scholarly journals Narrative structure of literary text: Free indirect discourse as a linguistic and narratological category

Author(s):  
Natascha Jourdy

The paper focuses on the analysis of free indirect discourse as a modernist narrative form. We outline the basic narrative and linguistic characteristics of free indirect discourse and examine its main functions in the literary texts. We undertake a comparative analysis of three examples of free indirect discourse (drawn from the texts of G. Flaubert, F. Kafka and V. Nabokov) and display their common and distinctive features.

Target ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Johnson

Point of view in narrative has been identified in literary stylistics through the use of deixis, modality, transitivity and Free Indirect Discourse. These findings have also been applied to literature in translation (Bosseaux 2007). This article focuses on deictic cues in the narrative structure of Canne al Vento by Grazia Deledda in the original Italian and the English translation, following an earlier study focussing on constructing a particular point of view through mental processes of perception, the translation of which did not always reflect that point of view (Johnson 2010). Data emerging from a corpus-assisted study is examined qualitatively using a systemic-functional model in order to assess to what extent the point of view constructed by these cues in the ST is conveyed in the novel in translation.


Author(s):  
Alexander Usachev

The object of this research is the works of the prominent Russian writer F. M. Dostoevsky. The subject of this research is the opinion whether F. M. Dostoevsky first and foremost is the Russian philosopher and thinker, and only then a writer. The author examines the peculiarities of such roles in culture as philosopher, thinker and writer, which gives grounds to question unambiguous reference of the works of prominent Russian writer as activity of the thinker. The peculiarity consists in the fact that F. M. Dostoevsky’s literary texts is so rich in images and themes, that shifting the specificity of his artistic image into the background is not quite justified. Special attention is given to clarification of the essence of activity of the philosopher and the writer. The key research method is the comparative analysis of the facts of such types of social practice as the profession of writer, philosopher and thinker in their relation to the fundamental concepts of time, space, text and nature of its perception from the outside perspective .The main conclusion consists in the statement that the philosophical text maintains neutrality in relation to time, as is being written from the standpoint of eternity. Literary text, in turn, is “submerged” in time and space of the events taking place within it, and relies on recognizability of the characters and their existential characteristics. F. M. Dostoevsky appears to the audience as the creator of storylines and images, rather than a person who sets the trends and concepts of social movements.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Trieu Thu Hang

Translating literary proper names is regarded as one of the challenging but inspiring issues in the field of Translation Studies. Given this context, the present paper aims to analyze the strategies undertaken by the translator when rendering proper names from the English literary text “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (2014) into its Vietnamese translation “Harry Potter và Hòn đá phù thuỷ” (2016). To fulfill the research purpose, a descriptive and comparative analysis was made between the source and target text. The analysis of translation strategies was grounded on the theoretical frame of Davis (2003). The findings reveal that the translator adopted the strategy of preservation for most of the proper names in the chosen literary text. Several recommendations for translating proper names in the literary texts are finally drawn out.


Target ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tarja Rouhiainen

Abstract Free indirect discourse (FID) is a narrative technique which purports to convey a character’s mental language while maintaining third-person reference and past tense. This paper deals with the problems the use of FID may create for Finnish translators of English literary narratives. A comparative analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and its translation into Finnish shows that the translator’s treatment of the pronouns he/she may shift the viewpoint from the character’s consciousness to the narrator’s discourse. The article concludes with the question of what stylistic norms could explain the translator’s avoidance of the spoken-language simulation typical of the source text.


2018 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 01119
Author(s):  
Daria Novikova ◽  
Yulia Ivanova

The aim of the study is to present semantic diversity of an adjective “strange” in Russian, English and Spanish literary texts. All context examples are taken from world-known mystical-fantastic novels (“Altist Danilov” by V. Orlov, “Falling Angel” by W. Hjortsberg, and “The Club Dumas” by A. Pérez-Reverte) in order to demonstrate individual author’s style in conveying religious concept such as demon and its attributes through different cultures. Using the method of comparative analysis and specific identification the authors describe three aspects of adjective definition – gnoseological, emotional-axiological and orthological. The paper confirms that attributive features of main characters in all literary texts can be depicted through one single adjective, its synonyms and its collocations. Moreover, description of demonic personages mostly depends on quality adjectives having selected by a creator of a literary text. The practical value of the study is that research findings can be used in future investigations on the modality and semantics of other adjectives belonging to the same semantic group.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 34-54
Author(s):  
I.D. Volkova ◽  

The purpose of the present article is to describe the significance of translator's notes from the point of view of localization of English works of fiction for Russian readership, as well as to identify the types of lexical units that become object of adaptation and the degree of their explication. The theoretical and methodological basis of this study is made up of the key provisions of translation studies, the study of linguistic localization and the study of literary discourse. Within the framework of the present research, a comparative analysis of the concepts of adaptation (pragmatic adaptation) and localization has been carried out to substantiate the advisability of using a new term to name culturally determined modifications of the original text. The characteristics of a literary text have been established, which make it possible to classify works of fiction as objects of localization. Content analysis of the English and Russian versions of the novels Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Slade House by the British writer D. Mitchell has been carried out. The original English-language and translated Russian-language versions of the specified literary works are analyzed, in particular, a comparative analysis of the English-language lexical units and phrases, accompanied by translator's notes in the secondary texts, has been conducted. The advantages of notes as a form of localization of literary texts are indicated. They consist in the possibility of a more detailed and quick description of foreign cultural units in comparison with intra-text transformations.


Author(s):  
Tatyana Zhakova

The article dwells on the study devoted to the translation of dialects used by the authors of literary texts as a means of giving a special colouring to some area. Being forms of the language, they are used within a certain geographic location as a means of the speech attribute of the character and as a detail disclosing its social context.The dialect is considered to be a retreat from the literary standard and is juxtaposed to it though in linguistics there is a set of various approaches to the problem. The article points out the difference between the terms «dialect» and «accent» highlighting that the latter is a narrower notion and just a constituent of the «dialect».Dialects in a literary text are aimed at rendering certain ideas and performing various functions depending on which one should carry out a strategy of their transfer to the target text in the course of the pre-translation analysis. Distinctive features of dialects point to the existence of the problem connected with their translatability. In general, there are three approaches to it: complete untranslatability, complete translatability and relative translatability. The relative translatability approach seems to be the most adequate as dialectal words refer to zero equivalent lexical units and locative peculiarities of dialects cannot be translated into a foreign language. In this respect the transformation of compensation turns out to be the most essential way of dialects translation. It can be assumed that there are several types of compensation. The article employs clippings from several literary texts to accentuate the highest efficiency and importance of vertical compensation due to resorting to units of different linguistic levels. This way of using compensation allows translating the maximum of the content and of the communicative value of the source text, though it is common knowledge that some loss of information is inevitable.


Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Egetenmeyer

Abstract In this article, we investigate the role free indirect discourse (FID) plays in temporal discourse structure. In contrast to the most widely accepted account of FID, which compares the content of FID to the surrounding content (two voices or two contexts), we take FID as a discourse entity and, thus, focus on the FID event. We follow a prominence-based approach to temporal discourse structure, through which we are able to describe the temporal relations the FID event maintains to the preceding and the following discourse in a precise manner. We can also account for the temporal developments that may be brought about by FID events. This becomes especially interesting in longer passages where FID events alternate with non-FID parts of discourse. The interaction involves the three levels which together make up our account of temporal discourse structure.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-273
Author(s):  
Eckhard Lobsien

Abstract What sort of object is a literary text? From a phenomenological point of view - phenomenology considered as both a radical theory of reading and a theory of radical reading - a range of answers arise, many of them tinged with deconstructive momentum. This paper aims at pointing out some basic issues in reading literary texts, offering ten theses on the enduring tasks of phenomenological literary theory.


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