Communication and the representation of thought: the use of audience directed expressions in free indirect thought representations

Blakemore, D 2009, 'Communication and the representation of thought: the use of audience directed expressions in free indirect thought representations' , Journal of Linguistics, 47 (1) , pp. 1-25.

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Abstract

This paper examines the use of audience-directed or inherently communicative expressions(discourse markers and interjections) in free indirect thought representations in fiction. It argues that the insights of Banfield’s (1982) no-narrator approach to free indirect style can be accommodated in a relevance theoretic framework. The result is an account in which the author’s act of revealing a character’s thoughts communicates a guarantee of optimal relevance – a guarantee which justifies the effort which the reader invests in deriving meta-representations of those thoughts from the evidence which the author provides. However, the reward for this effort is a meta-representation of a character’s thoughts which is unmediated by the thoughts of the author who is responsible for producing the text. Using examples from fiction, I show that within this framework, the use of procedurally encoded discourse markers and interjections contribute to this sense of immediacy by imposing constraints on interpretation which leave the reader with the responsibility for deriving his own interpretations of a character’s thoughts and thought processes.

Item Type:	Article
Themes:	Subjects / Themes > P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics Memory, Text and Place
Schools:	Schools > School of Humanities, Languages & Social Sciences > Centre for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Journal or Publication Title:	Journal of Linguistics
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Refereed:	Yes
ISSN:	0022-2267
Related URLs:	Publication
Depositing User:	DL Blakemore
Date Deposited:	21 Dec 2009 10:00
Last Modified:	16 Feb 2022 09:06
URI:	https://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/2691

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