527 emotional cue  524, 526, 529, 533–535, 541 emotional cycle  519, 521 emotional display  518–523, 533, 535, 536, 541 emotional involvement  16, 166, 177, 518, 538, 541, 545 emotional language  491, 495, 516, 524, 531, 534 empathy  7, 73, 95, 104, 115–118, 538, 543, 544 engrossment  56, 83 enregisterment  214, 266, 267, 298 envoice 272 epistemic stance, see stance epistemicity 491 estrangement  15, 83, 307, 329–357 ethnic shift  285 ethnic stylization  265, 267, 282, 285–289 ethnicity  143, 215, 282, 284, 286, 312 ethnography of speaking  57 ethnolect  14, 272, 276, 279, 377 ethnomethodological conversation analysis  243, 248 etic 471 evidentiality  491, 492 evocation  302, 310, 311, 313, 319, 542 excess poeticity, see poeticity extradiegetic  1, 2, 98, 164–166, 175, 425, 428, 442, 496, 497, 505, 509

Subject index  extradiegetic communication  1, 2, 425 eye dialect, see dialect F face aggravation  456 face attack  207, 380, 431, 433, 434, 456, 487 face-threatening act  350, 351, 412, 414, 426, 428, 430, 445, 456–458 facial expression  40, 51, 474, 489, 492, 502, 504, 524, 529, 532, 537 fandubbing 415 fansubbing  398, 399, 403, 415, 422 fantastic  332, 356, 357 fantasy  15, 56, 133, 300, 311, 329–357, 515, 516, 544 fictionality  6–8, 31, 37, 198, 199, 215 – panfictionality 7–8 fidelity  275, 399, 411, 415 first order politeness, see politeness fly-on-the-wall filming  461 focalization  160, 162–169, 175, 184, 186 footing  31, 74, 333 foregrounding  142, 173, 174, 202–204, 208, 210, 286, 307, 370 foreignization 402 forms of address, see terms of address fragmentation 251 frame  12, 13, 47, 55, 56, 60–65, 83, 161, 162, 337 frame analysis  55, 56, 60–65 free indirect speech, see speech French accent  266, 267, 270,275–277, 280, 285, 286,305, 309, 385 French cinema  286 functional linguistics  58, 59, 176, 207, 212, 367, 408, 491, 527 G gambit 247 Gastarbeiterliteratur  318 gaze  40, 235, 241, 254, 502, 534 gender  9, 12, 49, 100, 111, 143, 146, 284, 286, 312, 438, 464, 475 genre  4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 15, 25, 34, 43, 45, 46, 50, 55–86, 94, 97, 98, 101, 102, 134, 138, 144, 146–148, 150, 197, 200, 201, 207, 209, 212, 213, 253, 265–267, 269, 270, 274, 315, 329–333, 337, 342, 346, 356, 357, 403, 411, 426, 445, 458–461, 465, 503, 504, 515, 516, 523, 532, 538 – meta- 55, 66, 85, 86

611

gesture  27–29, 32, 40, 177–179, 241, 246, 349, 379, 386, 489, 492, 502, 524, 527, 529, 532, 534, 536, 537 grammaticalization 208 Great Vowel Shift  559, 560 greeting  137, 308, 400, 411–414 H hedge  115, 376, 492, 499 hegemonic reading  39, 279, 309 hesitation  9, 14, 31, 146, 238, 247–249, 374, 378, 412 heterodiegetic level  164, 165, 175, 445 heterogeneity  9, 25, 281, 469, 555, 557, 564, 565, 577 heteroglossia  207, 274, 289 historical pragmatics, see pragmatics homodiegetic level  164–167, 175, 445 homogenizing convention  301 horror  334, 515, 518, 543 humanizing approach  31, 95, 210 humor  13, 15, 43, 44, 47, 129, 132, 138, 140, 142–144, 147, 149, 150, 184, 274, 297, 307, 310, 316, 319, 384, 385, 409–412, 460, 462, 465, 469, 475 hypocrisy  428, 438–441 I identity construction  114, 213, 493, 576 idiolect  274, 374, 377, 411, 464, 575 illiteracy  271, 272 illocutionary act  15, 197, 203, 205, 329, 330, 333, 344, 354, 356, 425, 426 illocutionary force  329, 330, 332, 333, 338, 351–353, 357, 445 immediacy  213, 240, 252, 253, 495 implicature  3, 12, 52, 55, 57, 58, 61, 69, 72, 77, 80–86, 93, 94, 109, 162, 203–205, 210,354, 371–374, 403, 408, 409, 433, 443, 444, 465, 526, 532 – weak  12, 55, 57, 61, 69, 72, 77, 80–86, 205, 372 implied author  47, 48, 97, 427 implied reader  47, 48, 62, 97, 427, 428, 516 impoliteness  15, 94, 109, 111, 113, 114, 144, 206, 375, 380, 381, 425–446, 455–476, 562 – mock  433, 434 – impoliteness1 471 – impoliteness2 471

612 

Subject index

indexical field  298, 319 indexicality  111, 112, 150, 279, 282, 297, 318, 319, 575, 577 inference  38, 43, 55, 57–59, 61, 64, 74, 75, 79, 80, 83, 84, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 106, 108, 109, 111–114, 117, 397, 444, 468, 471, 472 informal  32, 71, 146, 253, 254, 270, 374, 378, 379, 381, 382 insert  246, 379 intensifier  146, 381, 411, 491, 495, 553, 564–567, 569 intentionality  98, 197, 198, 272, 373, 433, 470, 472 inter-cultural pragmatics, see pragmatics inter-language  283, 311 interactivity  252, 253, 255 interjection  59, 115, 142, 374, 375, 378, 379, 411, 414, 524, 525 interlingual representation  15, 397, 399, 401, 402, 410 interpersonal dynamics  403, 404, 408 interpersonal pragmatics, see pragmatics intertextuality  57, 73, 86, 132, 138, 139, 147, 373, 409, 411, 444 intonation  31, 246, 373, 374, 404, 492, 506, 508 intradiegetic  1, 2, 98, 164, 165, 425, 428, 442, 505, 509 intradiegetic communication  1, 2, 425 involvement  16, 83, 101, 104, 137, 166, 169, 177, 182, 211, 235, 243, 244, 251, 252, 253, 518, 538, 541, 544 isochrony 400 J Jafaican 214 K kinesic synchrony  400 Klingon  139, 311, 337, 338, 348–350, 357 L language game  57, 255 language, mock  279, 282, 285 – spoken  2, 4, 8–10, 32, 170, 184, 238– 244, 251, 252, 269, 301, 342, 373–375, 437, 492, 502, 503, 558, 564 – written  4, 8–10, 14, 238–243, 251, 252, 373–375, 492, 502, 503 layer of action  33, 36, 37

leave-taking  412, 413 linguicism 282 lip-synchrony 400 literacy  59,72, 104, 238, 239, 241, 273, 401 literary multilingualism, see multilingualism literary pragmatics, see pragmatics literary theory  3, 6, 48, 56–69, 163, 173, 203, 338, 357 locutionary act  203, 354 London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English  236, 243 M macaronic verse  314 mass media  33, 41, 146, 148, 150, 338, 346, 460, 461, 553, 554, 562, 563 Maxim of Manner  82, 204 Maxim of Quality  69–72, 82, 109, 204, 430, 431 Maxim of Quantity  80, 82, 109, 204, 345, 430 Maxim of Relation  204, 432 mediatisation 150 meta-genre, see genre metacommunication  14, 32, 243, 244–248, 304 metalanguage  244, 269, 476 metalinguistic comment  269, 275, 289, 302, 310, 336, 356, 474 metaphor  33, 34, 109, 161–163, 173, 174, 178–182, 186, 208, 212, 272, 277, 312, 330, 354, 355, 409, 410, 503, 519, 521, 525, 545 – conceptual  161, 162, 178–182, 186 – multimodal  163, 178–182, 186, 212 metapragmatic discourse  329, 330 metapragmatics  471, 476 method acting  520 metrolingualism 215 Middle English  208, 315, 561 mimesis  268, 301, 302, 380, 554 mind style  13, 93, 94, 98, 106, 108–110, 118, 159, 161–163, 171–183, 186, 211 mis-en-scène  27, 536, 539 mock impoliteness, see impoliteness mock language, see language mock politeness, see politeness modality  132, 133, 163, 168, 174–176, 186, 401, 491 model reader  62 mood  167, 185, 186, 272, 407

Subject index  multilingualism  14, 297–320, 367, 384–386, 411 – intertextual 314 – intratextual  314, 315 – literary 314 multimodal analysis  118, 176, 186, 503, 509, 535 multimodal metaphor, see metaphor multimodality  36, 40, 96, 118, 176–178, 182, 212, 400, 406, 533 multivariate analysis  558, 559 Mummerset 274 mutual knowledge  81 N n-gram  495, 499 narratee 97 narrative causality  13, 132, 133 narrative event  13, 132, 134 narrative perspective  13, 159–186, 213, 354, 489, 490, 540, 541 narratology  12, 13, 93, 106, 108, 144, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167, 171, 201, 210, 211, 539 narrator  13, 62, 70, 74–77, 83, 84, 93, 98, 105, 106–110, 118, 159–176, 185, 204, 206, 209, 211, 214, 269, 275, 299, 302, 303, 305, 316, 356, 415, 425, 426, 439, 445, 489, 496–498, 5001–505, 508, 509, 516, 523, 539–541 – covert  496, 497 – omniscient  13, 107, 160, 164, 169, 539, 540 – overt  489, 496–498, 504, 505 – unreliable  98, 105, 505 narratorial control  12, 105, 118 narratorial filter  13, 93, 98, 106, 118, 502 narratorial level  97, 98, 503, 504 neo-Gricean framework  205, 443, 470 nerdiness 145 New Historicism  443 New Realism  199 Nollywood 289 non-standard  78, 147, 148, 265–289, 400, 407, 410, 411, 560, 570 O Old English  336, 556, 564 onomastic level  15, 329, 330, 342, 356 onomatopoeia 377 orality  11, 13, 14, 32, 146, 235, 238–244,

613

248, 249, 251–257, 270, 374, 375, 400, 401, 407, 410–414, 436, 500 – conceptual  241, 242, 252, 253, 254 – feigned 375 – fictional 375 – fictive 375 orders of indexicality  279 Organon model  245 orientalism 279 Orientalist discourse  283 otherness  309, 409, 413, 415 overhearer  25, 31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43–46, 48, 73–76, 255, 256 – design  36, 41, 45, 48 overhearing  35, 36, 55, 69, 73–77, 252, 256 overlap  14, 31, 77, 146, 238, 246, 248–250, 253 P panfictionality, see fictionality paradox of fiction  7, 235, 331, 515, 520, 544 parasocial engagement  569–571, 573 parasocial interaction  563, 569 participant role  12, 25–50, 57, 60, 255, 445, 493 participation framework  25–50, 131, 147, 149, 159, 330, 535 participation structure  5, 12, 25–50, 131, 205, 209, 402, 415, 428 perception of characters  12, 94, 102, 106, 115–118, 287 perceptual dialectology  279 periodic motif  407 perlocutionary act  203, 330, 332–335, 338, 348, 356, 361 phonemic shift  574 plot  3, 5, 101–104, 117, 134, 135, 137, 141– 143, 148, 150, 160, 176, 206, 310, 315, 332, 355, 404, 425, 426, 431, 432, 446, 462, 473, 489, 509, 522, 539, 542 poetic effect  3, 57, 80–82, 84, 86, 200, 205 poeticity 329–357 – excess 348 – surplus  329, 330, 332–334, 336, 342, 347–349, 353, 355, 356 poetics  63, 204, 207, 208, 212, 370, 515, 516 politeness  10, 15, 76, 93, 109, 111, 113, 114, 150, 162, 205, 206, 210, 312, 350, 357, 367, 380–384, 402–404, 408, 412–415, 425–446, 455–476, 489, 561, 562 – mock  432, 434, 457

614 

Subject index

– politeness1 471 – politeness2 471 – principle  109, 206 – super-strategies 456 – theory  10, 205, 206, 426–430, 435, 436, 446, 462, 463 Polyglot wordplay  316 post-colonial  85, 297, 300, 307, 317 Postcolonialism 443 posture  241, 502, 524, 529, 532 pragmastylistics  171, 176, 202 pragmatic marker  202, 210, 491, 553 pragmatic turn  9 pragmaticalization 208 pragmatics, Anglo-American  1, 56, 57, 63, 67 – Continental European  1, 56, 57, 68 – cross-cultural  397, 402, 409–411, 476 – historical  9, 49, 55, 58, 60, 68, 81, 84, 86, 207, 208, 553, 561 – intercultural 410 – interpersonal  113, 118 – social 1 – theoretical 1 process-model of emotion  521, 527, 529 prosody  149, 415, 525, 532 Q quotative  553, 567, 568 R reality television  129, 138, 461, 476 recipient design  36, 41, 45, 48, 50, 255, 471 register  214, 314, 368, 374, 382, 400, 401, 404, 410, 414, 490, 494, 495, 566, 577 Relevance Theory  2, 3, 69, 80, 81, 97, 104, 205, 367, 370, 371, 372, 383, 403, 408, 425, 426, 428, 429, 443, 444 reported speech, see speech Rhetorical Genre Theory  12, 55, 56, 62–66, 84 romance  56, 59, 81, 309, 515 rudeness  145, 470 Russian Formalism  202 Russian Formalist approach  101 S sarcasm  33, 377, 434, 457 scenario  99, 106, 146, 536, 537, 545 schema  57, 99, 100, 102–105, 109, 111, 208, 210, 527, 528, 542 – theory  99, 102, 103, 109, 208

schemata  57, 58, 98–100, 102, 104, 117, 333 science fiction  15, 95, 311, 329–357 second order politeness, see politeness semiotics  111, 526 sexuality  145, 282 signalization  302, 303, 310, 311, 319 silent film  272 sitcom  27, 32, 33, 38, 43, 44, 138, 145, 148, 149, 277, 380, 384, 465, 563, 564 skopos theory  367 slang  138, 148, 214, 215, 276, 285, 431, 378, 382, 387, 562 Slayer Slag  138 small talk  63, 71, 137, 184, 381 soap opera  11, 570 social action  12, 56, 63, 65, 66, 69, 72, 73, 82–84, 202, 493 social cognition  99, 103 social constructionist approach  519, 522, 528, 531 social criticism  15, 297, 300, 307, 301, 311, 319 social psychology  97, 380, 403, 405 socialization 265 sociolect  14, 276, 279, 377, 411 sociolinguistics  144, 176, 553, 554, 577 sociological poetics  207 sound effect  61, 130, 182, 505–509, 538, 539 – acousmatic 185 – diegetic 185 – non-diegetic 185 – visualized 185 spatial positioning  502, 503 speech act  2, 93, 111, 112, 134, 168, 198, 203, 210, 255, 332, 333, 344, 345, 349– 351, 412, 425, 426, 428–430, 443, 445, 475, 528, 532, 534 – theory  93, 111, 112, 134, 203, 344, 425, 426, 428, 429, 443, 445 speech presentation  10, 93, 108, 110, 150, 162, 167–171, 186, 203, 208, 211, 274, 283, 429, 446, 495, 554, 560, 562 speech, direct  77, 105, 110, 167–171, 211, 214, 305, 308, 354, 540, 567 – free direct  105, 167, 168 – free indirect  110, 168, 170, 171 – indirect  77, 84, 168, 169, 211 – reported  12, 71, 77, 84, 85, 169, 211, 301, 495, spoken language, see language

Subject index  spy story  56 stance  15, 56, 77, 111, 115, 173, 174, 177, 253, 272, 397, 415, 489–509, 523, 534, 575 – affective  15, 173, 489–491 – attitudinal 491 – epistemic  15, 489–491, 495, 498, 499 – evaluative  15, 489–491, 494, 496, 497, 499 – multimodal  490, 493, 502, 503, 509 – non-linguistic means of  492 – paralinguistic means of  492 stigma  148, 267, 268, 271, 272, 275, 282, 285, 287, 310, 438 storyteller  70, 71, 74, 75 style  56, 57, 81, 135, 142, 143, 171, 173, 174, 197–216, 246, 248, 254, 267, 274, 282, 284, 289, 298, 301, 333, 342–345, 355, 372, 415, 429, 437, 443, 444, 491, 497, 507, 531, 562, 572, 573, 577 – cognitive 173 – marker 201 stylistics  3, 4, 11–14, 25, 48, 50, 84, 93, 99, 103, 107, 108, 113, 118, 131, 159–163, 166, 167, 171, 174, 186, 197–216, 238, 268, 279, 314, 407, 443, 445, 446, 462, 463, 469, 516 – cognitive  93, 99, 103, 174, 186, 202 – corpus  201, 208 – critical 207 – mulitmodal  118, 201 – new historical  201, 208 stylization  265, 267, 269, 272, 278–280, 282–289, 413, 414 subtitling  17, 300, 306, 307, 318, 379, 197–416 superdiversity  216, 289 superiority theory  462 surge feature  115 surplus of poeticity, see poeticity Survey of English Usage  243 suspension of disbelief  7, 14, 37, 46, 47, 147, 268, 299, 426 swearing  143, 145, 149, 375, 378, 381, 383, 384, 467, 475 swearword  253, 367, 381–384, 407, 525 sympathy  83, 84, 116, 330, 543 synchrony  400–402, 412, 413 – character 400 – kinesic 400 systemic functional approach  182, 403

615

Systemic Functional Linguistics  58, 59, 176, 207, 212, 491, 527 systemic functional model  207, 407, 408 T taboo  135, 143, 145, 381–384, 387, 410 talent show  460 telecinematic data  11, 12, 14, 39, 46, 406, 455–476, 545 telecinematic discourse  2, 5, 12, 13, 15, 16, 25–27, 33–50, 159, 163, 211, 243, 278, 311, 397, 398, 400, 402, 403, 410, 414, 415, 455–476, 500, 502–504, 515, 526, 535, 536, 538, 539, 544 television drama  1, 147, 382 television series  25, 27, 32, 39, 129, 149, 305, 337, 357, 374, 468, 495, 499, 501, 504, 505 telos 407 terms of address  145, 208, 210, 305, 414, 432, 575 text type  6, 7, 58, 201, 208, 211, 212, 216, 247, 374, 375 texture  161, 272, 273, 409 thanking 412 thought presentation  93, 110, 150, 162, 167, 169–171, 186, 208, 211, 214, 429, 446, 495 thought style  58, 59, 81, 82, 118, 343 thought, direct  77, 169, 170, 211, 214 – free direct  169 – free indirect  169–171, 214 – indirect  77, 169–171, 211, 214 thriller  56, 515 topic management  14, 235, 243, 249, 250 tragedy  442, 515 translation  15, 129, 284, 297, 298, 300–302, 305–307, 310–312, 316–319, 348, 349, 367–387, 397–399, 402, 404, 407, 410– 415, 462, 476 translation mimesis  301, 302 Translation Studies  312, 367, 368, 370, 374, 380, 381, 382, 387, 399, 402, 410 translation, embedded  305 turn management  14, 235, 243, 248 turn taking  14, 31, 32, 59, 64, 146, 149, 150, 210, 238, 243, 248–250, 304, 378 type of text, see text type U unreliable narrator, see narrator

616 

Subject index

V vague language  146, 491, 495 Valyrian  139, 311 variability  9, 269, 343, 555, 556, 558, 561, 564, 565 variation, dialectal  14, 15, 77, 147, 265–270, 274–276, 284, 298, 308, 377, 560 – ethnic  77, 111, 143, 214, 265–289, 300, 308 – historical  76, 554, 555 – regional  15, 77, 111, 147, 148, 265– 289, 300, 308, 575 – social  15, 77, 111, 143, 145, 147, 265– 289, 300, 308 verisimilitude  397, 412 vicarious pleasure  462, 468 village story  67 vlogs 16

voice  2, 13, 15, 55, 69, 72–78, 84, 85, 110, 111, 133, 143, 148, 159–186, 197, 207, 209–211, 242, 257, 265–267, 269, 272– 274, 277, 282, 284–289, 342, 345, 347, 371, 375, 397, 400, 405, 411, 415, 489, 490, 496–498, 501, 504, 505, 508, 509, 525, 532, 534 – narratorial  15, 305, 489, 490, 496, 504, 509 voice-over  13, 44, 130, 133, 147, 161, 180, 185, 305, 415, 504, 505–508 W writing presentation  208, 211 written language, see language Y youtube  11, 16, 286