Pragmatics of Fiction

Miriam A. Locher, Andreas H. Jucker

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110431124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Pragmatics of Fiction provides systematic orientation in the emerging field of studying pragmatics with/in fictional data. It provides an authoritative and accessible overview of this versatile new field in its methodological and theoretical richness. Giving center stage to fictional language allows scholars to review key concepts in sociolinguistics such as genre, style, voice, stance, dialogue, participation structure or features of orality and literariness. The contributors explore language as one of the creative tools to craft story worlds and characters by drawing on concepts such as regional, social and ethnic language variation, as well as multilingualism. Themes such as emotion, taboo language or impoliteness in fiction receive attention just as the challenges of translation and dubbing, the creation of past and future languages, the impact of fictional language on language change or the fuzzy boundaries of narratives. Each contribution, written by a leading specialist, gives a succinct, representative and up-to-date overview of research questions, theories, methods and recent developments in the field.

1.Introducing Pragmatics of Fiction: Approaches, trends and developments

Andreas H. Jucker and Miriam A. Locher

Abstract: In this introduction to the handbook on the Pragmatics of Fiction we introduce the aims of the collection and position it within the field of pragmatics. Considering fiction as texts that deserve to be studied in their own right, we argue that a pragmatic perspective opens interesting avenues of investigating both the techniques of fiction and how they pattern as well as the unique communication situation into which readers/viewers enter when engaging with fictional texts. We review the changing attitudes towards fictional data in the linguists’ community and then outline the themes of the collection.

1.Setting the stage: Why the ‘pragmatics’ of fiction?

Fictional language exists in a multitude of different forms, ranging from novels and theatre plays to cinematic movies and radio or television dramas. And pragmatics offers a multitude of different perspectives to analyze all these forms and their effects on the readers/viewers. The research field of the pragmatics of fiction is correspondingly large and diverse.

In accordance with the definition adopted for the entire series of handbooks in which this volume appears, pragmatics is understood here in a wide sense as the study of the use of language in its social and historical context (see Preface to this volume by the series editors). The definition follows the conceptualization of pragmatics that has been called Continental European in contrast to the more specific Anglo-American conceptualization (Huang 2007: 4) or social pragmatics in contrast to theoretical pragmatics (Chapman 2011: 5; see also Jucker and Taavitsainen 2013: 2–5 for an overview of the two traditions). Our conceptualization of pragmatics crucially includes the social context in which communication takes place, both at the level of the extradiegetic communication between the creator of a fictional text and its recipients, and at the level of the intradiegetic communication between the characters depicted within fictional texts. Social pragmatics relies on rich contextual data about the conversationalists, their relationships and the context in which the communication takes place. It subsumes the interests of theoretical pragmatics, which focuses more narrowly on the technical, philosophical and cognitive aspects of interactional processes.

But even in this wide sense our conceptualization of pragmatics provides a clear focus for the contributions in this volume in that they are all concerned with the communicative aspects of the language of fiction. They are concerned with communication that is depicted in written fiction, communication that is enacted in drama and in telecinematic discourse, and with the communicative aspects of fiction itself, that is to say with the communication between authors, scriptwriters, producers and so on and their audiences.

On the intradiegetic level of depicted and enacted communication, the contributions deal with all those aspects of language use that pragmaticists generally investigate on the basis of natural spoken language and with the specificities provided by the fictional nature of the data. On the extradiegetic level of the communication between an author or scripwriter and his or her audience, the fictional text or discourse is seen as a complex communicative act connecting the originator and the addressee. From this point of view, a literary piece of work has a performative dimension and may be analyzed as “a way of doing things with words” (Miller 2001: 1, with reference to Austin 1962), i.e. as an extended kind of speech act and as such an act of communication (see also Bredella 1992; Giltrow Ch. 3, this volume; Messerli Ch. 2, this volume; Ohmann 1971; Pratt 1977; van Dijk 1976a, 1976b, [1980] 1981, 1985).

In several of his publications, Mey (2000, 2001, 2011) explores the complexities of the communicative process between the author and the reader of a literary text. The literary text has to be re-created by the reader. It is the result of the collaborative work of author and reader (Mey 2001: 789). As defined by Mey (2011: 511) “[l]iterary pragmatics is about how language is used in the production and consumption of literary texts”, which puts the focus squarely on the extradiegetic level, on the communication taking place between the author and the reader. He disentangles the multiple complexities of this communicative event which arise from the intervention of various narrative voices, as he calls them (see Mey 2000). Sell (2000), too, focuses on the extradiegetic level of literature in his study of literary communication. He is concerned with the very special situation of a communication between writers and readers belonging to different historical periods and he establishes literary criticism as a mediating force between writers and readers.

Despite the richness of this literature, we are still left with the important question of the type of pragmatics needed for an analysis of fictional language. Do we need a special set of tools to analyze fiction? Do we need a pragmatics of fiction? Or can we apply the same tools that have been developed for non-fictional language? In fact, there is an extensive discussion in the context of Relevance Theory that we need a field of literary pragmatics in order to provide a satisfactory account of the process of reading literary texts, but there is also a wide consensus that the standard tools of utterance interpretation can be used for this purpose (see in particular Blakemore 1992: 155–179; Pilkington 1991, 2000; Sperber and Wilson 1995: 231–237; Uchida 1998; Wilson 2011).

Relevance Theory argues that utterance interpretation depends crucially on both a process of decoding linguistic stimuli and on an inferential process. The inferential process is necessary to complete the result of the decoding process. Addressees need to resolve the numerous ambiguities in virtually any linguistic stimulus; they need to identify the referents of referring expressions; and they need to identify the communicative intention that the speaker is trying to get across. It is the inferential processes of disambiguation, reference assignment and enrichment that solve these tasks (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 185). And it is exactly these inferential processes that are at work in the interpretation of literature or poetic language more generally (see also Giltrow, Ch. 3, this volume). Uchida (1998: 164), for instance, shows that literary texts often create suspense through sentences whose referring expressions cannot be immediately resolved or which cannot immediately be sufficiently enriched. Pilkington (1991) argues that the indeterminate nature of poetry is the result of a large range of weakly communicated implicatures or poetic effects. This accounts for the possibility of alternative interpretations of a poem. Two readings of a poem cannot be absolutely identical because of the different cognitive environments of different readers. But the literary interpretation, like any process of utterance interpretation, is constrained by the available evidence, i.e. the linguistic stimulus.

Relevance Theory, so the argument, provides a consistent and comprehensive cognitive account of utterance interpretation, and, therefore, also of the interpretation of literary texts and their poetic effects. However, Relevance Theory does not provide a better understanding of literary texts. This is the realm of literary critics. But it does provide a better understanding of how literary critics, and readers in general, work out their interpretations (Wilson 2011: 72).

Literary criticism, literary theory and many explorations in stylistics go beyond pragmatics and consider a different and possibly much broader range of aspects of fiction including evaluation and interpretation, aesthetic principles and values, plot structure and much more. Much of this work has direct or indirect relevance for the contributions in this volume, but in the context of this volume, such aspects are only relevant in relation to their communicative function. Narrative developments or stylistic choices, for instance, are discussed in detail in several contributions in this volume but always with a clear perspective on their pragmatic effects.

Apart from the focus on a pragmatic perspective, the contributions in this volume do not pose any restrictions on the repertoire of analytical methods that are applied to the study of the language of fiction. They include quantitative and qualitative work, empirical and more heuristic approaches. But they always probe their suitability for the very special context of the language of fiction. The chapters provide as comprehensive an overview of the relevant work in this field as possible. Each of them provides a state-of-the-art account of a particular subfield, and in their entirety they give an overview of the wealth of literature in this particular field of pragmatic research. In the following section, we will reflect on the nature of fictional data and on the slippery nature of the boundary between the fictional and non-fictional. In Section 3 we will briefly survey some of the justifications that have been given for using fictional data for pragmatic analyses. Section 4, finally, will give an overview of the contributions in this handbook.

2.What is fictional data?

Sentences that appear in fictional texts do not appear to differ in their linguistic form from sentences that appear in other types of texts. There are some phrases, such as “once upon a time”, or referring expressions, such as “unicorn”, “fawn” or “magic wand”, which immediately suggest the context of a fictional text, but otherwise there is nothing in the syntax or morphology of a sentence or in the choice of vocabulary which systematically differentiates between fictional texts and other texts. Nevertheless, fictional texts enjoy a special status. They are often considered to be artistic and they achieve many functions, among them aesthetic, didactic, cultural and emotional. Different expectations apply to the claims made in such texts and to the worlds depicted in them.

Linguists have always had ambivalent feelings about fictional texts. In the very early days of linguistics and dictionary writing, fictional texts, and in particular fictional texts by celebrated authors, enjoyed a special status as examples of language use particularly worthy of linguistic description and integration into dictionaries (see for example the authors used as examples for the English grammar books and dictionaries of the 18th century, but also in the Oxford English Dictionary). Linguists interested in present-day languages shunned fictional texts more or less completely for a considerably period of time. They were considered to be not so much artistic as artificial, and, therefore, unsuitable for linguistic scrutiny. But things have changed again. Corpus linguists in particular have started to investigate language in a more comprehensive way, compiling corpora of language that include many different types of genres – including fictional ones as one important variety of language. In addition to the theoretical justification that fictional texts are important in a balanced mix of natural language, there has always been the advantage that fictional texts are more easily available in large quantities and in computer-readable form than, for instance, transcribed spoken interaction. For historical corpora, fictional texts have been even more important because of their higher chances of preservation in contrast to incidental everyday texts.

Pragmaticists took somewhat longer to reconcile themselves with fictional texts. In the early days of pragmatics, in the middle of the last century, pragmaticists were either language philosophers, who relied on intuited data, or they were conversation analysts, who insisted on tape-recorded “real” language. Written language was considered a de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface to the handbook series
• Preface
• Table of contents
• 1. Introducing Pragmatics of Fiction: Approaches, trends and developments
• I. Pragmatics of fiction as communication: Foundations
• II. Features of orality and variation
• III. Pragmatic themes in fiction
• Bionotes
• Index of authors of scholarly work
• Index of authors of fictional work
• Index of fictional sources
• Subject index