20th Lecture:

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20th Lecture

• Further Considerations on Speech and Thought
  Presentation

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(1) Theme-rheme given-new

• Some Points of Consideration

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Paragraph theme

• The paragraph theme in the analysis of the
  agency of speech and thought may be important
• i.e. the first sentence of the paragraph may
  give us an indication of the sayer or thinker
  for the rest of the paragraph.

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Given information

• Given information in general may be important
• An indication of who says or who thinks given in
  an earlier sentence or clause may not be
  repeated in the sentences or clauses which are
  immediately subsequent to the earlier one, but
  it must be assumed by the reader or analyst that
  the sayer or thinker remains the same
• This consideration is especially crucial in
  locating the agency of speech and thought in the
  'free' versions of discourse.

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(2) Mood and modality

• Some Points of Consideration

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Tense (a)

• Important in telling us about the time that the
  agent says or thinks, relative to the present of
  the narrative
• i.e. past, present or future to the scene being
  described, or,
• past or present to the narrator's act of
  narration.

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Tense (b)

• If the present (or future) tense is used in the
  language of the narrator which primarily uses the
  past tense, this is usually a good indicator
  that the (free) direct speech of a character has
  intruded into the narrator's language.

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Judgment

• In general, mood and modality in third person
  narratives may indicate the judgmental nature of
  the clause
• May be linked to the point-of-view, and hence to
  the speech or thought, of a character of
  characters within the story, and not completely
  to the point-of-view of the narrator.

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Variation in clausal mood

• Any variation in clausal mood may indicate that
  the speech or thought of a character has
  intervened
• It is expected that the third person narrator
  uses the declarative mood
• If the imperative, interrogative or other non-
  declarative moods are used, one suspects
  (although this may not be invariably the case)
  that the speech or thought of a character or
  characters has intervened.

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Judgment

• Other features of mood and modality when found
  in a clause, such as the presence of
• the modal operators,
• modal adjuncts, or
• negative polarity
• May indicate the judgmental nature of the
  clause, which may thus be possibly (but not
  invariably) linked to the speech or thought of a
  character of characters within the story.

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Non-occurrence of speech and thought 1

• In some cases, features of mood or modality may
  indicate the actual or possible non-occurrence of
  speech and thought in relation to a particular
  proposition.

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Non-occurrence of speech and thought 2

• The modal operators for example, may indicate
  that speech or thought could or should have
  happened, but has not actually happened eg.
• 'He could have said that he was innocent' or
• 'They should have thought that killing a man who
  might later be proved innocent was not the right
  thing to do'.

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Non-occurrence of speech and thought 3

• Some of the modal adjuncts may also indicate
  that speech or thought has actually or possibly
  not occurred
• 'They almost said that the man was not
  responsible for the murder when the police shot
  him' (speech has not occurred) or
• 'He possibly thought that he was the man' (he
  might or might not have thought).

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Non-occurrence of speech and thought 4

• Negative polarity indicates that the speech or
  thought which the polar negative element
  qualifies, has not occurred
• 'I did not say that he was guilty',
• 'He did not himself think that he was innocent'.

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(3) Transitivity and Clause Complexing

• Some Points of Consideration

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Importance of Projection

• The verbal and mental processes which project
  subordinate 'that'-clauses (for clauses whose
  'direct' versions are in the declarative mood)
  or independent clauses enclosed in inverted
  commas, are crucial in speech and thought
  presentation.

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Importance of Projection

• You should already know that
• verbal processes project locution, whilst
• mental processes project thought, and
• if verbal or mental processes project
  subordinate 'that'-clauses (for clauses whose
  'direct' counterparts are in the declarative
  mood), the construction is hypotactic, and if
  they project independent clauses enclosed in
  inverted commas, it is paratactic.

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Indirect Discourse Simple Sentences

• Is indirect discourse possible in simple
  sentences?
• Answer grammatically speaking, it is possible
  only with complex constructions.
• For example, 'John thought about the man' is not
  IT but NRTA, not only because it is not clear
  what John's exact thought about the man was, but
  also because, grammatically speaking, 'about the
  man' is a circumstantial adjunct and not a
  dependent clause.

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Indirect Discourse Simple Sentences (a)

• The 'about' preposition may initiate a clause
  with a non-finite verb instead of an adjunct, and
  this may create some problems for our analysis
• For example, 'He said about going to the
  market'.

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Indirect Discourse Simple Sentences (b)

• We may note here that the reporting of what is
  exactly being said is rather imprecise, and hence
  the sentence appears to be more inclined towards
  NRSA rather than IS.
• We may also note that in the strict grammatical
  sense, indirect speech involves the conversion
  of the exact clause uttered by the speaker into
  its reported equivalent.

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Direct Speech and Projected Minor Clauses

• It may be possible to have examples of direct
  speech where the projected clause is a minor
  clause, especially if the clause is incomplete
  due to ellipsis, as in
• 'He asked, "Why?"'.
• The conversion of such a clause to its indirect
  equivalent involves the retrieval of the
  elliptical element(s) which will make the
  reported clause grammatically complete.

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Direct Speech and Projected Minor Clauses Example

• If the elliptical element in the DS clause
  complex just mentioned is
• 'he does not want to go',
• then the IS equivalent of 'He asked, "Why?"' is,
• 'He asked him why he did not want to go'.
• If the clause remains as 'He asked him why',
  then we are dealing with NRSA rather than IS.

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Conversion to Indirect

• The conversion to an indirect construction for
• polar interrogatives,
• WH interrogatives,
• exclamatives, and
• imperatives
• Clearly may involve subordinate conjunctions
  other than 'that'.

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Conversion to Indirect Examples

• Conversion Affected by Clausal Mood
• 'whether' or 'if' for polar interrogatives,
• a wh- element for WH-interrogatives (or for
  WH-interrogatives with the pragmatic force of a
  command, the conversion to a non-finite dependent
  clause),
• the use of 'that' or the appropriate WH-element
  for exclamatives, and the conversion to a
  non-finite dependent clause usually initiated by
  'to' for imperatives.

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Pragmatic Force

• In addition to grammatical mood, pragmatic force
  may also play a part in
• the use of the appropriate subordinate
  conjunction, or
• the conversion of the reported clause to a
  non-finite instead of a finite construction.

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(4) Orthographic indicators

• Some Points of Consideration

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Importance of Orthographic Indicators

• Quite crucial in speech and thought
  presentation.
• The deletion of the quotation marks in DS for
  example, immediately converts what is supposed to
  be DS to FDS.

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Paragraphing

• Paragraphing is also important in determining the
  speaker in DS or FDS, as each speaker is
  normally given an individual paragraph.

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Paragraphing

• To a certain extent also, paragraphing may help
  us to determine the thinker in thought
  presentation, especially when we are certain
  that there are instances of FDT or FIT in the
  text but are not sure who the thinker is.
• In this case, as mentioned earlier, the speaker
  or thinker indicated in the first sentence of the
  paragraph in which the FDT or FIT occurs, is the
  likely source of the FDT or FIT.

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Continuation of Mondays Analysis

• Extract from For Whom the Bell Tolls

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• This Anselmo had been a good guide and he could
  travel wonderfully in the mountains. Robert
  Jordan could walk well enough himself and he knew
  from following him since before daylight that the
  old man could walk him to death. Robert Jordan
  trusted the man, Anselmo, so far, in everything
  except judgment. He had not yet had an
  opportunity to test his judgment,

FIT
FIT
FIT
NRTA
?
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• and, anyway, the judgment was his own
  responsibility. No, he did not worry about
  Anselmo and the problem of the bridge was no more
  difficult than many other problems. He knew how
  to blow any sort of bridge that you could name
  and he had blown them of all sizes and
  constructions.

FIT?
FIT?
FIT?
FIT?
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• There was enough explosive and all equipment in
  the two packs to blow this bridge properly even
  if it were twice as big as Anselmo reported it,
  as he remembered it when he had walked over it on
  his way to La Granja on a walking trip in 1933,
  and as Golz had read him the description of it
  night before last in that upstairs room in the
  house outside of the Escorial.

FIT?
FIT?
NRTA
FIT?
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• To blow the bridge is nothing, Golz had said,
  the lamplight on his scarred, shaved head,
  pointing with a pencil on the big map. You
  understand?
• Yes, I understand.
• Absolutely nothing. Merely to blow the bridge
  is a failure.
• Yes, Comrade General.

DS
FDS
FDS
FDS
FDS
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• To blow the bridge at a stated hour based on the
  time set for the attack is how it should be done.
  You see that naturally. That is your right and
  how it should be done.
• Golz looked at the pencil, then tapped his teeth
  with it.
• Robert Jordan had said nothing.

FDS
NRA
?
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• Golz looked at the pencil, then tapped his teeth
  with it.
• Robert Jordan had said nothing.
• You understand that is your right and how it
  should be done, Golz went on, looking at him and
  nodding his head. He tapped on the map now with
  the pencil. That is how I should do it. That
  is what we cannot have.

NRA
?
DS
NRA
NRA
FDS
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Extract from Mrs Dalloway

• Elizabeth rather wondered whether Miss Kilman
  could be hungry. It was her way of eating,
  eating with intensity, then looking, again and
  again, at a plate of sugared cakes on the
  table next to them then, when a lady and a
  child sat down and the child took the cake, could
  Miss Kilman really mind it? Yes, Miss Kilman did
  mind it.

IT
FIT?
NRA
FDT/FIT
FIT
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• She had wanted that cake -- the pink one. The
  pleasure left her, and then to be baffled even in
  that!

FIT
NRTA
FIT?
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• When people are happy they have a reserve, she
  had told Elizabeth, upon which to draw, whereas
  she was like a wheel without a tyre (she was fond
  of such metaphors), jolted by every pebble -- so
  she would say, staying on after the lesson,
  standing by the fire-place with her bag of books,
  her satchel, she called it, on a Tuesday
  morning, after the lesson was over. And she
  talked too about the war.

FIS
FIS (cont.)
NRA
NRSA
NRSA
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FIS

• After all, there were people who did not think
  the English invariably right. There were books.
  There were meetings. There were other points of
  view. Would Elizabeth like to come with her to
  So-and-so? (a most extraordinary-looking old
  man). Then Miss Kilman took her to some church
  in Kensington and they had tea with a clergyman.
  She had lent her books. Law,

FIS
FIS
FIS
FIS
NRA?
NRA
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• medicine, politics, all professions are open to
  women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. But
  for herself, her career was absolutely ruined,
  and was it her fault? Good gracious, said
  Elizabeth, no.

FIS
FIS
FIS
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• And her mother would come calling to say that a
  hamper had come from Bourton and would Miss
  Kilman like some flowers? To Miss Kilman she was
  always very, very nice, but Miss Kilman squashed
  the flowers all in a bunch, and hadnt any small
  talk, and what interested Miss Kilman bored her
  mother, and Miss Kilman and she were terrible
  together and Miss Kilman swelled

NRA
FIS
FIS/FIT
NRA?
FIT
FIT
FIT
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• and looked very plain, but Miss Kilman was
  frightfully clever. Elizabeth had never thought
  about the poor. They lived with everything they
  wanted, -- her mother had breakfast in bed every
  day Lucy carried it up and she liked old women
  because they were Duchesses, and being descended
  from some Lord. But Miss Kilman said (one of
  those Tuesday mornings when the lesson was over),
  My grandfather kept an oil and colour shop in
  Kensington. Miss

FIT
NRTA
NRA?
NRA?
FIT/FIS
DS
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NRTA

• Kilman was quite different from any one she
  knew she made one feel so small.

FIT?
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• Miss Kilman took another cup of tea. Elizabeth,
  with her oriental bearing, her inscrutable
  mystery, sat perfectly upright no, she did not
  want anything more. She looked for her gloves --
  her white gloves. They were under the table.
  Ah, but she must go! Miss Kilman could not let
  her go! this youth that was so beautiful! this
  girl, whom she genuinely loved! Her large hand
  opened and shut on the table.

NRA
NRA
FIS
NRA?
FIT
FIT
FIT
FIT
NRA
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End of Lecture