Direct Speech, Self-presentation and Communities of Practice

Sofia Lampropoulou

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781472534781
• eBook ISBN: 9781441141934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book deals with speech representation in Greek adolescents' storytelling and investigates how members of different communities of practice present themselves and other characters as interactional protagonists through the stories they tell. The work puts forth a dynamic approach that examines (direct) speech representation at the local and the broader socio-cultural context in which it is embedded. The concept of community of practice accounts for direct speech variation, and direct speech is seen as the linguistic manifestation of shared repertoire of particular communities of practice. The book combines qualitative with quantitative methods of study and brings together relevant theories of speech representation, narrative analysis and self-presentation.

Chapter 1

Speech Representation and Direct Speech

Introduction

The representation of other voices through discourse, generally referred to as reported speech, is a pervasive linguistic phenomenon that has been addressed by scholars in a variety of subfields of linguistics. Depending on the theoretical background, various approaches have been adopted regarding the forms and functions it embeds, either in written and/or in spoken language. Overall, it has been examined in traditional sentence grammar studies as well as in text-oriented approaches. The latter includes among others, literary narratives, media texts, academic writing and spoken language. In this chapter, I present an overview of approaches relevant to this work, including structural, stylistic and sociolinguistic studies. I address functions of direct speech, including dramatization and involvement, evaluation, argumentation and self-presentation. This study follows the line of research that views the representation of speech as contributing to self-presentation. To this extent, I discuss the benefits of delving into direct speech, thus addressing both its content and functions and considering both the local interactional and broader social context in which it is embedded.

Terminological Issues

Before proceeding to the theoretical considerations, it is instructive I address some terminological issues. I will present the terms that have occasionally been employed to describe the notion of ‘representing other voices’ in different fields and I will explain my decisions concerning the terminology I use for this work. In particular, the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘speech’ have often been used interchangeably. The same applies to the terms ‘report’, ‘presentation’ and ‘representation’.

To unpack the terms and the corresponding approaches, I follow the terminological distinctions as discussed and explained by Short et al. (2002), according to whom, for some writers, the term ‘discourse’ means language in general and for others it is exclusively concerned with spoken language (2002: 333–4; see also Tannen, 1989). In studies of fictional prose, the term ‘discourse’ often includes the use of speech, thought and writing; to this extent, the term ‘reported discourse’ or ‘represented discourse’ is employed to denote representation of either speech, thought or writing. The distinction between speech, thought and writing is relevant to the conversational data at hand. My informants very often refer to what they have said or heard in previous contexts; thus, they employ speech representation. Thought and writing representation are also present, as my informants refer to what they themselves or other story participants have written or thought on previous occasions. As I discuss in the analysis chapters, speech, thought and writing representation differ in terms of frequency, meaning and function in the present data. Therefore, this work distinguishes among the three. In this respect, the term ‘speech’ will be employed only when referring to talk. I will occasionally use ‘discourse’ as a generic term, including speech, writing and thought as hyponyms.

With regards to the terms ‘report’, ‘presentation’ and ‘representation, the term ‘presentation’ is mainly used by stylistic approaches. These approaches use as data fictional texts that do not involve an anterior discourse situation independent of the reporting discourse, thus the term ‘presentation’ is appropriate in this context (Short et al., 2002: 336). The terms ‘report’ and ‘representation’ both imply an anterior/ original discourse situation, which is reported/represented in the posterior discourse. ‘Report’ is mainly used in linguistic traditions where the analysis is based on constructed examples and not on naturally occurring data as the object of investigation. Being used in traditional approaches, the term ‘report’ presupposes that ‘the relation between, for example direct speech and the speech in the anterior situation which it reports is unproblematic’ (ibid: 336). This is a far cry from what holds true for naturally occurring data. It is by now a truism that speech quotations should not be seen as faithful reports of the original utterances but rather as reconstructions of the original speech (Tannen, 1989).¹ Taking into account that my data are conversational, the problematic relation between speech representation and reporting contexts is particularly significant. As I will explain, it is unlikely that speech will be transferred from a temporal context to another without being modified and speakers often construct the represented words depending on the representing context. For this reason, the term ‘representation’ is adopted throughout the course of this work when I discuss approaches that are concerned with spoken language. The term ‘speech presentation’ will be employed to refer to work dealing with literary texts. Finally, ‘report’ will be used for traditional accounts that are mainly concerned with grammatical transformations of invented sentences.

I will be using the term ‘reporter’ to denote the person/speaker who represents the original words. The adoption of this specific term is due to the fact that there is no derived noun that denotes an agent from the verb ‘represent’. Furthermore, the terms ‘reporter’ and ‘narrator’ will be used interchangeably, as this work focuses on speech representation in conversational narratives. This implies that the narrators are also the producers of speech representation, the reporters, as they represent their own or other speakers’ words in the storytelling/posterior context.

After having unfolded the terminological concerns, I proceed to the overview of some influential works on speech (re)presentation, including literary and non-literary, written and spoken data.

Voices and Words

The dialogic dimension of language and the dynamic nature of speech representation have its roots in the philosophy of language and particularly in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986):

In real life people talk most of all about what others talk about – they transmit, recall, weigh and pass judgment on other people’s words, opinions, assertions, information; people are upset by others’ words, or agree with them, contest them, refer to them and so forth. (ibid, 1981: 338)

This quotation suggests that speech representation is ubiquitous in everyday life, as the majority of our everyday verbal encounters are concerned with talk. We very often use talk to represent what we have heard or said in previous contexts, or even to convey what will potentially be said in future contexts etc. In everyday life, we might even construct whole interactions on the basis of words that either we or others have heard or told. We report things that made us happy, upset, nervous and so forth. We even draw conclusions on somebody’s personality based on what he/she told us. As talk is an integral part of everyday life, speech representation is also central because it relates anterior to posterior talk, and as such it becomes part of our everyday personal experiences. Bakhtin’s often quoted words are revealing:

Any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere […]. Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere. Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account. (Bakhtin, 1986: 91)

These observations suggest that, among other things, language is inherently contextual. Every utterance refers back to others and cannot be separated from its surroundings. In other words, an utterance cannot stand on its own without taking into consideration previous or future utterances, as ‘words bring with them the contexts where they have lived’ (ibid, 1981: 293). When people use language they rely on some mutually understood relationships that may be related to the contexts in which an utterance occurred. As a result, language is polyphonic, since an utterance involves a range of other voices that come along with it. In a similar vein, Bakhtin argues that utterances are filled with dialogic overtones (ibid: 92). This means that, because they respond to previous utterances/contexts, they are in ongoing interaction with and they embed previously or potentially told utterances. To this extent, language is always multi-voiced. According to Bakhtin, these accompanying contexts presuppose utterances as if the interlocutor were already aware of them. These might also be repeated in order to be directly introduced and/or remembered. These ideas have inspired the concept of ‘intertextuality’, which relates to the interconnection between texts on a vertical axis and the interconnection between author and readers of texts on a horizontal axis (Kristeva, 1980). Along with texts come discourses and ideologies that determine and challenge subjectivity.

The process of representing one’s talk within posterior talk certainly involves the subjective contribution of the person who represents it. This is reflected in Bakhtin’s observation: ‘our speech, that is, all our utterances, is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of our “our-own-ness”, varying degrees of awareness and detachment’ (ibid: 89). The represented words are thus permeated with the current reporter’s subjectivity. As context, temporal and spatial loci change, meaning is reshaped; this process has been described as re-accentuation (ibid). For Bakhtin, readers and authors may re-accentuate words and texts and thus every reading is always a re-writing. Applying these ideas on speech representation, we can see that the representation of an utterance involves both the perspective of the speaker of the original words and of the producer of the represented words; and every speech representation is a process of re-interpretation. This idea has been described as double-voicing (see also Baynham, 1999; Pujolar, 2001). It also implies that, in spoken contexts, quotations do not form actual reports of what was said but representations or reconstructions of speech (Tannen, 1989; Baynham, 1996; Holt, 1999 etc.). The ‘constructed nature’ (see Tannen, 1989) of the represented utterances is further discussed later in this chapter. Bakhtin’s pioneering work on represented speech has paved the way for further investigation and analysis of the issue in question by subsequent scholars. His ideas have been developed and applied to a wide range of data by many scholars. A number of these approaches will be discussed in the following sections.

Structural Approaches

Speech report has been addressed by traditional grammar studies in terms of form and the structural distinction between direct and indirect speech. Particularly, grammatical criteria are employed to distinguish between the two forms. Jespersen proposed that:

When one wishes to report what someone else says or has said (thinks or has thought) – or what one has said or thought oneself on some previous occasion – two ways are open to one. Either one gives, or purports to give, the exact words of the speaker (or writer): direct speech. Or else one adapts the words according to the circumstances in which they are now quoted: indirect speech (oratio obliqua). (1924: 290)

The focus on the distinction between direct and indirect speech resulted in the use of invented examples that mainly dealt with the transformation of a hypothetical original utterance into direct and/or indirect speech and vice versa. The aim of these types of task was the identification of mechanical rules that would describe the formal aspects of these two forms of speech representation (see Baynham and Slembrouck, 1999).

For example Li (1986) describes the following characteristic features according to which, he argues, direct and indirect speech differ from each other: 1) pronominalization, 2) place and time deixis, 3) verb tense, 4) presence/absence of complementizer that and 5) intonation. The following is a case of indirect speech in which some of these features can be observed.

(1.1)

Michael said that he would be there.

As it can be seen, the represented discourse takes the form of a reported clause that is grammatically subordinated to the reporting clause, a relationship normally marked in English by the conjunction ‘that’. Tense and deictics are shifted to reflect the perspective of the reporter, so that, for example, ‘here’ becomes ‘there’. In terms of pronominalization, the first-person pronouns refer to the reporter and not to the original speaker. This process brings the reporter to the fore since he/she is supposed to report the utterances from his/her own perspective (see Coulmas, 1986: 2). Indirect speech is very frequently examined in parallel with direct speech, because they differ in terms of syntactic and deictic structure. A direct speech example is now given:

(1.2)

Michael said: ‘I will be here.’

In the case of direct speech, the words represented typically appear in quotation marks and there is absence of the complementizer that. However, in spoken data, quotation marks do not exist; therefore a further criterion has to be employed as the defining criterion of direct speech. This role is undertaken by deixis, which becomes the primary indicator that the reporter is quoting verbatim. In particular, time, place and person deixis have to reflect the perspective of the original speaker and not that of the reporter. With regards to pronominalization, the first-person pronoun refers to the original speaker. Another criterion employed for defining direct speech in spoken language is intonation, as the reporter very often changes the pitch and pace of her/his voice in order to highlight that s/ he actually represents anterior talk and somehow impersonates somebody else’s voice.² If these criteria apply, it seems that there is an explicit boundary between the voice of the person being reported and the voice of the reporter and as a consequence direct speech ‘is often said to use the exact words of the person being reported’ (Fairclough, 1992: 107).

Based on this discussion, traditional/grammatical approaches to reported speech have succeeded in describing in formal terms the differences between direct and indirect speech. However, they disregard the functions of speech representation in context, or across different genres. In this respect, little information is provided concerning the role of speech representation in actual discursive situations. In what follows, I present approaches to speech representation that make use of real data and address its functions, either in written or spoken language.

Stylistic Approaches

Speech presentation is an over-researched concept that became the ‘narrative bias’ (Baynham and Slembrouck, 1999: 444) in written language and especially in literary narrative (see, among others, Pascal, 1977; Leech and Short, 1981; Banfield, 1982; Fludernik, 1993; Simpson, 1993; Thomson, 1996; Person, 1999). One of the most influential publications in the respective field is that of Leech and Short (1981) who developed a scalar model that describes the forms and functions of speech (and thought) presentation in literary prose fiction. This same model was elaborated by Semino and Short (2004) who worked on the systematic annotation of a corpus including three written narrative genres, namely fiction, news reports and (auto) biography in order to investigate how patterns of speech presentation vary depending on genre. The consideration of non-fictional data in particular resulted in the elaboration, enr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Transcription Conventions
• Introduction
• 1 Speech Representation and Direct Speech
• 2 Narrative and Self-Presentation
• 3 Data and Methods
• 4 Frequencies, Distributions and Factors Affecting Direct Speech Variation
• 5 Voice Representation, Gender and Dominant Discourses
• 6 Self-Presentation
• 7 Self Through Other-Presentation
• Overview and Conclusions
• Appendix
• References
• Index