Topic 9 (session A) - Speech Presentation > What happens when speech is presented > Task A answer

What happens when speech is presented

Task A - Our diagram and commentary

In the anterior, reported situation Stef talks to Mick. In the posterior, reported situation Dawn talks to you and tells you what Stef said to Mick. As the posterior situation is current for you it is close, and the anterior one is more remote. But as we shall see in subsequent tasks, that anterior, reported situation can seem more or less remote, depending upon the kind of speech presentation involved.

Note also that the 'two discourse' relation can be related to the diagram of the discourse structure of the novel which we looked at on the Discourse structure of 1st and 3rd person novels page:

If we thought about the speech presentation in terms of a novel, Dawn would be a first person narrator, telling you, her narratee, what the character, Stef, said to Mick, the other Character in the story.

In the 1st-person novel, the narrator effectively reports to the narratee (posterior situation) what he or she heard one character say to another (anterior situation). So the reporting discourse is that between narrator and narratee (level 2 above) and the reported situation is that between character A and character B (level 3 above). In 3rd-person narration, because the narrator is not a character in the story, and is conventionally assumed to be omniscient, the effect is more like one where we 'look in' on the characters' conversation, as it unfolds, without the effect of report. The kind of narrator that a novelist chooses to use thus affects how we view the speech which is presented to us.

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