“I have often tried to write myself a pass” A Systemic-Functional Analysis of Discourse in Selected African American Slave Narratives Tobias Pischel de Ascensão Dissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie am Fachbereich Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft der Universität Osnabrück Hauptberichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Oliver Grannis Nebenberichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Ulrich Busse Osnabrück, 01.12.2003 Contents i Contents List of Tables iii List of Figures iv Conventions and abbreviations v Preface vi 0. Introduction: the slave narrative as an object of linguistic study 1 1. Slavery, resistance and the slave narrative 6 1.1 Slavery and resistance 6 1.2 The development of the slave narrative 12 1.2.1 The first phase 12 1.2.2 The second phase 15 1.2.3 The slave narrative after 1865 21 2. Discourse, power, and ideology in the slave narrative 23 2.1 The production of disciplinary knowledge 23 2.2 Truth, reality, and ideology 31 2.3 “The writer” and “the reader” of slave narratives 35 2.3.1 Slave narrative production: “the writer” 35 2.3.2 Slave narrative reception: “the reader” 39 3. The language of slave narratives as an object of study 42 3.1 Investigations in the language of the slave narrative 42 3.2 The “plain-style”-fallacy 45 3.3 Linguistic expression as functional choice 48 3.4 The construal of experience and identity 51 3.4.1 The ideational metafunction 52 3.4.2 The interpersonal metafunction 55 3.4.3 The textual metafunction 55 3.5 Applying systemic grammar 56 4. Presence, representation, and creation 59 4.1 General quantitative observations 59 4.2 The first-person pronoun and syntactic condensation 61 4.2.1 Introduction 61 4.2.2 Ellipsis 62 4.2.3 Finiteness 64 4.2.4 Nominalization 67 4.3 Representing the world: transitivity 73 4.3.1 The system of transitivity 73 4.3.2 The major process types: material, mental, relational 77 Contents ii 4.3.3 Minor process types: verbal, behavioural 83 4.3.4 The quantitative distribution of process types 84 4.3.5 Voice 89 5. The first-person narrator in individual narratives 91 5.1 A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery 91 5.1.1 Moses Roper’s presence in the text 91 5.1.2 Moses Roper’s use of transitivity 97 5.2 Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy 101 5.2.1 Moses Grandy’s presence in the text 101 5.2.2 Moses Grandy’s use of transitivity 104 5.3 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave 109 5.3.1 Frederick Douglass’ presence in the text 109 5.3.2 Frederick Douglass’ use of transitivity 123 5.4 Narrative of William Wells Brown, An American Slave 134 5.4.1 William Wells Brown’s presence in the text 134 5.4.2 William Wells Brown’s use of transitivity 143 5.5 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave 150 5.5.1 Henry Bibb’s presence in the text 150 5.5.2 Henry Bibb’s use of transitivity 159 5.6 Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup 168 5.6.1 Solomon Northup’s presence in the text 168 5.6.2 Solomon Northup’s use of transitivity 178 5.7 Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave 185 5.7.1 Charles Ball’s presence in the text 185 5.7.2 Charles Ball’s use of transitivity 198 5.8 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 210 5.8.1 Harriet Jacobs’ presence in the text 210 5.8.2 Harriet Jacobs’ use of transitivity 224 5.9 Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life 235 5.9.1 Louisa Picquet’s presence in the text 235 5.9.2 Louisa Picquet’s use of transitivity 251 5.10 Summary 257 6. Conclusion 270 Appendix 1: Quantitative results 277 Appendix 2: Statistical methods 284 References 288 Index 299 List of Tables and Figures iii List of Tables Table 4.1: Length of the narratives and occurrences of I 59 Table 4.2: Coordination of clauses and processes with and in first-person singular clauses 63 Table 4.3: Clause complex relations: taxis and logico-semantic relations 65 Table 4.4: Distribution of finite and nonfinite clauses 66 Table 4.5: Proportion (%) and relative frequency of nominalizations 68 Table 4.6: Selected nominalizations collocating with my 70 Table 4.7: Transitive and ergative interpretations of experientially similar clauses 75 Table 4.8: Proportion of subtypes of material processes (in percent of the total of material processes) 78 Table 4.9: Different types of mental verbs (Martin, Matthiessen, and Painter 122) 81 Table 4.10: Proportion of subtypes of mental verbs (in percent of the total of mental verbs) 81 Table 4.11: Criteria for distinguishing the major process types (Halliday 1994: 173) 83 Table 4.12: Summary of transitivity functions and their participants (Halliday 1994: 166) 84 Table 4.13: Absolute observed frequencies of process types 84 Table 4.14: Proportional distribution of process types (in percent) 86 Table 4.15: Relative frequency of process types (without passive voice and direct speech) 87 Table 4.16: Selection of passive voice in the corpus 89 Table 5.1.1: Development of the rfI in Roper’s narrative 91 Table 5.1.2: Selection of process types in Roper’s Narrative (in percent) 97 Table 5.2.1: Selection of process types in Grandy’s Narrative (in percent). 104 Table 5.2.2: Subtypes of material verbs in Grandy’s Narrative in percent of the total of material processes 105 Table 5.3.1: Distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in Douglass’ Narrative 109 Table 5.3.2: Distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in the four sections of Chapter 10 of Douglass’ Narrative 114 Table 5.3.3: rfI and nominalizations in Chapter 11 of Douglass’ Narrative 120 Table 5.3.4: Selection of process types in the four parts of Douglass’ Narrative (in percent, excluding passive voice and direct speech) 123 Table 5.3.5: Relative frequencies of process types in the four parts of Douglass’ Narrative 123 Table 5.4.1: Distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in Brown’s Narrative 134 Table 5.4.2: Selection of process types in Brown’s Narrative (in percent) 143 Table 5.5.1: Distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in Bibb’s Narrative 150 Table 5.5.2: Selection of process types in Bibb’s Narrative (in percent) 159 Table 5.6.1: Distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave 168 Table 5.6.2: Selection of process types in Northup (in percent) 178 Table 5.7.1: Distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains 187 Table 5.7.2: Selection of process types in Charles Ball (in percent) 199 Table 5.8.1: Distribution of the first-person singular pronoun in Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 211 Table 5.8.2: Selection of process types in Jacobs (in percent) 224 Table 5.9.1: Distribution of the I-pronoun in The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life 236 Table 5.9.2: Standard English forms and AAVE forms in Picquet 242 Table 5.9.3: Speech function pairs (cf. Halliday 1994: 69; Eggins and Slade 183) 246 List of Tables and Figures iv Table 5.9.4: Selection of process types in Picquet (in percent) 251 Table 5.10.1: Division into early “restrained” (group 1) vs. later “egocentric” (group 2) narrators 265 Table 5.10.2: Dictated vs. self-written narratives 266 Table 5.10.3: Linguistic characteristics of narratives according to an oral/literate cline 269 Table A.1.1 (4.13): Absolute observed frequencies of process types without passive voice and direct speech 277 Table A.1.2 (4.14): Proportional distribution of process types (in percent) 277 Table A.1.3 (4.15): Relative frequencies of process types (without passive voice) 278 Table A.1.4: Lexical density 278 Table A.1.5 Relative frequencies of linking devices 279 Table A.1.6: Finite and nonfinite clauses 280 Table A.1.7: Relative frequencies of interrogative and relative pronouns 280 Table A.1.8. Relative frequencies of selected lexical items 281 Table A.1.9: Relational processes and pseudo-passives 281 Table A.1.10: Relative frequencies of explicitly expressed probability 282 Table A.1.11: Negated process types in percent of the total of each individual process type 282 Table A.1.12: Negated process types in percent of the total of each individual process type (split according to negation of verbal group or nominal group) 283 Table A.1.13: Proportion of nominalizations without –nce in percent 283 Table A.1.14: Proportion of nominalizations formed with -ment, -ion, -ness, and -ity in different registers (Biber et al. 63) 283 Table A.2.1: Absolute expected theoretical frequencies of process types (uneven text weight) 285 Table A.2.2: Chi-square values for the individual narratives (uneven text weight) 285 Table A.2.3: Chi-Square values for individual process narratives (even text weight) 286 List of Figures Figure 3.4.1: Process types in the English language (Halliday 1994: 108) 53 Figure 4.3.1: Nuclear and circumstantial transitivity (based on Matthiessen 1999: 6f) 74 Figure 4.3.2: Distribution of process types associated with the first-person singular pronoun in the individual narratives 88 Figure 5.9.1: Speech functions in conversation (Eggins and Slade 193) 246 Figure 5.9.2: Reacting moves (Eggins and Slade 202, 209) 249 Conventions and abbreviations v Conventions and abbreviations Conventions: Double quotation marks (“.