Dr. Sophie Marnette
Speech and Thought presentation in French:
Concepts and Strategies
John
Benjamins. Amsterdam – New York. Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 133
2005. xiv, 379 pp. Hardbound. 1 58811
622 0 / USD 167.00.
90
272 5376 5 / EUR 135.00
Imagine a text that does not
quote or refer to anybody’s speech or thoughts… A few examples come to mind :
technical texts such as scientific papers, legal documents, instruction manuals
and textbooks may not contain any. But if we try to imagine a narrative - oral
or written - or an argumentative discourse (press article, political
discussion, etc.) without any speech or thought presentation (S&TP), it is
difficult to think of an example. Indeed the way we perceive a story, the
reasons we do (or do not) empathise with the narrator or the characters, the
bases on which we do (or do not) find a story realistic or entertaining are
largely dependent on the way speech and thoughts are presented in the
narrative, be it a novel, the story of our last holiday misadventures or even a
good joke. And the same is true for our ability to present our arguments in a
discussion or for our willingness to give credit to a journalist’s reporting.
All these different types of discourse have their own special aims and they all
tap accordingly into the rich continuum of various S&TP categories
available. This means that the study of S&TP is not just another set of
data available to linguists and literary scholars : it is an essential part of
our in-depth knowledge of language and literature. The presence or absence of
S&TP, the categories of S&TP used and their respective frequencies are
thus essential factors in defining a particular type of discourse. This book
aims at further understanding the concept of reported discourse and at bringing
to light the strategies of S&TP that determine the very essence of specific
speech genres.
In my book, I analyse and
describe S&TP in French from a broad theoretical perspective, building
bridges between linguistic, stylistic and narratological frameworks that have
until now been developed separately by French-speaking scholars on the one
hand, and by English-speaking scholars on the other hand. French théories de
l'énonciation, especially the concept of split subject developed by O. Ducrot
(1984) highlight the fact that discourse is by essence composed of a
multiplicity of voices and points of view. This insistence on the polyphonic
nature of language emphasises the intricate relationships existing between
subjects and discourses - their own (past, present, future, imagined) and those
of the others - and it allows for an uniquely complex and illuminating approach
towards S&TP in terms of strategies, both rhetorical (argumentative
discourse) and narratological (narrative dis-course). Anglo-Saxon scholars have
concentrated on studying S&TP in context (mostly in corpora of written
fiction, but also in written non-fiction and even spoken language). They have
proposed invaluable categorisations of S&TP (suggesting that these
categories should be seen as continuous rather than discrete, and sometimes
distinguishing between reported speech, thought and writing) and they have
considered S&TP in relation to notions such as faithfulness, involvement
and speaker/narrator's control. The originality of the present book lies in the
strong belief that a meaningful study of S&TP is possible only if one takes
into account both French and Anglo-Saxon frameworks. Indeed, I show that far
from contradicting one an-other, these approaches enormously benefit from being
combined into a harmonious whole, creating a new and exciting paradigm for our
conception of S&TP strategies.
The book is divided into two
parts: ‘Concepts’ and ‘Strategies’. In the first part, I outline the
implications of the French théorie de l’énonciation for the study of S&TP
and I undertake an in-depth analysis of the concept of ‘reported discourse’. I discuss
the multiple - and often unconscious - presuppositions on which most scholars
base their definitions of this concept and offer my own views on what the study
of speech and thought presentation could and should entail. This theoretical
discussion forms the basis for all my subsequent analyses. In the second part,
I examine S&TP strategies in a large range of discourse types : written and
spoken French, medieval and modern literatures, fiction and non fiction,
narrative and non narrative discourses. Basing my analysis on actual corpora
and going beyond the canonical categories of S&TP, I show that the study of
S&TP strategies is essential to our understanding of phenomena as diverse
as the evolution and categorisation of literary genres, the production and
staging of ‘orality’ in literature, the various conceptualisations of the
notion of ‘Truth’ in fiction and non fiction, the expression of points of view
in narrative and the construction of the Self versus the representation of the
‘Other’ in discourse.
In short, this analysis aims
at demonstrating the importance of S&TP in French linguistics today and its
relevance to the study of both language and literature. As such, it is not only
geared towards linguists but also towards scholars and advanced students
interested in applying linguistics to the study of literature.
References:
Ducrot,
Oswald. 1984. Le dire et le dit.
Editions de Minuit. Paris.
Leech,
Geoffrey & Michael Short. 1981. Style in Fiction, A Linguistic
Introduction to English Fictional Prose.
Longman. London - New York.
To order this book go to John Benjamins website: www.benjamins.com
Email: sophie.marnette@balliol.ox.ac.uk
Last updated on August 2005