Communication and the representation of thought: the use of audience directed expressions in free indirect thought representations

Blakemore, D

Abstract

This paper examines the use of audience-directed or inherently communicative expressions(discourse markers and interjections) in free indirect thought representations
in fiction. It argues that the insights of Banfield’s (1982) no-narrator approach to free indirect style can be accommodated in a relevance theoretic framework. The
result is an account in which the author’s act of revealing a character’s thoughts communicates a guarantee of optimal relevance – a guarantee which justifies the
effort which the reader invests in deriving meta-representations of those thoughts from the evidence which the author provides. However, the reward for this effort
is a meta-representation of a character’s thoughts which is unmediated by the thoughts of the author who is responsible for producing the text. Using examples
from fiction, I show that within this framework, the use of procedurally encoded discourse markers and interjections contribute to this sense of immediacy by
imposing constraints on interpretation which leave the reader with the responsibility for deriving his own interpretations of a character’s thoughts and thought
processes.

Citation

Blakemore, D. (2009). Communication and the representation of thought: the use of audience directed expressions in free indirect thought representations. Journal of Linguistics, 47(1), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226709990375

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2009
• Deposit Date: Dec 21, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 21, 2009
• Journal: Journal of Linguistics
• Print ISSN: 0022-2267
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 47
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 1-25
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226709990375
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0022226709990375
• Related Public URLs: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?iid=6259544