Types, Distribution, and Lexico-Grammatical Realization of Discourse Presentation Categories and Their Functional Implications
The fourth chapter presents the quantitative findings for the categories of speech, writing, and thought presentation in the corpus of 19th-century narrative fiction and compares their statistical distribution with the findings by Semino and Short (2004) for 20th-century fiction. The author finds that the JLVeffects of particular categories of thought presentation are different from those of speech presentation in the 19th-century data. Further, the scales of speech and thought presentation in 19th-century narrative fiction are differently distributed compared to the 20th century, this giving quantitative evidence to Fludernik’s (1993) “direct discourse fallacy” according to which a character’s direct discourse should never simply be accepted as fully reliable because the narrator’s mediation is always a distortion.