Abstract

This article utilizes the theory of narrative style which is interesting from both the standpoint of literary stylistics as well as from that of the theory of communication. In this framework, the relation of a narrator to a reader is the basic relationship underlying all narrative structures. According to this basic relationship a number of ways of narration are differentiated or, as Mc Hale (1978) calls them represented/reported discourse. This article endeavours a systematic analysis of the stylistic devices used in fictional writing for the representation of a character’s speech and thought. So, the present study attempts to analyze the interaction between categories of speech and thought presentation in James Joyce’s Dubliners by applying Leech and Short Model (2007). Excerpts of 2000-word length have been selected and manually tagged to have the accurate annotation keeping in mind the contextual potential to recognize discourse categories in Joyce fiction and then corpus software AntConc (Laurence Anthony, 2018) was used to get quantitative results. Since fictional texts display the tendency to move between categories of speech and thought presentation as well as between the modes within one category and its demarcation is a real challenge to the researchers. The practical part of research was done on the basis of short stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners. Special emphasis is given to variations between the two modes as well as to the instances of ambiguity created by their interplay.

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