Connectives in free indirect style: continuity or shift?

Cognitive Grammar analyses the semantics of linguistic features in relation to human cognition; Free Indirect Style allows authors to represent their characters’ cognition with language. This article applies Cognitive Grammar to the analysis of a character’s mind that is represented with Free Indirect Style. In the tradition of mind style analysis, it aims to use linguistics to reveal some of the underlying cognitive processes and proclivities at work in the character’s psychology. The character in question is the protagonist in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, an alcoholic who is largely characterised by his drunken behaviour and ideation. This article therefore focuses on the linguistic features that serve to represent his inebriated state of mind. It analyses the semantic effects of those features primarily in terms of attentional focus, drawing on Cognitive Grammar concepts, such as objective construal, specificity, scope, profile and domain, and relating these to the protagonist’s cognitive proclivities for solipsism, partial awareness, delayed reaction, attenuated experience and self-delusion. The article also discusses the theoretical background for mind style analysis, arguing for the continued importance of focusing on the relationship between the text and a character’s mind, alongside the focus on the reader’s mind that has come to dominate cognitive stylistics.

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Parentheticals and the presentation of multipersonal consciousness: A stylistic analysis of Mrs Dalloway

Language and Literature ◽

10.1177/0963947014528112 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 23 (2) ◽

pp. 175-187 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Yaxiao Cui

Keyword(s):

Point Of View ◽

Degree Of Freedom ◽

Stylistic Analysis ◽

Multiple Points ◽

Single Sentence ◽

Research Gap ◽

Points Of View ◽

Free Indirect Style ◽

Narrative Techniques

The presentation of consciousness in Mrs Dalloway has long been a focus of study, and many scholars have investigated Woolf’s narrative techniques in this regard, especially her use of Free Indirect Style. However, most of the existing studies mainly concentrate on the consciousness presentation of individual characters. Few studies have provided adequate accounts concerning the arrangement of the shifting narrative viewpoints and the linguistic mechanism that facilitates the ‘multipersonal representation of consciousness’ in this novel (Auerbach, 2003 [1953]: 536). This article attempts to fill this research gap by examining the use of parentheticals in Mrs Dalloway. The syntactic independence of a parenthetical gives it a degree of freedom to digress from its host, which makes this construction a convenient device to bring in new sources of consciousness and thus shift the narrative viewpoint from one character to another. The frequent viewpoint shifts subvert the convention of adhering to a single coherent narrative point of view. Meanwhile, using parentheticals allows Woolf to present multiple points of view within a short stretch of text, even within a single sentence. In this way, a sense of simultaneity is created. Distinct sources of consciousness are brought closer to each other; the very boundaries between individual minds seem to be blurred.

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Early Discussions of Free Indirect Style

Poetics Today ◽

10.1215/03335372-26-3-501 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 26 (3) ◽

pp. 501-517 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

D. Cohn

Keyword(s):

Free Indirect Style

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Connectives in Free Indirect Style: Continuity or Shift?

Language and Literature ◽

10.1177/0963947004044872 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 13 (3) ◽

pp. 216-234 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

Violeta Sotirova

Keyword(s):

Conversation Analysis ◽

Initial Position ◽

Critical Comment ◽

Point Of View ◽

Spoken Discourse ◽

Free Indirect Style ◽

The Way

This article re-examines the role of connectives in free indirect style. Connectives in sentence-initial position have been singled out as a marker of the style because of their frequency in spoken discourse (Fludernik, 1993). They have also been analysed as continuative devices which help the reader to sustain an already established interpretation of perspective across sentences of free indirect style (Ehrlich, 1990). My concern here is with a newly exemplified role of connectives to shift perspective and I have selected passages from D. H. Lawrence which have elicited critical comment in relation to point of view (Adamson, 1995; Baron, 1998). I turn to the contribution of conversation analysis and correlate the uses of connectives turn-initially with their use at points of perspectival shifts. My main conclusion is that connectives also relate viewpoints to each other much in the way that they relate utterances in conversation. Finally, this correlation between the interactive role of connectives and their shifting role in point of view presentation bears on the theories of free indirect style more generally. It strongly supports Bakhtin’s dialogical model.

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Parentheticals and point of view in free indirect style

Language and Literature ◽

10.1177/0963947009105341 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 129-153 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Diane Blakemore

Keyword(s):

Virginia Woolf ◽

Point Of View ◽

Katherine Mansfield ◽

Malcolm Lowry ◽

Free Indirect Style

This article explores the functions of parentheticals in Free Indirect Style (FIS), and in particular their role in enabling the author to represent thoughts from a variety of perspectives — including his own. I argue that while there is a sense in which a FIS text can achieve relevance by creating a sense of mutuality that is unmediated by the presence of the author, there are also features which allow the author to signal his own attitudes towards the characters whose thoughts he is representing. Indeed, as Dillon and Kirchhoff (1976) and Fludernik (1993) have shown, an author is able to communicate a sense of ironic distance even if he does not necessarily explicitly comment on his characters. Using examples from Katherine Mansfield, Malcolm Lowry and Virginia Woolf, I show that parentheticals play a role both in establishing a sense of affective mutuality between reader and character and in establishing a sense of irony by placing represented thoughts in a ludicrous light.

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Twenty-First-Century Excess

10.1093/oso/9780198766148.003.0005 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Ben Masters

Keyword(s):

First Century ◽

World War Two ◽

World War ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Zadie Smith ◽

Free Indirect Style ◽

Cloud Atlas ◽

New Generation

This chapter evaluates the legacy of Burgess, Carter, and Amis by examining the work of a new generation of excessive English stylists, including Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell. It begins by showing how arguments similar to those made against stylistic prolixity in the aftermath of World War Two have resurfaced post-9/11. It goes on, through close readings of three novels (NW, Darkmans, Cloud Atlas), to show how this newer generation of writers has adapted and expanded the methods of the earlier stylists of excess by staging a return to ideas of character, interiority, and empathy in a way that still prioritizes authorial style and amplitude. With reference to Dorothy Hale’s notion of the aesthetics of alterity, it shows how these authors have made innovative use of free indirect style and polyphony to create a critical empathy that self-reflexively trains us to apprehend its own limitations.

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Free Indirect Style Representing ‘thought’ in L’Assommoir and Its Translation : Diachronic Comparison with the Translation of ‘speech’

The Journal of East-West Comparative Literature ◽

10.29324/jewcl.2018.03.43.51 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 43 ◽

pp. 51-74

Author(s):

Sunheui Park

Keyword(s):

Free Indirect Style

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Misreading Emma

10.1093/oso/9780190689414.003.0008 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

David Davies

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Values ◽

Third Person ◽

Free Indirect Style ◽

First Time ◽

Do So

Emma Woodhouse misreads the intentions, and the significance of the actions, of those around her in ways that reflect both her projects and her own acknowledged or unacknowledged desires. Moreover, Emma is innovative in its wide use of “free indirect style”: readers view the fictional events largely through a third-person narrative inflected by Emma’s consciousness of these events. A consequence, for most critics, is that the first-time receiver will have difficulty detecting Emma’s misreadings. Contrary to this view, this chapter argues that, far from deliberately obscuring details of the narrative in this way, Austen’s particular use of the free indirect style allows her to furnish the receiver with the clues necessary to see Emma as the misreader that she is. The first-time receiver is intended to register Emma’s misreadings, and one who fails to do so is themselves misreading Emma. Emma, so understood, bears on debates about the cognitive values of literature.

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