International journal of literary linguistics
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This paper discusses aspects of direct speech in James Joyce’s story "The Sisters". The story is often analyzed with special attention to the gaps and ellipses in the utterances, which are usually read as omissions, evasions, or uncomfortable silences, and thus as indicative of some transgressive behaviour of the dead priest who is at the centre of the dialogues. In this article we explore the hypothesis that the utterances in question show features that are quite common in natural spoken language and thus may also be read as literary techniques to create authentic oral discourse. This hypothesis is not intended to invalidate previous interpretations, but to introduce an additional aspect of interpretation that has been neglected so far. In the context of a literary work, features of natural spoken language acquire new meaning, and the very attempt to narrow the gap between literary and natural spoken language appears as inauthentic, ominous and as an artistic strategy to express the unspeakable. The story thus evokes suspicion and a feeling of eeriness while also offering narrative and linguistic information that allows for a more empathic assessment of the characters. We use quantitative methods of analysis and linguistic data from corpora of (authentic) spoken language to substantiate our hypothesis. As "The Sisters" is a rather short story and the present study is, in several respects, exploratory, our claims and hypotheses need to be confirmed and validated by more exhaustive research into Joyce’s major works.
Establishing coherent identity patterns for literary characters in novels is a difficult task. In this respect, we assume that readers rely on pre-stored cultural models in order to construct mental models of the text content, including character identity. By significantly extending the approach by Van Dijk and Kintsch and going beyond the related accounts of Schneider and of Culpeper, we aim to clarify the constitutive role of conceptual metaphor as proposed by Lakoff et al. in processes of literary identity construction. The analysis of a corpus of three contemporary novels supports our claim that conceptual metaphors and the mapping of domains involved interact with cultural models and connect text phenomena to such prior knowledge structures. On this basis, we provide an integrated model of literary identity construction which acknowledges the constitutive value of conceptual metaphors in literary identity construction.
The article deals with Finnish translations of varieties of spoken language in fiction from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 2000s. It presents the central findings of a comprehensive study on the changes and developments of translational norms in Finnish literature. The study is based on a corpus consisting of 200 literary works (the original and its translations are counted as one work), representing various genres: literary fiction, young-adult fiction, as well as genre fiction (romance and crime). During this 100-year period, the use of colloquial variants in translations has strongly increased, influenced by the changing literary and linguistic norms of original Finnish literature. The norms of different literary genres, however, vary, and rich, non-standard variation can be found in translated works from different periods.
This article presents an analysis of the police television series A Touch of Frost (Yorkshire Television, 1992) and the crime novels by Rodney Wingfield upon which it is based.
In order to analyse the way the protagonist, Inspector Jack Frost, is characterised in either version, data is drawn from the pilot episode of the series and Wingfield’s debut novel Frost at Christmas (1984). Wingfield was less than impressed with television’s version of Frost, stating, ‘He just isn’t my Frost’. The rationale for this article is to apply established models in stylistics to investigate the differences between the original and the adaptation. A core motivation for stylistics is to ‘support initial impressions in various extracts’ readings’ and to ‘describe the readers’ response with some precision’ (Gregoriou 2007: 19); this article therefore offers a close linguistic explanation for an author’s dissatisfaction with the adaptation of his own work. The famously reticent Wingfield did not elaborate in detail on why he disapproved of the television version of Frost, although several critics observed that Wingfield felt television had ‘softened’ his creation. This article contends that ‘softness’ is represented in language through politeness strategies adopted by speakers whilst impoliteness represents the ‘tougher’ speech of Wingfield’s original iteration of Jack Frost. In order to demonstrate this contention, this study will analyse pragmatic elements of the dialogue of both novel and television versions of Frost through the analytical framework for impoliteness developed by Culpeper (1996; 2010). This framework will be integrated into the model for analysing the elements of narrative outlined by Simpson and Montgomery (1995), in turn suggesting an elaboration of this model. In investigating whether television’s Jack Frost is ‘softer’ than the character envisaged by Wingfield, free direct speech and accompanying physical behaviour in novel and television adaptation are analysed, focussing on whether the perceived softness of the latter has been partly achieved by making the speech of Frost less impolite on television.
The aim of this article is to show how linguistic and literary studies can benefit from the joint analysis of linguistic structures in poetry. Firstly, the analysis of poetry has an important impact on linguistic theory as it leads our attention to specific structures and meanings that so far have not been considered. Secondly, a close linguistic analysis can reveal hitherto overlooked facets of meaning which have a great significance for the overall interpretation of a poem. We focus on Bare Root Infinitives (BRIs) in German. As they lack the features for tense, mood, person and number, they are more flexible in meaning than finite forms. When looking at poetry, besides the well-known deontic and bouletic meanings (cf. Reis 1995, 2003; Gärtner 2014) a third meaning that we call reactive meaning stands out. Remarkably, this reactive meaning can also be found in everyday language. Its specific semantic properties show that a semantic analysis of BRIs in the style of Kaufmann (2012) is adequate: modality, but not non-referentiality, is a grammatically given semantic property of BRIs. The specific case study of the poem ‘muster fixieren’ (‘fixing patterns’) by Nico Bleutge reveals how the restricted context of the poem interacts with the different interpretations of BRIs, resulting in a complex interpretation of the text.
Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912) owes much of its fame in English to a translation from 1928 by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. The novella however has in fact been translated many times – first by Burke (1924, with a revised edition following in 1970), and, after Lowe-Porter, by Luke (1988), Koelb (1994), Appelbaum (1995), Neugroschel (1998), Chase (1999), Heim (2004), Doege (2007) and Hansen & Hansen (2012). Most of these versions are neither known to readers nor discussed in academic literature. This paper, which comes as part of a larger study on linguistic creativity in Der Tod in Venedig, focuses on the use of neologisms by Mann and what happens to them in (re)translation. Relying on a digital corpus composed of the complete set of English retranslations and a corpus-based methodology, the paper argues that, despite the extended time period between the publications and different translation conditions, neologisms are treated uniformly by the translators. Mann’s coinages are nearly always obliterated through normalisation and, if preserved, demonstrate less creativity overall than in the ST, raising questions about the Retranslation Hypothesis (RH) which proposes that early TT versions tend to domesticate while later ones increasingly foreignise.
Four main informational elements have been suggested and studied as central aspects of narrative discourse: causality, character, location, time. The research that scholars have previously undertaken on these aspects has been primarily on Indo-European languages, and more specifically on the European side of that language family. The linguistic limitations have indicated that character is the aspect of narrative that readers/listeners attend to most closely. However, in examining narrative discourses from non-Indo-European languages, challenges to the presumed primacy of character emerge. In a partial report on field work conducted in Borneo in 2012-2015, I compare and contrast patterns in the rankings of the four main aspects of narrative in three languages, English, Hobongan and Daqan. I also note the strategies by which the languages make their respective rankings clear, including focus particles (Hobongan), specificity of description (each), and amount of information provided about the aspects (each). I suggest that analyses of the patterns and rankings of information in narrative be included in typological categorizations and linguistic descriptions of languages.
It has been noted (Perkins, 2009; Zwaan, 1999; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998) that causality, character, location, and time are the four main aspects of narrative discourse, even if not attended to by listeners or readers in equal ways. For example, character is highly ranked, and the locational/spatial components have often been underestimated for English narratives (see Perkins, 2009, for a review). Relative to the ranking, there is no inherent reason why character needs to be highly ranked, and locational/spatial information is in fact important in English narrative discourse (Perkins, 2009). I instead suggest that there are linguistic and cultural factors in the ranking of these aspects of discourse. Specifically, I suggest that causality is (probably) the highest ranked component, in languages that have a ranking, with the other three elements being linked to causality more or less strongly, depending on linguistic and cultural factors; it is possible that some languages do not rank narrative elements or that some elements are ranked as highly as others. In English, the strongest link is between causality and character. However, this is not universal.
In a survey of fifty-eight languages from thirty language families, including an in-depth study of Hobongan, an Austronesian language spoken by approximately two thousand people on the island of Borneo that I am in the process of describing, it is found that there is a great deal of cross-linguistic variation, to the extent that it is possible that each logically possible combination of narrative elements is present in the world’s languages.
The present study investigates the representation of non-standardised varieties of English in literary prose texts. This is achieved by creating and annotating a corpus of literary texts from Scotland, West Africa, and Southeast Asia. The analysis addresses two major topics. Firstly, the extent of representation reveals clearly distinct feature profiles across regions, coupled with varying feature densities. Feature profiles are also relevant to individual characters, as certain traits such as social status, ethnicity, or age can be signalled by linguistic means. The second topic, accuracy of representation, compares the features observed in literary texts with descriptions of the actual varieties, and suggests that representations of varieties may differ from their real-life models in the sense that highly frequent features may be absent from texts, while less frequent but more emblematic ones, or even invented ones, may be used by authors to render a variety of English in their texts.
The (mis)management of rapport amongst groups in Niger Delta (ND) communities has become a significant issue, which Ahmed Yerima's Hard Ground (HG) depicts as having the capacity to aid or control the conflicts in the region. Linguistic studies on Yerima's drama from the perspective of pragmatics have tended to use pragmatic acts to identify the discourse value of proverbs and functions of characters' utterances but have not accounted for the politeness strategies utilised for rapport management, especially in conflict situations. This article, drawing on a rapport management model of politeness and aspects of speech act discourse, identifies the face, sociality rights, and interactional goals that characterise the conflict-motivated dialogues sampled in HG, and reveals the rapport management (RM) strategies through which these are managed in the text. Three conflict situations can be observed as prompting different RM strategies: cause-effect identification (CEI), militancy support (MSP), and disagreement (DSG) situations. CEI is marked by incriminating (involving eliciting and informing acts) and exonerating (including complimenting and acknowledging acts) strategies; MSP is indexed by strategies of persuasion (realised with face-enhancing/threatening acts), whereas DSG is typified by requesting (featuring explicit head acts and alerters) and blaming strategies (including insulting and threatening, aggravating moves). Generally, the requesting, blaming, and exonerating strategies are largely used by the ND youth in HG to probe, threaten, or disagree on specific issues, while the incriminating and persuasion strategies are mainly employed by the women to indict, influence, and predict future actions. The study of RM in the conflict situations depicted in the play sheds light on the often neglected cause of conflicts in contemporary Africa.