The‘listen to characters thinking’novel

Abstract

This article explores direct speech involving fictive interaction, that is not functioning as an ordinary quote (e.g. “a look of ‘I told you so’”; Pascual, 2006, 2014). We specifically deal with its use as a literary strategy, in which different fictive speech constructions may serve to: (i) give access to characters’ mental worlds; (ii) show the relationships and non-verbal communication between characters; (iii) create new semantic categories; and (iv) produce such rhetorical effects as vividness or humor. Special emphasis is placed on a comparative analysis of the English fictive direct speech plus noun construction (e.g. “the ‘why bother?’ attitude”) with its translations into Polish and Spanish. We show that the construction proves a challenge to translators, since neither of these languages has an exact syntactic equivalent. This study is based on an extensive and heterogeneous database that includes 30 bestselling novels from different genres, published between 1935 and 2013.

Viewpointed morphology: A unified account of Spanish verb-complement compounds as fictive interaction structures

“…In (18), a fictive enunciation in the first-person singular appears in the position of a clause (18a), a phrase (18b), a nominal modifier (18c), and even a lexeme with a suffix (18d). While having received little attention from linguists and barely any attention from Hispanists, this viewpointed structure is as grammatically possible and frequently occurring in Spanish as in English, becoming manifest at all grammatical levels (Pascual 2010(Pascual , 2014Pascual & Królak 2018) Note the appearance of deictic pronouns (used as generics) and the second-person singular present indicative and subjunctive affixes in puedes and quieras as well as the diphthongization of a stressed /o/ and /e/ of the verbs poder ('to be able to') and querer ('to want'), further indicating inflectional information. The constituent 'tú-puedes-llegar-a-ser-lo-que-quieras' has the syntax of a clause or sentence, while operating as a head noun preceded by an article, and the first-person pronoun yo is used as a lexeme, also following an article and having a suffix.…”

“…As predicted by the complex modifier restriction, translating these examples literally into Spanish compounds results in ill-formed structures, as shown in (3). For these too, Spanish generally uses phrases headed by a noun with a PP complement or a clause modifying the head noun:Indeed, most viewpointed English nominal compounds are translated into Spanish as phrases or even clauses (Pascual & Królak 2018). Consider the English compounds below, and their official Spanish translations as a prepositional phrase (4a) and a clause (4b), respectively (Pascual & Królak 2018: 409, 417):Less frequently, such complex viewpointed structures appear in Spanish as noun appositions, following a pause, as in the attested advertisement line ‘ Plan me quedo todo en uno ’ (‘Plan I’ll take all in one ’, Pascual 2010: 85).…”

“…For these too, Spanish generally uses phrases headed by a noun with a PP complement or a clause modifying the head noun:Indeed, most viewpointed English nominal compounds are translated into Spanish as phrases or even clauses (Pascual & Królak 2018). Consider the English compounds below, and their official Spanish translations as a prepositional phrase (4a) and a clause (4b), respectively (Pascual & Królak 2018: 409, 417):Less frequently, such complex viewpointed structures appear in Spanish as noun appositions, following a pause, as in the attested advertisement line ‘ Plan me quedo todo en uno ’ (‘Plan I’ll take all in one ’, Pascual 2010: 85). These are not to be considered proper compounds, however, and are most likely the result of preposition ellipsis, a fairly frequent phenomenon in Spanish noun appositions (e.g.…”

“…In contrast, viewpointed nominal compounds are much more marginal in Romance languages (Pascual & Królak 2018), which have strong restrictions on word compounding (Val Álvaro 1999: 4759; Marqueta 2017). Some scholars even claim that Romance languages lack structurally complex compounds (Bisetto 2015), so-called phrasal compounds, that is, compounds with phrases in the non-head position (Wiese 1996: 185).…”