Toward Developing a Procedure for Automatically Identifying Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation

The sixth chapter illustrates how the automatic annotation of the different modes of speech, writing, and thought presentation in 19th-century narrative fiction may be performed on the basis of repetitive lexico-grammatical features and by setting up rules based on the manual annotation of the corpus and facilitating it in larger data sets. The chapter proposes a number of formal diagnostic features for the identification of discourse presentation as well as procedures to help their automatic detection. The procedures described serve as basis for a tool for the automatic identification of discourse presentation which can be adopted to programs like Wmatrix (Rayson 2018) and WordSmith Tools (Scott 2017). The chapter furthermore critically reflects on the limits of automated procedures and the necessity to manually check the annotations and include contextual information for unambiguous identification of different types of discourse presentation.

Scales and Modes of Discourse Presentation and Their Functions

The fifth chapter focuses on the functional aspects of the various discourse presentation modes in 19th-century narrative fiction and particularly their role for the expression of subjectivity. The functional interpretation is based on the quantitative findings for the frequency, character, and combination of unambiguous as well as ambiguous discourse presentation modes in the corpus, also including hypothetical speech, writing, and thought presentation. The latter appear with considerable frequency in the 19th-century data. The chapter further describes and analyzes repetitive lexico-grammatical patterns identified for the different modes of discourse presentation and retrieved by the analysis of keywords and collocational structures.

The Discourse Presentation Model So Far

The second chapter discusses Semino and Short’s (2004) model of discourse presentation and adapts it for the study of 19th-century narrative fiction; the chapter presents a state-of-the-art overview of relevant research on discourse presentation in narrative fiction, including Sinclair’s concept of “trusting the text,” and Toolan’s (2009, 2016) concept of narrative progression. The chapter outlines first the main objectives of the study as comprising a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the types of speech, writing, and thought presentation in a corpus of 19th-century English narrative fiction, their distribution and functions; second, the development of a new methodology for investigating discourse presentation in historical data in order to enable diachronic comparison; third, the development of a tool for the automatic coding of discourse presentation on the basis of characteristic lexico-grammatical patterns; and finally, a qualitative investigation of the interplay between narration and modes of discourse presentation and their narratological function.

Introduction

In her introductory chapter, the author specifies the aims of the study and its theoretical background. Basing her approach on Leech and Short’s (1981) and Semino and Short’s (2004) categories of discourse presentation, she further develops their model to suit 19th-century fiction and to enable corpus annotation for quantitative next to qualitative investigation, in order to allow for systematically investigating the previously impressionistic observations about discourse presentation modes in historical English on a sound empirical basis. She further outlines how her corpus-stylistic approach will be enriched by contextualization to address the portrayal of subjectivity as well as diachronic pragmatic differences between 19th- and 20th-century narrative fiction. Defining the key issues in her approach of New Historical Stylistics, the study is to provide new insights into the nature of 19th-century narrative fiction that are useful for corpus stylistics, text-linguistics, historical linguistics and pragmatics, as well as narratology and literary criticism.

Narrative Progression and Characterization

The seventh chapter focuses on the functional interplay between passages of narration that interplay with the different modes of discourse presentation. It shows how this interplay is linguistically realized in 19th-century fiction and which functional potential it has for narrative progression and characterization. The discussion focuses on (a) the lexico-grammatical variety of reporting verbs that accompany direct and indirect forms of speech, writing, and thought presentation; (b) paralinguistic narration describing mime, gesture, and body movement as well as moments of silence; and (c) foregrounded occurrences of passages of visual narration and discourse presentation. With particular grammatical, syntactic, and pragmatic patterns priming narrative stretches, readers are able to identify them and use them as anchor points for the processing of the narrative in general. Via recourse to quantitative methodology such as the identification of keywords, the chapter further presents some conclusions about particular 19th-century strategies of world creation.

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.

Conclusion

The final chapter summarizes the results from the study and presents directions for future research. The study has illustrated that speech, writing, and thought presentation in 19th-century narrative fiction works in a variety of modes and plays a crucial role in establishing, reflecting, and construing a social mind in action. This construal affects both intra- and intertextual dimensions, including readers and their processing as well as theoretical concerns of interpretation and methodological issues of analysis. The study has done pioneer work in the way it uses the analysis of keywords and repetitive patterns as basis for a tool that automatically annotates speech, writing, and thought presentation in digitized corpora. It has furthermore shown how repetitive patterns on all levels of discourse contribute to characterization and function as a means of narrative progression.

Methodology

The third chapter focuses on the methodological steps followed in the building of the electronic corpus of 19th-century narrative fiction used for the analysis as well as in the annotation and tagging of this corpus for automatic search. It outlines the parameters for the selection of sample texts and the annotation scheme in a detailed fashion. The chapter further discusses and critically reflects methodological caveats related to the size of the corpus, the selection of texts, and the manual annotation procedure.