Theresa Heyd

Understanding and handling unreliable narratives : A pragmatic model and method

Abstract This paper explores the pragmatic foundations of unreliable narration (UN), a narrative technique highly popular in western literary texts. It sets out by giving a critique of the competing theoretic frameworks of UN, namely the seminal Boothian concept and more recent constructivist approaches. It is argued that both frameworks neglect a pragmatic perspective as the most viable way for identifying and analysing UN. Such a pragmatic model is then developed on the basis of theories of cooperation, such as the Gricean maxims, relevance theory, and politeness. The emerging definition of UN treats a narrator as unreliable if he or she violates the cooperative principle without intending an implicature. This model is tested against three prototypical UNs: Christies The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Ishiguros The Remains of the Day, and Poes The Tell-Tale Heart. These sample analyses yield a typology of UN: while pragmatic deviation is shown to be the intrinsic feature of the phenomenon, unreliable narrators vary according to their degree of intentionality. Finally, two recurring issues in the UN debate are briefly discussed: the existence of textual clues of UN, and the role of the reader in constructing unreliability.

Folk-linguistic landscapes: The visual semiotics of digital enregisterment

This article analyzes folk-linguistic photo blogging as an example of twenty-first-century grassroots prescriptivism. Photo blogs engaged in grassroots prescriptivism usually focus on one specific linguistic phenomenon and collect visual evidence of its usage. Through the overt or covert language policing involved in such displays, folk-linguistic photo blogs contribute to the digital enregisterment of the linguistic practices they focus on as nonstandard or uneducated. This process is closely examined in a case study on emphatic quotation marks, a nonstandard form of punctuation that has been termed ‘greengrocers quotes’, and its concomitant folk-linguistic photo blog. It is argued here that much of the persuasive power of such blogs can be attributed to their reliance on photographic material depicting signage in public space, and thus on the kind of visual semiotics that also informs many recent approaches in sociolinguistics. The simultaneity of these two phenomena is critically discussed. (Visual semiotics, enregisterment, computer-mediated communication, grassroots prescriptivism, emphatic quotation)*

Unreliability. The Pragmatic Perspective Revisited

Unreliability has been discussed from the vantage point of literary theory and in particular narratology for several decades; as the predominant concepts in these disciplines have shifted, so has the notion of what constitutes the notion of unreliability in a narrative. The account presented here approaches unreliability not from within literary theory but from a linguistic and pragmatic perspective. It is rooted in the pragmatics of cooperation and interaction and the associated pragmatic models: Gricean conversation maxims, relevance and politeness theory, speech act theory and conversation analysis. Based on this theoretical framework, unreliable narratives are described as utterances that have, at their core, a deceptive and thus uncooperative stance; unreliability is thus based on the violation of the Gricean Cooperative Principle and its maxims of quality and quantity. The fact that such maxim violations, when not intended as an implicature, go against the grain of purposeful and cooperative communication helps to explain the striking aesthetic effects that unreliable narratives often create, such as suspense, humor and a distinct sense of surprise in the reader. Based on this initial description, this paper discusses the question of author and narrator and their respective roles in the creation of unreliability; the model presented here conceives of unreliable discourse as dual or echoic utterances that are shared between the fictional narrator persona and the real-world author in a case of simultaneous use/mention semiotics. In addition, the existence of so-called unreliability markers, or microlinguistic cues for unreliability, is discussed. Based on the pragmatic and linguistic framework employed here, it is emphasized that microlinguistic features are neither sufficient nor necessary for a narrative to be unreliable; the fact that certain bundles of features are nevertheless frequently observed in such texts is here explained in terms of recurrent politeness strategies, as well as the simulation of orality and thus closeness in such discourse. Finally, an outlook is provided that links up this pragmatic account of unreliability with certain trends in cognitive linguistics and stylistics, thus suggesting that the cognitive turn that has influenced recent literary studies and a linguistic approach to literary discourse are far from irreconcilable but share, in fact, a lot of common ground.

Narratives of Belonging in the Digital Diaspora: Corpus Approaches to a Cultural Concept

Abstract In this study, I examine narratives of belonging through a corpus of digital diasporic discourse. The corpus is based on a Nigerian online discussion forum; its users primarily consist of both local Nigerians and members of the globally dispersed Nigerian diaspora. The study sets out by providing a working definition of narratives of belonging couched in the sociolinguistic tradition of approaching narrative structures. This includes aspects of personal narration, structural features, and reference to concepts that are salient in the construction of belonging. From this preliminary definition, retrieval strategies are developed to identify narratives of belonging in a large-scale dataset through a combination of manual and automated searches. The dataset of narratives is then analyzed, both in terms of structural features such as length and variation in narrative complexity, as well as linguistic properties, such as code-switching and the use of toponyms. Finally, these analyses are used to identify emerging topic strands and recurring themes in these narratives of belonging. It can be argued that such codifications of the diasporic experience are created and reinforced through individuated stories. Narratives of belonging, in other words, systematically contribute to the identity work performed in and by a digital diasporic community.