Read more
This book investigates speech, writing, and thought presentation in a corpus of 19th-century narrative fiction. Beatrix Busse develops a new corpus-stylistic approach for analyzing and automatically identifying historical strategies of discourse presentation. On the basis of the identification of these diachronic patterns and their positioning in cultural-historical context, Busse shows how discourse presentation furthers narrative progression and shapes readers' expectations.
List of contents
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Tables and Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- 1.1 This Study and Its Aims
- 1.2 My Version of English Historical Linguistics
- Chapter 2: The Discourse Presentation Model So Far
- 2.1 Presentation of Voices: Leech and Short's (1981/2007) and Semino and Short's (2004) Models of Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation
- 2.2 The Notion of Faithfulness to an Anterior Discourse in Narrative Fiction
- 2.3 "State-of-the-Art" Research on Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in 19th-Century English
- 2.4 Additional Linguistic Frameworks and Models Necessary to the Analysis of Discourse Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction
- 2.5 Wrap up and What is Next
- Chapter 3: Methodology
- 3.1 The Corpus and Its Scope
- 3.2 The Annotation Scheme
- 3.3 The Annotation Procedure
- 3.4 Methodological Caveats
- Chapter 4: Types, Distribution, and Lexico-Grammatical Realization of Discourse Presentation Categories and Their Functional Implications
- 4.1 General Quantitative Observations
- 4.2 The Different Categories of the Modes of Discourse Presentation: Quantification of Tags and Number of Words by Which These Are Represented
- Chapter 5: Scales and Modes of Discourse Presentation and their Functions
- 5.1 A Note on Subjectivity
- 5.2 The Categories of Discourse Presentation
- 5.3. Subcategories of Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation
- 5.4 Summary Discourse Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction - Further Reflections
- Chapter 6: Towards Developing a Procedure for Automatically Identifying Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation
- 6.1 Preliminaries
- 6.2 The Procedure
- Chapter 7: Narrative Progression and Characterization: The Functional Interplay between Narration and Discourse Presentation
- 7.1. Reporting Strategies of NRS, NRT, and NRW and Discourse Presentation
- 7.2 Paralinguistic Narration
- 7.3 Imagination and Observation: Thought Presentation and Visual Narration in19th-Century Narrative Fiction
- Chapter 8: Conclusion
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Beatrix Busse is Vice-Rector of Student Affairs and Teaching and Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Cologne (Germany). She is Reviews Editor for the
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics and honorary research fellow at Glasgow University, and co-author or editor of multiple books including
Patterns in Language and Linguistics: New Perspectives on a Ubiquitous Concept (2019),
Rethinking Language, Text and Context (2018),
Key Terms in Stylistics (2010), and
Language and Style (2010). Her main research interests are corpus linguistics, stylistics, historical pragmatics, and language and urban space.
Summary
Reference to or quotation from someone's speech, thoughts, or writing is a key component of narrative. These reports further a narrative, make it more interesting, natural, and vivid, ask the reader to engage with it, and reflect historical cultural understandings of modes of discourse presentation. To a large extent, the way we perceive a story depends on the ways it presents discourse, and along with it, speech, writing, and thought.
In this book, Beatrix Busse investigates speech, writing, and thought presentation in a corpus of 19th-century narrative fiction including Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, and many others. At the intersection between corpus linguistics and stylistics, this book develops a new corpus-stylistic approach for systematically analyzing the different narrative strategies of discourse presentation in key pieces of 19th-century narrative fiction. Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction identifies diachronic patterns as well as unique authorial styles, and places them within their cultural-historical context. It also suggests ways for automatically identifying forms of discourse presentation, and shows that the presentation of characters' minds reflects an ideological as well as an epistemological concern about what cannot be reported, portrayed, or narrated. Through insightful interdisciplinary analysis, Busse demonstrates that discourse presentation fulfills the function of prospection and encapsulation, marks narrative progression, and shapes readers' expectations.
Additional text
A majestic study of speech, writing, and thought presentation in the 19th century novel. The use of highly focused corpus data and linguistic annotations greatly increase the depth offered by this work. Further depth comes from a wide range of perspectives taken on the subject, including cognitive, historical, narratological, and literary investigations. The result is a rich, highly textured, and insightful work.
