Conversation and ‘Voices’ in the Narratives of 5- to- 8-Year-Old French-Speaking Children

ABSTRACT According to Bakhtin, polyphonic dialogism, a general principle for advancing knowledge, is well instantiated in the literary novel, and more generally in narratives, where different ‘voices’ can find expression. Accordingly, in this paper we analyzed picture-based narratives constructed by thirty 5-to-8-year-old French-speaking children, produced before and after a conversation on the causes of the events. The analysis focused on children’s ability to make different voices heard, particularly the voices of the characters which children made heard not only through direct or reported discourse forms, but also through the expression of their inner states such as beliefs, intentions and feelings. Results show a development in children’s ability to make these voices heard in their narratives, as well as a facilitating role of the conversational exchange on their expression. It will be argued that these results provide support to the central place that dialogue occupies in the overall Bakhtinian approach.

Dogon reported discourse markers: The Ben Tey quotative topicalizer

The purpose of this study is to re-evaluate the interpretation of a particle that has hitherto been analyzed as a marker either of addressee or the subject of a quoted clause in Ben Tey (Dogon, Mali). As both of these interpretations are typologically rare if not unique, a broader conceptualization for the particle as a quotative topic marker is proposed here. Data are from a newly compiled cross-linguistic annotated corpus of discourse reports within textual contexts. Along with data presentation and analysis, a methodology is illustrated for multilingual comparative corpus construction for the analysis of discourse reporting strategies.

Reportative evidentiality and attribution in Romanian fairy tales

This study sets out to examine how reportative evidentiality and attribution are achieved in Romanian fairy tales. By comparing and contrasting reportative and attribution expressions, the current research aims to determine the deictic function of these constructions, the pragmatic motivations of the speaker for evidential usage as well as the lexicalization, richness and functional diversity of these expressions in the Romanian language. In fairy tales, the content, actants, constructed reported discourse, sources of information and reproduction of speech vary widely, thus the relationship between evidentiality and attribution can be richly explored from a syntactic, lexical and a pragmatic/interactional/functional perspective. Research findings suggest, among other things, that Romanian fairy tales integrate evidential and attributive preferences that are reflective of a regional practicality of the genre as a form of communication, that there is cognitive implication of the storyteller in the process of evidential choice and that evidential values are associated with particular constructions that allow for evidentiality and attribution to operate as effective discourse strategies in the realization of the interpersonal functions in the tales. With regard to Romanian fairy tales, such evidential expressions help clarify, validate and evaluate sources of information, operating as prompters in a perspective-taking dynamic process.

Royal language and reported discourse in sixteenth-century correspondence

This paper investigates the formal and functional dimensions of reported discourse in sixteenth-century correspondence. It focuses on how letter-writers report the utterances – spoken, thought and written – of high-status sources (namely, the king or queen), in order to assess how the early modern reporting system compares with the present-day equivalent. The early modern values of authenticity, verbatim reporting and verbal authority are examined. The results taken from the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (PCEEC) suggest that early modern writers prefer to present royal language using indirect reports with semi-conventionalised linguistic features that clearly mark the authority of the source. Only an elite few, associated with the Court, use direct speech. The paper suggests that reporting practices distinguish between speech and writing, with the latter showing nascent signs of anxiety over verbatim reporting. I argue that these trends arise from the larger cultural shift from oral to written records taking place throughout the early modern period.

Positioning translators: Voices, views and values in translation

Starting from a set of examples of translations in which translators use paratextual or code-switching devices to voice reservations about the works they are translating, I explore the similarities between this type of translation and what Dorrit Cohn calls discordant narration. I go on to argue in favour of viewing translation as a form of reported discourse, more particularly what Relevance theory calls echoic (and in some cases ironic) speech, a species of interpretive discourse in which the speaker’s attitude towards the words being reported is relevant. Viewing translation as reported discourse implies that the translated words are embedded in the translator’s reporting discourse. I conclude by suggesting that it is up to the reader to make a translator’s attitude relevant, and that deictic shifts from the framing to the framed discourse enable the reader to discern or construe the translator’s positioning.