Mick Short

Revisiting the notion of faithfulness in discourse presentation using a corpus approach

A number of recent studies have argued that the notion of faithfulness to an original should be abandoned in models of discourse presentation, and particularly in accounts of direct speech presentation. This has coincided with a shift of attention in the study of discourse presentation from written to spoken data. This article discusses the arguments that have been made against the notion of faithfulness, and proposes a context-sensitive account of this notion, and of its relation to the various clines of discourse presentation and their categories. Our account is prompted partly by the results of a corpus-based approach to the study of discourse presentation, and partly by a qualitative analysis of a set of newspaper articles on a particular news story from outside this corpus, which we undertook to provide a check on the conclusions we had reached from our corpus study. We believe that if a general account of discourse presentation is to be reached, similarities and differences across a wide range of texts and text types need to be examined. Our corpus work, which involves careful and systematic comparison of a balanced set of written fictional, news and (auto)biographical narratives, is offered as a contribution to the general account referred to above. We also believe that if such a general account or theory is to be reached, scholars will need a clearer and more consistent application of the various descriptive terms which have been used in this area of study during the 20th century, in particular (a) ‘discourse’, (b) ‘speech’, ‘thought’ and ‘writing’ and (c) ‘report’, ‘presentation’ and ‘representation’.

Linguistic metaphor identification in two extracts from novels

This article examines a series of issues involved in identifying metaphors in texts. Metaphor identification is, in turn, a fundamental part of the more complex issue of how to relate linguistic metaphors in texts to the conceptual metaphors of cognitive metaphor theory. In section 1 we list a number of general issues involved in metaphor identification. In sections 2 and 3 we examine two short fictional extracts from novels written in the 1990s (one from popular fiction and one from serious fiction), relating our detailed analyses to the general questions raised at the beginning of the article. We thus raise and exemplify a series of issues which do not have easy resolutions but which must be grasped (a) if a corpus-based approach to metaphor is to become a reality and (b) if the relations between conceptual and linguistic metaphors are to be fully understood. Interestingly, this attempt to be extremely detailed and systematic in turn leads us to comment on differences in aesthetic effects between the use of metaphors in the two extracts examined.

Using a corpus to test a model of speech and thought presentation

This paper reports on a text-based empirical project aimed at testing and refining Leech and Shorts (1981) model of speech and thought presentation. A balanced British English corpus consisting of twentieth-century prose fiction and contemporary press stories was tagged using Leech and Shorts categories of speech and thought presentation as a starting point. The tagging of the corpus led to the introduction of two new categories (the narrators report of voice and the narration of internal states), and a number of sub-types of existing categories. We define and exemplify the new categories and sub-categories, indicate their frequencies in our data, and explore their effects in different text-types. We also discuss the coding difficulties posed by anibiguities and overlaps between categories, and consider the implications of such problems and other factors for the claim that the boundaries between speech and thought presentation categories are clinal in nature. Although our research reveals a wealth of evidence to support the idea that the speech and thought presentation scale is a cline rather than a series of discrete categories, it also suggests that some category boundaries (especially those at the direct/free indirect boundary) are less clinal than others.

A cross-cultural study of fictional and non-fictional text understanding.

It is often assumed that readers of texts vary in their responses, even if they come from the same cultural background, depending upon their personal assumptions and knowledge about the kind of text they are reading. In this paper we investigate how readers from three different language groups responded to (translations of) the same textual extracts. We focus on two questions. Do readers respond differently to the same textual extract depending on what text-type they think it is, and does the response vary much from one language/cultural group to another? Our study involves English, Hungarian and German senior secondary school students. They were asked to read and comment on three short extracts from three different text-types (novel, newspaper report and autobiography) according to different text-type assumptions. Although there were some palpable differences in response to the texts, both within and among the samples, there were also considerable similarities. Moreover, there was no discernible effect on reading outcomes of declared text-type.

Discourse presentation and speech (and writing, but not thought) summary

This article outlines the detailed nature of a relatively neglected phenomenon in discourse presentation – speech (and writing but not thought) summary – and considers its consequences for discourse presentation theory. Careful consideration of the phenomenon of clearly intended speech and writing summary, as well as other phenomena where discourse is clearly presented but not reported, helps us to preserve in a focused way the canonical notion of varying degrees of faithfulness in the reporting of speech and writing originating in anterior contexts, something which is necessary, in my view, to explain the prototypical effects of the different categories on the discourse presentation scales in contexts (e.g. fictional speech) where speech is clearly being presented but not reported. I make a distinction between what I call ‘proposition-domain summary’ (where individual propositions are summarized) and ‘discourse-domain summary’ (the summary of larger stretches of discourse), and suggest that, whereas proposition-domain summary is usually associated with what has usually been called the Narrator’s/Reporter’s Representation of a Speech Act (NRSA) on the speech presentation scale and its equivalent Narrator’s/Reporter’s Representation of a Writing Act (NRWA) on the writing presentation scale, discourse-domain summary can in principle be presented using any of the categories on the speech and writing presentation scales. Consequently, I want to propose scales of speech and writing discourse-domain summary to match the traditional speech and writing presentation (i.e. ‘proposition presentation’) scales. I also suggest that the notion of summary does not sensibly apply to thought presentation and consider the theoretical consequences of this. Along the way, I will (i) propose a minor, but hopefully helpful (because I think it is clearer and more accurate), change in the naming of the discourse presentation categories and their associated acronyms, (ii) discuss some interesting ambiguous cases, (iii) consider how we become aware, when reading the presenting text, that discourse is being summarized and (iv) correct some errors in Short (1988) and Chapter 10 of Leech and Short (2007 [1981]).

A reply to Mackay

As far as we can see, in his Note in Language and Literature 8 (1) Ray Mackay (1999) makes no real attempt to counter the arguments made by ourselves, Donald C. Freeman and Paul Simpson in Language and Literature 7 (1) (Short et al., 1998), in our response to his original article (Mackay, 1996) ‘critiquing’ the work of Ron Carter and the other four stylisticians named above. Instead, he says that we have ‘misrepresented’ and ‘demonized’ him as a consequence of his ‘having touched a nerve’ (p. 59). His account takes up most of its space in suggesting that we have been unfair in our response because we are ‘eminent professors’ and he is not, and because of our misrepresentation, intemperate language and slippery tactics. As we cannot perceive what Mackay accuses us of in our work, it is rather difficult to know how to respond helpfully to such an account. Below we make some observations on the nature of the debate, and then follow this with an attempt to get back to a proper understanding of what is meant by ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ (what we were originally ‘accused’ of trying to be).

Investigating Student Reactions to a Web-Based Stylistics Course in Different National and Educational Settings

Although native English-speaking teachers of literature in English have sometimes shown a theoretical interest in the pedagogy of literature teaching, by and large they have tended to assume that an interest in their subject and associated texts, and a generally humane and humanist approach to discussing texts and issues, is more or less all that is required. Teachers of stylistics like to be involved in such discussion with their students too, but they have also been interested in the ‘nuts and bolts’ of teaching stylistics, and language and literature more generally. This is partly because stylisticians are predisposed to be interested in the more minute details of whatever they are investigating, and partly because having a foot in the linguistics/English language camp as well as the literature camp means that they have had to work harder to interest students in their area of study. By and large, nativespeaking students of English literature love reading and talking about literature, but are less keen to study the language of literary texts in the systematic, analytical and precise detail that stylistics requires, and so the stylisticians have been forced to think harder about how to engage their students with what they teach.

The web-based Language and Style course, e-learning and stylistics

This special issue of Language and Literature describes an introductory, interactive, online, (mainly) literary stylistics course, which is available free of charge, and how it has been used in a number of investigations to explore student reactions to learning online how to do stylistic analysis. Web-based Language and Style is an electronic equivalent of a course which has run, in various incarnations, at Lancaster University, UK since the 1980s. It used to be available as part of the Part I (first-year) English offerings and is now available as part of the Part I English Language offerings, under the course mnemonic ‘Ling 131’. Online Language and Style was made freely available in July 2005 at the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) conference at the University of Huddersfield, UK, to mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of PALA and to help those wanting to learn or teach stylistic analysis worldwide. It can be found at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/start.htm. Section 2 of this preface describes the structure of the rest of this special issue. Section 3 outlines the nature of the web-based course, how it came to be created and how, in general terms, it has been used for investigative pedagogical purposes. Section 4 describes the course in more detail and relates its structure and philosophy to what has been said more generally about e-learning. Section 5 compares Language and Style with other internet stylistics offerings and other internet courses more generally. Section 6 outlines how other stylistics teachers can use Language and Style in their own pedagogical research, and the support we can offer to those interested in such research. We also provide as an appendix a checklist of things which need to be considered by teachers thinking of using online Language and Style.

'E-learning and Language and Style in Lancaster'.

This article reports on research conducted in the department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University from 2002 to 2005 on first-year undergraduate student performance in, and reaction to, a web-based introductory course in stylistic analysis. The main focus of this report is a comparison of student responses to the varying ways in which the web-based course was used from year to year. The description of student responses is based on an analysis of end-of-course questionnaires and a comparison of exit grades. In 2002–3, students accessed the first two-thirds of the course in web-based form and the last third through more traditional teaching. In 2003–4 the entire course was accessed in web-based form, and in 2004–5 web-based course workshops were used as part of a combined package which also involved weekly lectures and seminars. Some comparison is also made with student performance in, and responses to, the traditional lecture + seminar form of the course, as typified in the 2001–2 version of the course.

Book Review: Language and Style in The Inheritors:

Cathayis a good example: for some, it is a wonderful work of art in its own right, for others, an inadequate translation. It is not surprising, then, that the Editor’s Notecontains a short but a useful passage stating the complexity of the problem, and hoping that the readers will accept the methodological eclecticism of the contributors (pp. ix–x). Although theoretical purists may disagree with this liberal approach, anybody interested in translation will find it practical and very rewarding. There are numerous occasions where contributing editors have produced very well-written mini essays. A good example is Peter Newmark’s discussion of Lowe-Porter’s and Wood’s translations of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Newmark admits that Lowe-Porter’s 1927 translation needed to be replaced by a more contemporary version suited to our sensibilities, and Wood’s 1995 translation is a good substitute (pp. 907–9). There is no doubt, however, that for many readers Lowe-Porter’s ‘imperfect’ and ‘dated’ version will remain a faithful representation of Der Zauberberg. Reading individual entries like this one, I have come to feel that it would be better if the word encyclopediawere not used in the title at all. I have happily read these two substantial volumes in the same way I would have read a history of literature in English translation, and perhaps this is the book’s biggest achievement. Since we have no comprehensive history of literary translation into English at the moment, these two volumes may serve as a good substitute.