Heroic Deeds and Devious Villains: a Study in the Use of Reported Direct Speech in Six Children's Books
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Heroic deeds and devious villains: a study in the use of reported direct speech in six children's books Hovedoppgave i engelsk Universitetet i Bergen Våren 2001 Therese Holm Because the context in which children’s literature is produced and disseminated are usually dominated by a focus on content and theme, the language of children’s literature receives little explicit attention. Stephens 1996:58 List of tables List of tables Table 1.1: The books in the corpus 6 Table 1.2: Selected chapters from each book 7 Table 1.3: Average number of pages, words per page and per book. 7 Table 4.1: The position of the reporting clause in direct speech 57 Table 4.2: The four reporting verbs most frequently used 63 Table 4.3: Number of verb types in each verb group 63 Table 4.4: Number of verb tokens and types used in the corpus 64 Table 4.5: Percentage of occurrences of SAY used with and without expansion 66 Table 4.6: Occurrences of SAY with and without expansions 67 Table 4.7: Number of different expansions found in the corpus 67 Table 4.8: Number of adverbial expansion types found in the different groups 68 Table 4.9: Occurrences per verb group of reporting verb types used with adverbial expansions 69 Table 4.10: The correspondence between the use of inversion and the use of expansions 71 Table 4.11: The use of expressive reporting verbs vs the use of expansions 72 Table 5.1: Number of paralinguistic reporting verb tokens and types in Lundquist (1992) 83 Table 5.2: Number of paralinguistic reporting verb tokens and types in the present study 84 Table 5.3: Percentage of SAY in six studies 84 Table 5.4: Most frequently used reporting verb types in three studies 85 Table 5.5: Percentage of reporting clauses with and without expansions 86 List of figures List of figures Figure 3.1: Three types of dialogues, according to Nash (1990) 35 Figure 3.2: Chatman’s figure of free direct and indirect speech and thought 40 Figure 3.3: Thompson & Yiyun’s (1992) reporting verbs categories 47 Figure 3.4: Fónagy’s (1986) groups of Hungarian verbs denoting non-verbal activities 49 Figure 3.5: The reporting verb categories according to Arctaedius (1982) 50 Figure 3.6: Three groups of adverbial expansions 53 Figure 4.1: Percentage of reporting clauses with inversion in each book 58 Figure 4.2: Percentage of the total number of reporting verb tokens used in each book 59 Figure 4.3: Number of reporting verb types used per book 60 Figure 4.4: Percentage of verb types occurring once in each book 61 Figure 4.5: Distribution of reporting verbs used only once in the corpus 62 Figure 4.6: Percentage of SAY in the different books 65 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of tables i List of figures ii Acknowledgements iii Preface iv 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Preface 1 1.2 Aim and Scope 3 1.3 Choosing the material 4 1.4 Primary material and text selection 5 1.5 The Corpus 7 1.6 Analysis of the corpus 8 1.7 Analysing the results 10 1.8 Stucture and organisation 11 2 LITERARY BACKGROUND AND HISTORY 2.1 Introduction 12 2.2 What is children’s literature? 12 2.3 The readers 16 2.3.1 Two Danish surveys 17 2.3.2 The Deichman debate of the 1980s 18 2.4 Authors of children’s literature 20 2.4.1 The self-image of children’s literature writers 20 2.4.2 The authors of the books analysed in this thesis 22 2.5 Publishing and marketing 26 2.6 Popular children’s fiction 26 2.6.1 What criteria can we use for discussing popular fiction? 27 2.6.2 The characters of popular fiction: heroes and villains 28 2.6.3 The story line 28 2.6.4 Dialogue as an action-enhancing tool 31 2.7 Summary 32 3 REPORTED SPEECH 3.1 Introduction 34 3.2 Conversations and pictures in popular fiction books 34 3.3 Previous research 35 3.3.1 Reported speech in general 35 3.3.2 Reported speech in children’s books 36 3.4 Types of reported speech 37 3.4.1 Direct and indirect speech 37 3.4.2 Free direct (and indirect) speech 39 3.4.3 Paraphrased speech 40 3.5 Direct speech 41 3.5.1 The reporting clause 41 3.5.1.1 Positions of the reporting clause 42 3.5.1.2 Inversion 43 3.5.2 Reporting verbs 46 3.5.2.1 Terminology 46 3.5.2.2 Functions 47 3.5.2.3 Problems with categorization 50 3.5.3 Expansions of the reporting clause 52 3.5.3.1 Adverbials 53 3.5.3.2 Prepositional phrases 53 3.6 Summing up 54 4. RESULTS 4.1 Introduction 55 4.2 Reporting clauses 55 4.2.1 The position of the reporting clause 56 4.2.2 Inversion 57 4.3 Reporting verbs 58 4.3.1 Variety 58 4.3.2 The reporting verb say 64 4.4 Expansions 65 4.4.1 Adverbial expansions 67 4.4.2 Prepositional phrase expansions 69 4.4.3 Inversion and expansions in Harry Potter and Narnia 70 4.5 The use of expressive reporting verbs vs the use of expansions 71 4.6 Summing up 73 5. DISCUSSION 5.1 Group 1: Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys 74 5.2 Group 2: Animorphs and Goosebumps 75 5.3 Group 3: Narnia and Harry Potter 76 5.4 The three groups 77 5.5 The old books vs the new books 79 5.6 Books by female authors vs books by male authors 81 5.7 Comparison with other studies 82 5.8 Why these results? 86 5.8 Summary 87 6. CONCLUSION 6.1 Summary of results 88 6.2 Were the hypotheses correct 89 6.3 Aspects of further study 90 References 92 Appendix A: The Library Survey Appendix B: A presentation of the books Appendix C: Appendix D Appendix E Appendix F Appendix G Appendix H Appendix I Appendix J Appendix K Appendix L Appendix M Appendix N Appendix O 1 Introduction ___________________________________________________________________________________ 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 PREFACE It is a truth universally acknowledged that the ability to read gives you power. Because we believe it is important to be a good reader, and since we see reading as a meaningful and important activity, we want our children to read as much as possible. We are not indifferent, however, to what kind of literature children should read. Although we usually accept that some books can be read for no other purpose than entertainment, we quite often believe it is better for children to read so-called ‘good’ children’s books, instead of popular fiction books, partly because of our prejudices against popular fiction books in general, and partly because many adult readers, even if they enjoyed reading popular fiction while growing up, now see the books as poorly written, predictable and formula-based, filled with simplified language and over-used clichés. A good book is usually dependent on two main ingredients: a believable plot and a varied language. The plot should not be too predictable and the protagonists should be someone the reader can relate to. The language should not be repetitive or oversimplified, but rather enhance the description of the action and the characters. A common perception among adult readers is the following: if we want children to achieve a well-developed language and be able to express themselves well, we need to provide them with good quality books. We assume that the author of a good children’s book uses a broader vocabulary and is more diverse and varied in her/his choice of words than the author of a popular fiction book. But is this really a fact? Nash (1990) suggests that popular fiction books consist primarily of pictures and conversations; in other words, the books contain partly descriptions of protagonists, their surroundings and the action, and partly dialogues between people. According to Liljestrand (1983), this is the case for all kinds of prose, including novels and short stories. We can thus assume that children’s books, both popular fiction and, for want of a better word, quality children’s books, consist of a patchwork of pictures and conversations. Since the aim of many modern children’s books is to entertain the reader and make her keep turning the pages to find out how the story ends, the action becomes the most important ingredient. The dialogue in children’s books is thus often used as an action-enhancing tool, in that a lot of the action takes place in the speech-sequences, viz the dialogues. Therefore, by analysing the language used to 1 1 Introduction ___________________________________________________________________________________ report speech in children’s books, we can get a fairly good picture of the language in the book as a whole. Stephens (1996) gives additional reasons for studying the use of direct speech. He says that the writer implicitly controls how readers understand a text by the presence of the narrative voice. Because readers willingly ‘surrender themselves to the flow of the discourse, especially by focusing attention on story or content, they are susceptible to the implicit power of point of view’ (1996:66). The writer, in the shape of the narrator, has, however, less control over point of view in the reported speech; therefore the instances of reported speech are where the reader is allowed to interpret the text herself.