Topic 9 (session A) - Speech Presentation > What happens when speech is presented > Task B

What happens when speech is presented

Task B - some different ways of presenting speech

We have already seen in Topic 8 that narrative descriptions can be written in ways that can make us feel close to, or more remote from, the viewpoint of a particular character and what is being decribed. The ways in which character speech can be presented contributes to this set of viewpoint effects. We will begin to explore this matter with some simple invented examples.

Below are four sentences. They all report the same conversation between two characters which a 1st-person narrator in a novel reports to us.

Drag the sentences to what you think are the appropriate places on the scale below and then compare them with our ordering. Can you label any of the presentational forms (e.g. direct speech, indirect speech)?

• What we have here are just some of the ways in which speech can be reported in real life and the speech of characters can be presented in novels. Effectively, we have a varying mix of character and narrator.

• With Direct Speech (DS) we know, within what is usually called the reported clause, because it connects to the reported discourse situation, exactly what the character said and the words and grammatical structures used to say it. The only indications of the narrator in our example are the quotation marks and the 'she said', which is normally called the reporting clause because it connects to the reporting discourse situation.

• With Indirect Speech (IS) we know the propositional content of what the character said from the reported clause, but the words and structures used to report it belong to the narrator, just like those of the reporting clause, not the character.

• With Narrator's Representation of Speech Act (NRSA), as with IS, the words and structures below to the narrator, and the only trace of the character is a summary of what she said, including an indication of the speech act used by the character. Unlike DS and IS, there is no reported clause at all.

• With Narrators's Representation of Voice (NV), all we know is that the female character said something to the other character. We don't even know what speech act was used, let alone what was said or what words were used to say it.

Hence we can feel 'close up', or 'further away' from what the character says, much like the way we noticed in Task A on the Linguistic Indicators of Point of View page, that the sentences in the extract from Virginia Woolf's 'Solid Objects' first positioned us a long way away from the two men and then brought them closer and closer to us.

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