Social deixis in literature

Macrae, Andrea

doi:10.5040/9781350062993.0008

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…As McIntyre (2006) puts it, deictic centres refer ‘not just to a speaker or hearer’s location in space and time, but also to their position in social hierarchy’ (p. 92). While Macrae (2020) notes that there is ‘at present no clear agreement on what comprises [social] deixis’ (p. 53), Stockwell (2019) has suggested that ‘modality [. .…”

Section: Point Of View In Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

Distance, proximity, and authenticity in the point of view of US military drone operator autobiographies

Voice

2022

Discourse Studies

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Drone warfare disrupts the generally understood experience of war, and drone operators’ distance from the battlefield has called into question the authenticity of their experiences as participants in conflict. This article examines the autobiographies of three US military drone operators, analysing how the narration is discursively oriented to particular spatial and ideological perspectives. It argues that the linguistic construction of point of view in each text reflects a dynamic and sometimes paradoxical relationship between drone operators and their distance from the battlefield. Observing the position and shifting of deictic centres, the analysis draws parallels between spatial perspective, ideology, and the social identities of drone operators and victims of drone strikes. It concludes by reflecting on the variety of discursive strategies employed across these texts, and considers this variation itself to be an emerging trend in the discourse of drone warfare.

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Section: Point Of View In Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

Distance, proximity, and authenticity in the point of view of US military drone operator autobiographies

Voice

2022

Discourse Studies

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“…Lambrou analyses these endings, one a counterfactual daydream and the others two ‘what if’ endings which construct a ‘forking path’ on the narrative road, in light of the concept of metalepsis (Genette, 1980) to demonstrate the ultimate manipulative power of the author/narrator. Macrae (2020a) explores social deixis in literature, examining a range of overlapping deictic categories to offer two main social deictic sub-types, Attitudinal-experiential deixis and Socio-relational deixis, which are applied to the last stanza of ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas. These two social deictic sub-types highlight the shifting addressees in this verse, between reader and ‘my father’ and potentially God, and foreground therefore the somewhat ambivalent status of the reader.…”

Section: Lockdown Stylistics Continuedmentioning

confidence: 99%

The year’s work in stylistics 2020

Statham

2021

Language and Literature

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“…Social deixis, in particular, has covered a large category of features compared with the other useful divisions to the extent that different thinkers (such as Macrae, 2019 and Semino, 2011) have explored ways of differentiating within that classification. The scope of my own category (Stockwell, 2000, drawn from Levinson’s (1983) relational deixis) has been described as ‘unusually wide’ and ‘markedly rich’ (Macrae, 2020: 57) since I included any aspect of sociocultural positioning that anchored the meaning of an utterance. (Most recently, I have fallen in line with others working in cognitive poetics in describing this category as ‘social deixis’: Stockwell, 2020).…”

Section: Social Deixismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, most cognitive poetic studies have focused either on the main egocentric aspects of deixis or (as in Macrae’s, 2019 work) on textual and compositional matters collectively subsumed as discourse deixis (see also Gibbons, 2012; Gibbons and Macrae, 2018). Aside from Macrae (2020), there has been little cognitive poetic work on social deixis (though see Glover and Al-Tekreeti, 2018; Horton, 1999).…”

Section: Social Deixis As Positioningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Literary dialect as social deixis

Stockwell

2020

Language and Literature

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The representation of non-standard and regional accent and dialect in literary fiction has been framed mainly sociolinguistically and treated as an index of authenticity, within an account of characterisation. The reader’s attitude to such speakers in literary fiction is manipulated narratorially and authorially. Since readerly effects, impressions and evaluations are the key issues involved, it seems plausible that a cognitive poetic approach to the reading of dialect in literature would also be productive. In the current deictic theory, the dimension of social deixis captures a broad range of stylistic features including register and dialectal representations. Cognitive deictic theory draws on an explicitly spatial metaphor in which characters are positioned in conceptual space. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the effect of readerly positioning and dispositioning. This article revisits social deixis and its points of transition and textural variation from a theoretical perspective. It develops a new angle on the representation and significance of accented and dialectal forms in literary fiction, with some illustrative examples drawn from 19th and 20th century British novels.

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Social deixis in literature

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Distance, proximity, and authenticity in the point of view of US military drone operator autobiographies

Distance, proximity, and authenticity in the point of view of US military drone operator autobiographies

The year’s work in stylistics 2020

Literary dialect as social deixis

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