From Empathetic Deixis to Empathetic Narrative: Stylisation and (De‐)subjectivisation as Processes of Language Change

Abstract

In this paper I try to relate a problem in the history of literary style to wider issues in the theory of language change. The stylistic question I address concerns the historical origin of empathetic narrative (Bally's style indirect libre). I contest the standard account, which associates its first appearance with the nineteenth‐century novel, and argue instead for a linguistic origin in the everyday use of shifted (empathetic) deictics and for a historical origin in the emergence of modern subjectivity in seventeenth‐century epistemology. I propose a quantificational method for comparing the incidence of empathetic narrative in texts and a theory of stylisation to account for its progressive development across a historical corpus. The paper's interest to non‐literary readers lies, on the level of data, in the evidence it presents of the use of tense‐adverb combinations as an exponent of aspect and, on the level of theory, in its challenge to Traugott's account of the role of subjectivisation in language change.

Defoe’s psychological realism: The effect of directness in indirect consciousness representation categories

“…Many critics have focused exclusively on free indirect speech and thought (FIST) due to its unique linguistic status (Banfield, 1982; Ehrlich, 1990; Fludernik, 1993; McHale, 1978; Pascal, 1977). As Adamson argues, however, the historical origin of FIST ‘has been curiously neglected’ (1995: 197). Although it seems universally acknowledged that Jane Austen was the first to use the style extensively in her third-person narratives at the beginning of the nineteenth century, some critics, including Adamson herself, have demonstrated its earlier, first-person instances.…”

“…According to Cohn, the existential relationship between the two selves ‘imitates the temporal continuity of real beings’ (1978: 144), and so the narrating self is always ‘free to slide up and down the time axis that connects [the] two selves’ (1978: 145). Adamson (1995: 202–204) similarly argues that the narrating self can easily attribute subjectivity to the past self because of the normal assumption about the continuity of personal identity, due to which FIST first evolved in the first-person narrative style. In first-person narratives, therefore, ‘linguistic empathy most naturally arises, transferring deictic, epistemic, and expressive terms’ from the narrating self to the experiencing self (Adamson, 1995: 204).…”

“…The use of direct elements as in (17) and (18) gives the narrated consciousness ‘new colour as a marker of experiential immediacy’ (Adamson, 1995: 216) as if it were represented through the point of view of the past self. Defoe’s indirect modes of consciousness representation are not always clearly consonant or dissonant, because they often exhibit both qualities even within a sentence.…”

“… 3. Adamson (1995) calls such a linguistic construction ‘the was-now paradox’, and Nikiforidou (2010, 2012) similarly names it ‘the Past + now pattern’. …”

How is Mrs Ramsay thinking? The semantic effects of consciousness presentation categories within free indirect style

“…These include Cohn (1978), Banfield (1981Banfield ( , 1982, Brinton (1995), Semino and Short (2004) and Blakemore (2009). Other stylisticians also warn against analysing it as a form of quotation (Adamson, 1994a), or as derivative of some underlying direct discourse (Aczel, 1998). According to Banfield, FIT 'may represent thought with all its expressivity and subjective nuances without it being necessary to assume that these thoughts ever took linguistic shape for the thinker ' (1982: 138).…”