thought presentation twenty-five years on

7/25/2019 Thought Presentation Twenty-five Years On

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Mick Short

Lancaster University, UK

Thought Presentation Twenty-five Years On

1.

Introduction

In this article I will briefly review the model of speech and thought presentation

outlined in Chapter 10 of

5ry e in Fiction

(henceforth

SIF,

see 2 below ) and how it

has been developed through the corpus-based work of the Lancaster University

Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation (SW TP) project, which began in

1996. Th is project has resulted in a series of pub lications,' cu lmina ting in Semino

and Short's Corpus Stylistics: A Corpus-based Study of Speech, Thought and

Writing Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing (see 3 below). The brief

review in sections 2 and 3 is an initial exposition to enable a preliminary

exploration of some issues that the current version of the model has raised for the

analysis of thought p resentation, in the hope that this discussion will prompt further

research and debate. The newer m aterial constitutes (i) an attempt

to

use the no tion

of faithfulness in speech and writing report to explain the various effects on the

different d iscourse presentation scales (and thought presentation in particular), (ii)

an outline of an argument for the placing of NI (Internal Narration, see below)

outside the thought presentation scale (as Toolan 141 -2 has also suggested) rather

than within it, as proposed in Corpus Stylistics, and (iii) a suggestion that we should

explore treating embedded discourse (see 2 below) within a cognitive stylistics

framework, rather than assuming (as we did in Corpus Stylistics that embedded

discourse presentation is embedded within a higher-level discourse category.

Throughout I will use examples from fiction, though it should be remembered that

the Lancaster SW TP work relates to news report and (auto)biography as well.

For ease of reference, I provide in Figure 1 a list of the main discou rse

presentation acronym used in this article and what they stand for. Each acronyms

is explained when it is first introduced, but readers m ay, nonetheless find it helpful



226

Mick Short

Discourse presentation

peech presentation

FDS

DS

FIS

IS

NRSA

NV

N

Free Direct Speech

Direct Speech

Free Indirect Speech

Indirect Speech

Narrator s

(Re)presentation of a

Speech Act

Narrator s presentation

of Voice

Narration

Writing presentation

FDW

DW

FIW

IW

NRWA

NW

N

Free Direct Writing

Direct Writing

Free Indirect Writing

Indirect Writing

Narrator s


Writing Act

Narrator s

presentation of

Writing

SJarration

Thought presentation

FDT

DT

FIT

IT

NRTA

NT

NI

N

Free Direct Thought

Direct Thought

Free Indirect Thought

Indirect Thought

Narrator s


Thought Act

Narrator s

presentation of

Thought

Internal Narration

Narration

Fig. 1 Speech thought and writing presentation terms

2.

Speech and Thought P resentation in SIF

Chapter

10 of SIF has

been quite influential since

1981 in the

exploration

of

discourse presentation

in

fiction.

It was the

first attempt

to

distinguish

systematically between speech and thought presentation and to propose

explanations

for the

differences

in

effect between Free Indirect Speech

(FIS) and

Free Indirect Thought

(FIT) by

establishing

a

pair

of

parallel presentation clines

along with

a

proposal that

the

norms

for

speech

and

thought presentation were

at

different points

on

the scales. The 5/Fp resen tation scales are given in Figure

2 . On

the speech presentation scale below, N = Narration, NRSA = Narrator s

(Re)presentation of Speech Act, IS = Indirect Speech, DS = Direct Speech, and

FDS

-

Free Direct Speech.

The

thought presentation scale

had a

parallel

set of

categories, where

T =

Though t) replaced S. Th e NRSA and NRTA categories w ere

first proposed

in SIF as was the

siting

of

FD S

(and FDT) to the

right

of

DS

(and

DT)

on the

scale, ra ther than

in

between FIS

and

DS,

as had

been assumed earlier.

Speech presentation

IN] NRSA

Thought presentation

IS

FIS

S

orm

FDS



Thought Presentation Twenty-five Years On 227

3. Proposed Changes to the SIF Model Resulting from the

Findings of the Lancaster SW&TP Project

The Lancaster SW& TP project annotated exhaustively by hand m ore than quarter

of million w ords of extracts of around 2000 w ords from 240

texts,

divided equally

among three text types: fiction, news report, and (auto)biography. Although the

general SIF model of speech and thought presentation applied reasonably well to

the data examined, and in spite of the inevitable human error involved in hand-

annotation (especially when one remembers the extent of discourse presentation

ambiguity - e g between N arration and FIT ), our annotation work has changed the

iS/F discourse presentation model in various ways. Some of these changes are

spelled out below.

3.1 The Writing presentation Scale a third scale parallel to speech presen -

tation and its consequences for how we view thought presentation

We soon realized that we needed to establish a third discourse presentation scale,

writing presentation. Consider the boldened part of the extract below, which is

clearly a quotation from a written, not a spoken, source in the fictional world of the

novel:

Extracts from Ruby Lennox's school report, summer term, 1966 —

Ruby has a real

talent for acting . . . Ruby was the star of the school play.

(Atkinson 279, my emphasis)

Generally, writing presentation is not as common as speech and thought

presentation in the novel, but it does occur, as the above example shows (and

indeed, the epistolary novel arguably consists mainly of Free Direct Writing). It

can be very common in other text types as well (e.g. academic writing). In the

examp le above, we have Free Direct Writing

(FDW).

Writing presentation turns up

in the Lancaster SW&TP corpus in all the forms you find for speech presentation

and canonically (in spite of Tannen, Talking Voices particularly chapter 4, and

Fludernik, Fictions of Language 281-2, 409-14) has similar faithfulness

assumptions and resultant effects. Indeed it appears to be more can onic al than

speech presentation in relation to the meanings and effects associated with the

catego ries. This is because w riting is less transitory than speech and so it is much

easier to ensure , when w riting, that a quotation from a written source is faithful to

an original and for others to check up on it later (see Short, Sem ino, and W ynne for

further discussion). Arguably the canonical assumptions that we have for speech



228 Mick Short

speech were well known long before speech could be tape recorded or transcribed

rapidly, and have been most often discussed in relation to literary texts.

The fact that the speech and writing presentation scales pattern together helps

to show more clearly how the thought presentation scale is rather different: it is

really derived scale, based on rather imperfect analogy with speech and writing.

Unlike speech and writing, thought is not communication and is not publicly

available to others (indeed, only rather conscious thoughts appear to be available

introspectively to the thinkers them selves). This imperfect analogy transferred

from the comm unication presentation scales to a non-communicative form (where

any faithfulness considerations are effectively suspended) is what lies at the base

of the different prototypical effects of the thought presentation scale categories

compared with those on the speech and writing presentation scales.

3.2 M ajor category changes on the speech presentation scale^

Firstly, we found the need to establish one new, minimal, speech presentation

category, which can perhaps best be called Na rrator's presentation of V oice

(NV).^

This was to account for examples like She whispered secretly to him,

where we know that speech occurred but do not even know anything about the

speech act(s) used, let alone exactly what was said, or how. A nice exam ple can be

. seen in chapter three of

F.

Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside,

until the air is alive with

chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo

and introductions

forgotten on the spot, and

enthusiastic m eetings between w omen

w o

never knew each

other s names.

(42, my emphasis)

Here, the boldened parts refer minimally to a series of different speech events as

part of Fitzgerald's strategy to suggest the superficiality of Gatsby's grand party.

Introductions forgotten on the spo t is not included in the bolden ing above

because it tells us a little about the speech acts used at the beginning of some of the

conversations, and so is probably best categorized as NRSA .

Our other main-category conclusion was that the traditional distinction

between DS and FDS w as not really a distinction between major categories, as had

been generally assumed, but effectively a way of marking more minor variation

within the (now larger) DS category. We w ere already unsure about the DS/FDS

distinction when the project began (cf. Short, Speech presentation ), and we

decided to tag for the free direct forms simply in order to be able to test out our



Thought Presenta t ion Twenty-f ive Years

On 229

F D S , and

inven ting increasingly f inicky

and

unrea l is t ic tagging co nve nt ion s

to

keep

the

pheno men a apa rt ,

and

this

led us to

belie ve mo re f irmly that

the

D S / F D S

distinction lacked a firm foun dation.

The changes

I

have jus t sum marized leads

to an

altered speech presen tation

scale , as seen in F igure 3:

[N] NV NRSA IS FIS DS (including FDS)

igure

3

The orpus Stylistics speech presentation scale

and also

a

paralle l writ ing presen tation sc ale , wh ere

the

kind

of

p h e n o m e n a

descr ibed above

for

speech

can

also

be

easily found, leadin g

to the

wri t ing

presentation scale seen

in

F igure

4.

[N] NW NRWA IW FIW DW (including FDW)

igure 4 The orpus Stylistics writing presentation scale

O n e of the a rgumen ts tha t can be made aga ins t FD S and F D W as major ca tegor ies

distinct from

DS and DW is

that they

do not

seem mak e

an

extra prototypica l

faithfulness c la im compared with DS

and

D W ; inte res tingly the addi t ion of the N V

and NW ( Narra tor ' s repor t of Wri t ing ) ca tegor ies

at

the narra tor /p resente r end

of

the

sca les appears

to

c o m p le te

the

logical

set of

faithfulness possib il i t ies

in

speech and wri t ing presenta t ion. In F ig u r e 5, I spell these out for the speech

presenta t ion c l ine . The n u m b e r s on the left-hand side indicate each a ddition of a

fa ithfulness c la im and the r ight-hand co lum n g ives the re levant speech

presenta t ion ca tegory acronym. No ex t ra number is used for F IS as it is a m b i g u o u s

as to whether c la im 4 is be ing/can be m a d e .

Faithfulness claims ategory

1 Claim: speech occurred NV

2 Claims: 1 + speech act presented NRSA

3 Claims: 1 +

2 +

propositional content presented IS

Claims:

1

+ 2 + 3 (+ 4?????????)

RS

4 Claims:

1

+ 2 + 3 + words originally used to express DS

propositional content

igure 5 Prototypical faithfulness claim assumptions in speech presentation

The indeterminacy of claim 4 for FIS effectively captures its well-known

half-

way house character in relation to IS and DS. Substituting W for S and V



230 Mick Shor t

interestingly with some other terms which can often be found in non-technical

characterizations of discourse presentation, as well as other aspects of presentation

in the novel. Fig ure 6 i l lustrates speech prese ntation but also applies to writ ing

presen ta t ion .

[N] NV NRSA IS n s DS (including FDS)

«

Faithfulness

->•

<- Summary

-v

< - Distance, calmness,

etc ->• < -

Vividn ess, drama , etc.

->

••-

Tell ing -^ <- Showing -*

Figure 6 Prototypical effects of the categories on the speech presentation scale

T he faithfulness idea subscribed to in SIF also seems to be essential if w e are to be

able to explain how the effects of vividness, summary and the like in discourse

presentation come about. Note how summary and vividness are complementary;

and on the speech presentation scale, this seems to match up with the showing/

telling distinction first suggested by Lubbock and fleshed out by Booth and others.

Summary does not apply to NV but can be prototypically associated w ith NRSA

(and IS?) on the scale, although it is possible in fact to find exam ples of summary

using other categories on the scale, when a w riter wants to summ arize something

in a mo re dramatic or vivid way than normal. For example, the passage from Jane

Austen's Persuasion quoted in the first edition of SIF (326) appears to be FIS

summary and that from Dickens's Bleak House SIF 323) appears to be FDS

summary, as the dashes and parentheses in the quotations make clear. These are

fictional examples, of course, but non-fictional examples can also be found (see

Short, Speech Presentation ).

4 Thought Presentation

Now that the major proposed changes in relation to speech and writing presentation

categories have been outlined we can concentrate on thought presentation. As in

the original SIF model, the categories on the thought presentation scale in Corpus

Stylistics parallel that for speech and writing presen tation, but with the assumption

that the presentation categories will have different effects, as a general

consequence of the fact that the notion of faithfulness cannot apply to thought

presentation. Indeed, there is something of an issue, of

course,

concerning to what

extent, outside fiction, our thoughts come to us in linguistic form at all. In Figure

7,1 give the thought presentation cline as presented in Sem ino and Sh ort's Corpus



Tho ugh t Presenta t ion Twen ty-f ive Years On 231

[N] NI NRTA IT FIT DT FDT

<- Dis tance , calmness, etc. ->• •<- Vividness, drama, etc -*

<- Telling - • • < - h o w i n g ->•

Figure 7. Prototypical effects of the categories on the thought presentation scale

Because faithfulness does not apply, that aspect of the scale has been rem oved , as

has the summ ary aspect; there is no possibility of assuming a fictional orig ina l

which can be approximated to, more, or less, in the presentation of thought. The

result appears to be a series of effect scales that line up with one another and with

the change taking place at the IT/FIT boundary. The possibility of summary is

replaced with a set of effects relating to the extent of narrator interfere nce or

reader distan cing from the thoughts presented as we mo ve along the though t

presentation scale. Now I will examine the categories on the thought presentation

scale a bit more carefully.

4.1 Narrator s (Re)presentation of a Thought Act (NRTA)

Because thought is not communication, the most inexact thought presentation

category, on the analogy with the speech and writing presentation categories, is

probably the Narrator's (Re)presentation of Thought Act (NR TA ). NRSA is the

speech presentation category most canonically associated with summ ary, but

s

we

have just noted, summary does not apply sensibly to thought presentation.

Mo reover, the number of thought

act

verbs available to us is dramatically smaller

than the number of speech act verbs. There are, however, plenty of thought

presentation equivalents of speech acts in fictional texts and elsewhere. Below is an

example from Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells:

Even in the West End, in Mayfair and the squares about Pall Mall, Ewart was presently

to remind me the face of the old aristocratic dignity was fairer than its substance, here

were actors and actresses, here moneylenders and Jews, here bold financial ad venturers,

and

thought of my uncle s frayed cuff as he pointed out this house in the park and that.

(98, my emphasis)

Here, brief non-propositional thought (NRTA), reminding us of the poverty of the

narrato r's u ncle, is contrasted with E wa rt's expansive critique (using IS and FIS)

of the rich w hich precedes it. Hence it seems worth p reserving the NR TA category

to label phenomena like the example above, so that we can characterize relevant

textual effects more accurately.



232 M ick Short

or from DW to FDW, the free variants are merely minor variants of DS or DW.

As the notion of faithfulness to an original does not apply to thought presentation

it is an open question whether the DT /FDT distinction should be treated in a similar

way. Future research is needed to decide the issue, but a few preliminary remarks

here may be helpful. Firstly, our corpus suggests that (F)DS and (F)DW occur

rather often (see

Corpus Stylistics

67-8 , 88-96, 100-101, and 10 8-11 1), and they

almost always use orthographical quotation devices. The use of F)DS or (F)DW

without quotation marks or some orthographic equivalent (e.g. indentation,

italicization, or capitalization of the quotation) is rare. On the thought presentation

scale, however, w e seem to have a mirror image of what we find for the speech and

writing presentation scales: (F)DT is less comm on than the other full thought

presentation forms (see

Corpus Stylistics

115; 118-22), and (F)DT without an

orthographical quotation device is much more common than instances with

quotation marks. Indeed, in many novels (spy fiction novels are a good source of

examples) the presence or absence of quotation marks or an equivalent

orthographical device is often used to dem arcate speech presentation clearly from

thought presentation. In the example below, Harry Pendel comes to bed late after

a long day, to find that his wife is unexpected ly still awake, sitting up in bed staring

at him:

'What's wrong' he whispered, dreading a row that would wake the children.

Reaching out her long arms she clutched him fiercely against her, and he discovered that

her face was sticky with tears.

'Harry, I'm really sorry, I want you to know that. Really, really sorry.' She was keeping

him and not letting him kiss her in return. 'You're not to forgive me, Harry, not yet.

You're a good fine man and a fine husband, and you're earning great, and my father was

right, I'm a cold mean-hearted bitch and I wouldn't know a kind word if it got up and bit

me in the butt.'

It s too late, he thought as she took him. This

s

who we should have been before it was

too late.

(Le Carre,

91,

my emphasis)

The Free Direct Thought without quotation marks at the end of the quotation

contrasts with the previous speech between Harry and his wife, and so signals to us

the contrast between Harry 's external and inner worlds. A parallel use can be seen

throughout Hemingway's

The Old Man and the Sea

In a minority of

cases,

however, the (F)DT can involve quotation marks or a

grapho logical eq uivalent. In the example below, forms with and without quotation



Thought Presentation Twenty-five Years

On 233

'How absurd he look s ' thought Mary, as she glanced at him. 'L ike a bull calf. A blushing

bull calf.

'Do we mind? '

Da mn ed innocent li ttle bound er

George w as working up a r ighteous

indignation. I should just think we do mind. And I ll t rouble you to . . .

Mary broke into laughter . We don ' t mind at all, she said. Not in the least . '

(Huxley 137, my emphasis)

A stranger

is

trespassing

on

George

and

Mary's family land

and

says

so

openly,

asking Do you mi nd ?'. M ary 's DT in the second paragraph is in quotation m arks,

as well as having a reporting clause, but G eorg e's (which I have boldened for ease

of reference) has neither. The two forms do not seem spectacularly different in

terms of effect, as far as I can see. They are both exclamatory, and the difference

in treatment

is

most likely

a

result

of

the graphological inelegance

and

possible

confusion which could result if quotation marks w ere used for George's thought as

well

as for his

adjacent speech. That said, once

a

contrasting pattern

is

perceived,

readers

may

well want

to

ascribe significance

to it.

Given that

the

encounter

is

being described mainly from Mary's viewpoint, perhaps Mary's thoughts

are

foregrounded more

(and so

might

be

seen

to be

more consciously produced )

and

perhaps George's

FDT

reaction

is

being presented

as

hypothetical thought; w hat

Mary inferre that George

was

thinking?''

Ouotation marks

set DT off

more starkly orthographically from

the

surrounding narrative. Hence they

may

sometimes

be

used

in

preference

to the

unmarked form

to

signal very dramatic internal effects, indications

of

great

surprise, etc.

In

first-person narrations

in

particular,

it

would seem mo re plausible

that an author m ight choose to use (F)DT without quotation marks in order to blend

the world of the narrator with that of the first-person character, but I know of no

clear exam ples. That said, it is not at all clear that the DT/FD T distinction marks big

differences

in

effect,

any

more than

the

DS/FDS

or

DW/FDW distinctions

do. A

more com prehensive and systematic examination of DT/FDT, however, is clearly

needed before reliable conclusions can be drawn.

4.3 Internal Narration NI) and Narrator's reference to Thought NT)

While we were conducting the Lancaster SW&TP project we noticed many

examples like the following:

He disliked and slightly feared R ichard P earce , who was almost as big as himself.

(Ballard

170)



234 M ick Short

Partly because we had observed no straightforward thought presentation

equivalents of NV and NW in our thought presentation data, we came to assume on

the Lancaster SW &T P project that NI was the thought-presentation equivalent of

NV and NW, and so in our various publications, including Corpus Stylistics we

placed NI in the equivalent place on the thought presentation cline to NV and NW

on the speech and writing presentation ctines.

But it is arguable (as Michael T oolan has already suggested in Narrative 142)

that NI

is

best seen as part of na rration, and

so

outside the thought presentation scale

as such. On this readin g, cases of NI are the statements that the narrator mak es

about the inner world of his or her characters (rather than about the external world

of the fiction), as is suggested by the internal narration label, which is how this

sort of phenomenon was described in S IF (341-2). One of the pieces of evidence

which favor this latter view is that although w e did not code any of the exam ples in

our corpus as such, it is possible to find more straightforward thought presentation

equivalences of NV and NW , which I will refer to as NT (N arrator's presentation

of Thought, see b elow). I had begun to notice one or two relevant examples outside

our corpus while Elena Semino and I were completing the manuscript of Corpus

Stylistics and w e discussed the issue briefly in the conclusion to that book. S ince

then, I have found more exam ples, some of which I discuss below.

There are many examples of

N

in our corpus , and the category covers a fairly

wide range of phenom ena, partly because we used it

to

deal with things we were not

sure how to deal with the narrator-domina ted end of the presentation scale. The two

examples above describe mind states, but the first is arguably more durative than

the second. The exam ple below, how ever, seems to be a blend of perception and a

mind state:

I became aware of the age of this old crone of a ship for she is positively beaked in the

manner ofthe last century and flimsy, I should

judge,

about the bow withal.

(Golding 34)

Now I will turn to the Narra tor's presentation of Thoug ht

(NT).

The example below

com es from Complicity by Iain Banks. This story alternates from chap ter to chapter

between a first-person and a second-person narration. The narrator of the first-

person chap ters is a journalist who becom es accused by the police of a series of

murders which he is himself investigating. He always seems to have been in the

right place at the right time and so becomes a possible suspect. The second-person



Th oug ht Presentation Tw enty-five Years On 235

privy to what he is thinking , which distance s us from him em otio nally . But it soon

becomes clear by inference that he is experimenting with ways of making his

victim suffer before he finally dies.

You let him slump back again so that he's sitting against the chicken-wire gate and when

his eyes start to open you pull his head forward by the hair and cosh him again. He falls

to the side. You put the plastic ties in your

pocket

You re thinking The foxhounds

continue barking and

yelping.

Banks 56-7, my emphasis)

It is not surprising that NT is used infrequently in novels. By and large, novelists

usually w ant to show the internal even ts of their cha racte rs, particula rly their m ajor

cha racte rs, as a way of getting us to eng age with their internal w orlds, not

tell

those

internal eve nts. So the fuller form s, like FIT , hav e obv ious benefits, and N T is

only likely to occur when a narrator wants to withdraw for some strategic reason

from the showing technique we have come to expect.

On ce this strategic effect has been no ticed, it can be seen that detec tive stories

are likely to be a richer sou rce of NT than m ost nov els; and it is interesting to no te

that

I

have found eight separate exam ples of NT in

Com plicity.

This relatively high

incidence of a rather rare phenomenon foregrounds its tactical use in

Complicity

but NT can also be found, for example, in Raymond Chandler 's Philip Marlowe

novels, whenever Marlowe is thinking about something that would let the reader

into the secret of who the murderer is (see

Corpus Stylistics

228-9 for examples) .

4 4 Where should NI and NT come on the thought presentation scale?

I would like to argue, on the grounds of equivalence of the phen om ena, that NT on

the thought presentation scale, as in Figure 8 below, should occupy the equiva lent

place to NV and NW on the speech and writing presentation scales. This in turn

raises the issue of where NI should be located. We could argue that it is thought

presentation and so is on the scale next to NT or, as was assumed in SIF and

prop osed by To olan, that it should be thoug ht of as part of narratio n pro pe r (the

narration of internal states and events, paralleling the narration of external states

and ev ents) . Th e issue is difficult, in that the exam ples which are coded as NI in the

Lancaster SW&TP corpus appear to cover a wide range of different kinds of

phenomena, some of which are more complex than others, and I think that in the

future our NI and other codings at the narrator end of the thought p resentation

scale need to be carefully re-exa m ined. B ut my provisional view is that the thou ght



236 Mick Short

I know that others have intuitions which are different from those expressed here,

and so the exact nature of the left-hand part ofthe above sca le clearly needs further

analysis and discussion. To get the ball rolling, I outline some argum ents below for

NI being part of narration, and not part of the thought presentation scale itself as

indicated in Figure 7.

The prototypical examples of NI do not look like presentations of

thoughts and/or thought processes, but narratorial statements about the

internal world (either momentary or durative mind states) of characters,

as opposed to the external fictional world.

What exactly counts as an example of NI needs further examination,

whereas, what counts as NT, like NV and NW , is rather clear.

Thoughts are often about displaced phenomena but, prototypically, mind

states and emotions are related to a speaker's current context in the

relevant fictional or non-fictional world. If references to mind states and

emotions are displaced, they seem to need to be embedded within a

discourse presentation mode.

Thought is part of cognition, and cognition is complex and not welt

understood. Indeed, many psychologists refer only to the more general

term. But we cannot automatically assume that all cognition is thought.

Human beings seem to use the distinction rather a lot, when we discuss

ourselves and other people, as well as when we produce texts, after all.

• NI canno t very easily be transformed into the various positions on the

thought presentation scale because mental states and emotions are not

always representable as thoughts.

There are obvious descriptive and analytical advantages in keeping the

speech, writing and thought presentation scales maximally parallel.

4 5 Selection and use of terms

One of the general issues which needs to be addressed if we to com e to a balanced

view ofthe NI problem is how specific or generalized our descriptive terms need

to be for us to be able to provide effective stylistic ana lyses of texts. We w ant our

descriptive apparatus to be generalizable across different texts and text types, but



Thoug ht Presentation Twenty-five Years On 237

"writing presentation," and "thought p resentation" to the general term "discourse

presentation." This is because using the more general term can hide important

differences among the three presentation scales, for example differences in the

frequency of use of different categories and differences in the prototypical effects

of different categories. Hence I also worry that the use of general terms like

"cognition" might make it more difficult to discriminate analytically among the

perceptions, feelings and thoughts of characters, distinctions which readers and

critics often feel the need to make.

For similar reasons, I am suspicious of terms like "represented perception"

(Brinton ) and m ore specific forms like "free indirect perception" (Chatm an 205) to

describe what happens when, for example a character's perceptions are narrated

without being introduced by "he saw" or "she heard." There is a clear structural

parallel between this sort of Case and the omission of a reporting clause in many

cases of Free Indirect Tho ught, and often there will also be a mixture of cha racter-

based and narrator-based deixis, as in Free Indirect Thought. But these linguistic

forms are, in any case, commonly used outside discourse presentation as well as

within it, and the descriptor "free indirect" only m akes good sense in relation to a

system of presentation choices ("direct," "free indirect," indirect, etc.) within

discourse presentation. This system of choices is not available to a writer when

narrating character perceptions and so the use of "free indirect" in relation to

perception is, in my view, not advisable.

There is a clear danger that terminological conflations of the sort I have

described will make it harder for us to distinguish genu inely different phen om ena,

and so be analytically precise, something which could well apply in the

examination of N and related phenomena. To get the descriptive balance right we

need first to make the distinctions and test their accuracy and usefulness (as the

Lancaster SW&TP project did for the direct and free direct forms) before we can

make a principled and well-thought-out decision to retain or abandon those

distinctions.

4.6 Thought presentation and discourse embedding

In the Lancaster SW &T P project we became aware of

a

textual phenom enon which

we called discourse emb edding. A clear example of this phenomenon is:

"Mr Willis, Mr W illis Do not omit

to invite Mr Talbot to glance at the captain's

may



238 M ick Short

Here we have a stretch of Direct Speech within w hich the speaker a lludes to future

acts of speech which he is telling Mr Willis to perform. The first embedded

exam ple involves IS and the second NRSA (with a further NRSA embedded inside

that). It was examples like this that led us to assum e that one discourse presentation

category could be embedded inside another. Here it is easy to say that the IS and

NRSA is embedded inside the DS because the outer DS is marked off by the

quotation marks, and in all our publications to date we have assumed (e.g. orpus

Stylistics 171-82) that presented discourses are embedded inside other presented

discourses.

Many examples of discourse embedding in speech and writing presentation

involve a DS frame. But the following example from Joyce's famous story

Eveline, involves

a

thought presentation frame, and makes the above assum ption

a bit more difficult to sustain:

What would they say of her in the tores when they found out that she had run away with

a

fellow?

ay she was a

fool, perhaps,

and her place would be

filled

up by

advertisement.

Miss Gavan would be

glad

She had always had

an

edge

on

her, especially whenever there

were people listening.

Miss Hill, don't you see these ladies are waiting?

'Look lively. Miss Hill, please.'

She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.

(Joyce 38)

Here we have the free indirect presentation of Eveline's thoughts about the future,

as she im agines it, in the first three sentences, followed by her memory of life in the

shop with Miss Gavan as her boss in the fourth (a sentence which is formally

ambiguous between FIT and Narration). This memory leads to two DS

presentations of what Miss Gavan said to Eveline. The fact that the two DS

sentences have separate quotation marks and paragraph indents suggests that,

rather than referring to just two individual speech events, the sentences allude to

two different but typical kinds of occasion when Miss Gavan ordered Eveline

about. This view is strengthened when we consider the iterative context provided

by the previous N-F IT sentence (cf. alw ays, especially when ever ). The DS

forms appear to increase the vividness of the recollection and strengthen our

perception of the psycho logical salience of her memories for Eveline. This

percep tion of salience in turn helps us to assum e that Eveline will go with Frank at

the end of the story, and so be surprised when she does not.



Thoug ht Presentation Twenty-five Years On 239

because (i) the thought presentation is not all in the same presentational mode

(which is not an unusual situation in thought presen tation), (ii) the speech sentences

are not within a sentence involving a higher-level form of discourse presentation

and (iii) the paragraph boundary between the thought and the speech pushes the

presentation forms further apart.

In any case, what appears to need capturing here, in ordinary language terms,

is not whether the embedded DS forms are inside N-F IT or FIT, but the fact that we

are within Eveline's mental space, moving within it from hypotheses to memories

and back again, and that the iterative memories are presented to us in a particular

form (DS ), which therefore makes them vivid. Hence

a

better way of characterizing

what happens might well be to use a mental wo rlds approach. That said, there are

currently various competing cognitive m odels (e.g. text worlds, possible w orlds,

mental spaces and blending theory), each of which have particular advantages and

disadv antages . It is not yet clear which of these models to choo se, if

any,

and what

knock-on consequences there would be for discourse presentation theory more

generally. This issue clearly needs more research before we decide how best to

account for the phenomenon of discourse em bedd ing.

5.

Conclusion

There are clearly plenty of issues which still need resolution in relation to how

discourse presentation in its various manifestations should be described. Whether

or not others agree with the views presented here, I do not think we w ill be able to

be clear about what needs to be described and how, unless we are careful to use

enough distinctions to be able to account for the phenomena adequately. This does

not mean, however, that we need to multiply categories and descriptions

in extenso

as some approaches to traditional rhetoric d id. Instead, we need to be careful that

the distinctions we make have functional consequences which are useful in

explaining how readers understand texts, and are affected by them.

Notes

' For exam ple, Semino, Short, and C ulpeper; Sem ino, Short, and W ynne;

Short, Wynne, and Semino; and Short.

We also introduced a series of sub-categorizations (e.g. distinguishing

between hypothetical and non-hypothetical speech within each presentation

category) which I do not have the space to go into here.



240 Mick Short

we had already used N R S as a label to apply to reporting clauses and related non-

clausal speech introducing structures.

''Apa rt from sum mary in Figure 5, the other terms can also apply to non-

linguistic as well as linguistic phenomena.

• Such fine discrim inations are hard to pin down and be sure abou t, of course.

They involve

post hoc

rationalization of a sort that is difficult to substantiate

empirically, even with carefully set-up informant testing, and without large

numbers of informants it is difficult to know whether what is discovered

empirically is representative.

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