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What happens when speech is presented
Task B - our answers
The scale
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'Know most detail about what 'she'
said'
'Know least detail about what 'she' said'
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- 'I wasn't here yesterday, you idiot,' she said.
- She told him that she had not been their the day before.
- She pointed out his error.
- She spoke severly to him.
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What we have here are just some of the ways in which speech can be
reported in real life and the speech of characters can be presented
in novels. Effectively, we have a varying mix of character and narrator.
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With Direct Speech (DS) we know, within what is usually called the
reported
clause, because it connects to the reported discourse situation,
exactly what the character said and the words and grammatical structures
used to say it. The only indications of the narrator in our example
are the quotation marks and the 'she said', which is normally called
the reporting
clause because it connects to the reporting discourse situation.
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With Indirect Speech (IS) we know the propositional
content of what the character said from the reported clause, but
the words and structures used to report it belong to the narrator,
just like those of the reporting clause, not the character.
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With Narrator's Representation of Speech Act (NRSA), as with IS,
the words and structures below to the narrator, and the only trace
of the character is a summary of what she said, including an indication
of the speech act used by the character. Unlike DS and IS, there is
no reported clause at all.
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With Narrators's Representation of Voice (NV), all we know is that
the female character said something to the other character. We don't
even know what speech act was used, let alone what was said or what
words were used to say it.
Hence we can feel 'close up', or 'further away' from what the character
says, much like the way we noticed in Task A on the Linguistic Indicators
of Point of View page, that the sentences in the extract from Virginia
Woolf's 'Solid Objects' first positioned us a long way away from the two
men and then brought them closer and closer to us.
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