The Interactional and Cultural Pragmatics of Evidentiality in Pastaza Quichua

This paper analyses the interactional and pragmatic effects of two evidential enclitics in the Pastaza Quichua language of Amazonian Ecuador. Attention is also given to represented discourse in a variety of genres. The overall goal is a better understanding of the perspectival encoding of experience through evidential enclitics and represented discourse, and the role of these devices in articulating concepts of sociability and politeness principles. A broader aim is to clarify how discourse practices making use of evidentiality and represented discourse may clarify Quichua peoples’ understandings of their relationships with each other and with non-human nature. Finally, this paper points to the need for future work which attempts to disentangle evidentiality from epistemic modality in Pastaza Quichua by suggesting that epistemic modality may be generated from evidentials as an implicature that depends in part on intonation.

Features of Discourse Presentation in Translation: Literary and Narratological Insights into Translation Universals

Several translation scholars have recognised translation as a form ofdiscourse mediation or discourse presentation (see, for example, Mossop 1998). In line with this, ‘universals’ of translation have also been re-framed in the larger context of discourse mediation, as mediation universals rather than something strictly translationspecific (Ulrych 2009). In the present article, this line of enquiry is developed by comparing some of the alleged universals of translation, namely standardization and explicitation, with insights from literary and narratological studies on the nature of discourse presentation. The notion of reportive or interpretative interference (Sternberg 1982) and Fludernik’s (1993) claim that all represented discourse is typical and schematic in nature seem to bear curious resemblance to the notion of standardization or normalization, posited as a possible universal of translation (Mauranen & Kujamäki 2004). Drawing on the results of my earlier research (Kuusi 2011), I present examples of free indirect discourse (FID) used in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment with their translations into Finnish. Analyzing the translations, I demonstrate how intranslations, the narratological and literary-theoretical notions of reportive interference and typification/schematization coincide with the translation-theoretical notions of explicitation and standardization.

Embedded dialogue and dreams: the worlds and accessibility relations of Inception

In this article, Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) and Ryan’s model of fictional worlds (1991a, 1991b) are both applied to Nolan’s blockbuster film, Inception (2010) to explore the multi-layered architecture of the narrative. The opening two scenes of Nolan’s screenplay are analysed using Text World Theory, with particular attention to the embedded nature of character dialogue, or, more generally, ‘represented discourse’ (Herman, 1993), otherwise known as Direct Speech (Leech and Short, 2007). Based on this analysis, I suggest a modification to the way in which Text World Theory deals with represented discourse, which improves the framework’s applicability to all text types. Moving from the micro-analysis of the screenplay text, to a macro-analysis of the film narrative as a whole, I outline the various different worlds that make up the reality, dream and ‘limbo’ layers in the film, explaining how most of the action takes place at a remove from the world at the centre of the textual system. I use Deictic Shift Theory’s terms PUSH and POP (Galbraith, 1995) to describe the movements between the ontological layers of the narrative and suggest that these terms are better suited to describe hierarchies of ontology rather than horizontal deictic shifts. Ryan’s taxonomy of accessibility relations is used to describe the ways in which the film differs from reality, as well as the ways in which the dreams differ from the internal reality of the film. The complex ontological structure and asymmetric accessibility relations between the worlds are ascribed as the reason for many viewers’ difficulty in processing the film’s narrative. With its attention to discourse-world factors, Text World Theory is then used to account for the myriad of reactions to Inception – as expressed on online discussion forums – which range from engagement and enjoyment to frustration and resistance.