CHAPTER SEVEN:

MODAL, SELECTIVE AND PRESENTATIONAL SUBJECTIVITY

To conclude the present exploration of linguistic forms indicating subjectivity, three major

areas of investigation will be explored, namely, modality, the lexicon and text presentation. A

selective inventory of these subjectivity markers will be provided with a view to showing how their

detection helps in the identification of the speaking voice in narrative.

VII.1 Modal subjectivity:VII.1.1 Towards an extended definition of modality:

Modality is central to research in linguistics, logic, philosophy and allied areas. Various

definitions have been offered (see Lyons, 1977 for a nice discussion). Since it involves basically

the speaker's attitude towards the message, its various manifestations are of paramount importance

as clues helping in the detection of egocentric subjectivity in the utterance and consequently in the

ultimate identification of the speaking voice in narrative. An extended definition of modality could

be found in Ducrot and Todorov (1981:313):

Logicians and linguists have often judged it necessary to distinguish, in an act of enunciation, a

representative content, sometimes called dictum (the relating of a predicate to its subject), and an

attitude on the part of the speaking subject with regard to its content (the modus or modality) ... the

modus has varied means of expression...In addition, in many cases there is no precise criterion for

distinguishing what is connected to the predicate (and internal to the dictum) and what is an attitude

with respect to the predication (belonging thus to the modus).

The inexorable intertwining between the predicating activity and the speaker's attitude points to

the impossibility of drawing a clear dividing line between the content of a proposition and the

speaker's attitude towards it. The speaker does not simply encode messages into linguistic signs.

Rather, whilst encoding his message, many other improvised factors (some of which are conscious,

some are unconscious) come to affect and modify the linguistic institutionalized forms he is

choosing. The final product (which is the utterance) is necessarily affective, that is, it carries a

much more complex emotional charge than its straightforward institutionalized linguistic meaning

(Le Goffic, 1980).

The active involvement of the speaker in the modification and manipulation of the linguistic

devices with a view to having a bearing (or influence) on the addressee in the interaction (what Joly

calls expressivit‚ allocutive) stresses the need for widening the scope of the word modality and

making it more pervasive if not inherent to the very structure of the utterance (Joly & Roulland,

1981:549):

On sait que l'expression de la modalit‚, marque de l'op‚ration active du sujet parlant, est

constitutive de la phrase... Elle est donc appel‚e … jouer un r“le de premier plan dans l'‚nonciation.

The deep fundamental relations of what is probable or possible (that is, the degree of certainty),

the logical relations of subordination (agent, patient, object, subject, etc.) crop up at the surface of

the utterance not as "natural" relations but as the results of a particular "vis‚e d'effet" adapted for the

expedient needs of a specific discourse situation (Kress & Hodge, 1979).

VII.1.2 Epistemic modalities:Epistemic modalities relate to the speaker's belief in the truth of the utterance (Fowler,

1986:57). If believing is the modality that determines an utterance of state Greimas and CourtŠs

(1982:106)'s epistemic modal structure obtains:

certitude (believing-to-be)#incertitude (not-believing-to-be)#probability (not-believing-not-to-

be)#improbability (believing-not-to-be)

VII.1.2.1 Epistemic certitude:Epistemic certitude could be expressed by various means such as:

a) By means of modal auxiliaries:

Modal auxiliaries are presence-indicators par excellence since they necessarily presuppose a

present of consciousness [of epistemic belief]. The modalizing operation always takes place in the

present from which the speaker can then have either a prospective or a retrospective orientation (see

chapter four).

For instance, in its epistemic function, must expresses logical necessity (Quirk et al, 1972).

Firmly rooted in the present, the speaker's modal judgment bears on the future [with respect to

now]. For instance:

Gerald watched them go, looking all the while at the soft, full, still body of Gudrun, in its silky

cashmere. How silky and rich and soft her body must be. (WIL:268)

Apart from the introductory sentence, the whole passage stems from Gerald at the deictic [latent

present], perceptual [visual perception] and cognitive [affective response] levels. An exclamation

mark would have been suitable for the exclamatory "how" construction (see below). Gerald's

reported prior watching leaves no doubt that the modal judgment is his.

Similarly, the speaker's present sense of the logical necessity of an action could function

retrospectively as a present comment on a past state of affairs, as in the following example:

The gipsy coughed and coughed, and gazed down blankly. Tree after tree went down, mown by

the water, which must have been ten feet deep. (V&G:245)

The logical connection between the effect [the falling of the trees] and the cause [the flooding

water] is made by the gipsy, as heralded by his reported gazing operation which is the only

mediated sentence. The present of perception and modal judgment is his but the past tense in

"went" is the narrator's mediation of the gipsy's (probably aspectualised) present.

b) By means of semi-auxiliaries:

The speaker's present certitude about a future happening can be expressed by a semi-

auxiliary (Quirk et al, 1972). For instance:

he was bound to be murdered, he could see it. This was the moment when the death was

uplifted, and there was no escape.(WIL:533)

In contrast to must, to be bound to expresses an "impersonal" objectifying orientation on the

part of the speaker. The perceptual centre is definitely Gerald but the impersonality of the certainty

is problematic. On the one hand, Gerald's present of subjectivity is signalled by the proximal

demonstrative (chapter five) and the negation (see below). On the other hand the deontic auxiliary

could can be either experiential [stemming from Gerald] or reportive [mediated by the narrator].

Thus at the deictic level, there is partial mediation [the latent present of perception and of modal

judgment are preserved but the third person and the past tense are reminders of the narrator's hand].

Perception is also kept intact. But at the cognitive level, it is not clear whether the narrator has

mediated Gerald's certainty [as seems to be inferrable from the impersonal bound to] or kept it

intact.

c) By means of modal adverbs:

Adverbs like certainly, clearly, evidently, obviously, etc. express a present modal judgment

of epistemic certainty. They can function prospectively through a perception heralder as in the next

passage where Lord Henry's examination of the picture is reported:

Lord Henry came over and examined the picture. It was certainly a wonderful work of art, and

a wonderful likeness as well. (PDG:48)

The modal judgment on the picture emanates from him at his present of perception. However,

the narrator's intervention could still be felt at the temporal level.

They can also function retrospectively through causality with subsequent action. For

instance, Miss Hawkins' turning to Mr Gabbitas in the next passage:

Mrs. Gabbitas was a lady with intellectual features of a Roman type; and a shallow desire for

profundity. She was clearly very much interested in what the Hindoo had to say; so Miss Hawkins

turned again to Gabbitas. (FEP:111)

is causally linked to her total certitude (as highlighted by the intensifier) of Mrs. Gabbitas'

interest in the Hindoo's talk [and by implication Mrs. Gabbitas' lack of interest in her]. The

reference to the male d‚locut‚ as "the Hindoo" suggests that the speaker takes him to be alien to her

own culture (chapter two). The modal adverb clearly is also linked to the preceding value judgment

on Mrs. Gabbitas' character. Perceptand cognitively, the defining centre has to be Miss Hawkins.

But deictically, the narrator's intervention is felt at the temporal level, hence the past tense.

Modal adverbs tend to presuppose a tacit norm, such as the use of evidently in the next

passage:

At the door of their compartment a man was standing with his back towards them. He was

evidently a foreigner; his hair formed a peculiar frizzy mat, such as no Englishman could or would

exhibit. (FEP:114)

Perceptually and cognitively, the speaker has to be an Englishman since he has taken

"Englishness" to be an ethnocentric criterion with respect to which the d‚locut‚ is classified as a

"foreigner". The perception of a failure implies that the speaker takes for granted his own

conformity to that implicit norm. Evidently implies both an act of perception [I can see it] and an

act of matching against a norm. In fact, the certitude of evidently suggests that the norm is clear-cut

in the speaker's mind. Therefore at these two levels the speaker must be Mr. Gabbitas. However,

deictically, the narrator has intervened at the temporal level.

Like evidently, obviously presupposes a tacit egocentric norm. However, an overdose of

certitude can have an opposite effect by undermining the reader's trust in the speaker:

Michaelis obviously wasn't an Englishman, in spite of all the tailors, hatters, barbers, booters of

the very best quarter of London. No, no, he obviously wasn't an Englishman; the wrong sort of

flattish, pale face and bearing; and the wrong sort of grievance. He had a grudge and a grievance:

that was obvious to any true-born English gentleman, who would scorn to let such a thing appear

blatant in his own demeanour. (LCL:23)

The narrator's mediation has operated at the deictic [spatio-temporal] level through the use of

the past tense. However, at the perceptual and cognitive levels, by foregrounding Clifford's

certitude about the rightness of his racial prejudice and apparently not mediating it, the narrator has

subtly undermined its reliability. Clifford is ridiculed by being given too much credence.

d) Other means of expressing certitude:

Factive modality (Palmer, 1986) is a means of expressing epistemic certitude through

assertions. It could be expressed by the emphatic do. For instance, more than one clue indicate the

character's consciousness in the following passage:

This thing in his hands was plainly and indisputably a printed newspaper. It was a little odd in

its letterpress, and it didn't feel or rustle like ordinary paper, but newspaper it was. (QSBLN:29)

The character's deictic centre is only partially mediated [since the proximal this (chapter five)

belongs to the character whilst the past tense signals the narrator's mediation]. The character's

perceptual centre has remained intact [cf the acts of auditory perception (chapter nine) and

cutaneous perception (chapter eleven)]. However, cognitively, the fact that the passage is heavily

modalized through the use of the adverbs plainly and indisputably (see above), the emphatic

focalisation of the assertion: "but newspaper it was", the tacit norm in the perception of "odd"(ity)

as set against "ordinary paper" and the negation (see below) suggests that the cognitive centre is the

character (for the use of the lexical item "thing", see below Fowler's (1986) underlexicalisation as

an indicator of character limitation in the choice of the vocabulary).

The assertion is the highest degree of certitude (Lyons, 1977:808-9). Expressions of full

certitude on the part of characters should be taken with scepticism. More often than not, such

expressions backfire and turn into narratorial satire on the character. For instance, the facticity of

the next assertion:

In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous. (LCL:11)

cannot be universally true. The assertion remains relative to its cognitive centre, namely

Clifford. By electing not to mediate the character's belief, the narrator has made it more vivid, and

thus more vulnerable for irony. Deictically, though, the past tense is the narrator's.

Of course is equally misleading since what a speaker takes for granted remains to a great

extent relative. Thus, the truth of the following statement:

In all these things, of course, the authorities were ridiculously at fault. But Clifford could not

take it to heart. (LCL:11)

is very much in doubt. It remains Clifford's own idiosyncratic judgment. However, deictically,

the narrator's mediation has operated at the levels of person [shift from latent first person to third-

person Clifford] and time [shift from latent present to narrator's past] but the high degree of salience

in the speaker's mind indicated by the proximal these (chapter five) remains the character's.

Expressions of familiarity are borderline cases which could be said to stretch the accepted

meaning of modality. Their modal component stems from the assumption of relative certainty

behind their use. Adjectives like "familiar", "recognizable", "well-remembered" should be taken as

useful clues indicating the presence of a perceptual centre presupposed by the act of perception and

a cognitive centre being relatively certain about the similarity between the sensation presently felt

and the stored information in the memory.

If only two selves are involved, namely the narrator and the character chosen as a focalizer

(Toolan, 1988), the picture is relatively easy to handle. There is an implicit norm and a latent "to

me" in the perception of familiarity. Thus, in the next passage:

"Dr Selador here."#Selador's India-cum-Oxford accent sounded familiar and close. (SRB:23)

the speaker is also the perceptual centre on the phone, namely Dasein. The past tense signals

the narrator's intervention at the spatio-temporal level.

Whole processes can be nominalized (Fowler et al, 1979; Kress and Hodge, 1979). Thus,

one way for the speaker to disengage himself is to turn his own act of perception into a permanent

feature in the object of perception:

"Finish your tie," she said, "I've brought you some breakfast." Her voice had a well-

remembered, throaty, soothy tone. (SRB:29)

There is no feature of "well-remembered"(ness) or "soothy"(ness) in Jane's voice. What is

recorded is the effect of the voice on the speaker qua perceptual centre, namely Dasein.

However, if another character is taken into consideration, so that the direction of mediation

is from the narrator, to character1 to character2 the process of mediation becomes more complex.

For instance, as illustrated in the next passage, the feature of being "recognizable" is not inherent in

the object of perception but reveals the speaker's ability now to recognize it [which in itself

presupposes an assumed norm against which the present object is measured]:

It was different in appearance from an ordinary newspaper, but not so different as not to be

recognizable as a newspaper, and he was surprised, he says, not to have observed it before.

(QSBLN:28)

The perceptual centre is definitely the character holding the newspaper in his hands and

scrutinizing it. However, the presence of the distancing "he says" suggests that this latent centre is

in fact being mediated by another character in the story. Both the narrating and the narrated selves

overlap modally in the sense that they share the same modal judgment on the newspaper but differ

affectively in their response to it; hence the third- person "he says".

VII.1.2.2 Lack of certitude:The speaker's present lack of certainty could be expressed through various means such as:

a) Modal auxiliaries:

Many modal auxiliaries have an epistemic function. For instance, the epistemic function of

may/might (Fillmore, 1973:101; Quirk et al, 1972:98-9) provides a range of perspectives as to what

kind of possibility the speaker has in mind.

The possibility can be perceived to be still holding now but the speaker is uncertain about it.

Thus the double effect of the weak possibility in might and the word of estrangement as if in the

next passage:

The desire was still there, still curious and naked, in his eyes. But it was more remote, the

boldness was d. There was a tiny glint, as if he might dislike her. (V&G:238)

suggests a state of uncertainty which is akin to a character's limited perspective. Thus the

perceptual and cognitive centre is Yvette. The narrator's intervention is limited to the temporal

decadence from the character's latent present of consciousness to the past of the story as viewed

from the narrator's present of telling.

The possibility does not have to be exactly true but it is perceived to be suggestive enough.

Thus in the next passage:

The Theosophist was a slender young man from India, his hair might have come from the

Soudan. (FEP:111)

The cognitive centre expressing the modal judgment has to be Mr. Gabbitas. This could be

inferred not only from the modal might but also from the depreciatory reference to the d‚locut‚ as a

"theosophist" (chapter two) and the assumed norm as to what kind of hair people coming from India

and from Sudan typically have. Deictically, although the modal auxiliary necessarily presupposes a

present of enunciation, the past tense is a reminder of the narrator's hand.

The aspectualised form of the epistemic modal [geared towards the past] typically expresses

a possibility that has been irrevocably missed:

Gerald might have found this rope. He might have hauled himself up to the crest. He might

have heard the dogs in the Marienhštte, and found shelter. He might have gone on down the steep,

steep fall of the south side, down into the dark valley with its pines, on to the great Imperial road

leading to Italy. He might! And what then? The Imperial road! The south? Italy? What then? Was it

a way out? It was only a way in again. (WIL:537-8)

Birkin is all too aware of Gerald's death. The recurrence of impossible possibility signals his

exasperation with this kind of wishful thinking. His subjectivity is further indicated by the heavy

use of question and exclamation marks (see below). The only visible intervention on the narrator's

part is at the temporal level in the last sentence.

Would is another device. One of the meanings of this auxiliary is probability (Quirk et al,

1972:101). Probability is an expression of the speaker's epistemic belief in the truth of the

utterance:

He came to the first landing. There he stood, scarcely breathing. Again, corresponding to the

door below, there was a door again. That would be the mother's room. He could hear her moving

about in the candle-light. She would be expecting her husband to come up. (WIL:385)

The speaker's inability to tell categorically which room belongs to whose member of the family

suggests Gerald's limited perspective as a perceptual centre participating in the story. The spatial

coordinate below functions here deictically (chapter three) but the third person and the past tense

emanate from the narrator's deictic centre.

Another auxiliary expressing epistemic modality is could. When coupled with a special

emphasis, it can indicate strong possibility. However, as in the next example, the question mark

undermines the certainty and seems to deny it altogether:

She would lie always unsheathed in sleep, unrelieved, unsuaved. Oh, how could she bear it, this

endless unrelief, this eternal unrelief. (WIL:524)

The speaker's subjectivity is further indicated by the expostulation "oh", the heavy concentration

of negative prefixes [five in two lines] which lends a strong negative charge to the utterance (see

below), the proximal demonstrative suggesting a heightened degree of salience in the speaker's

mind (chapter five) and the emotionally loaded metaphor in "eternal" (chapter four). Depending

how the modals could and would are read, the speaker is either Gudrun at the three levels of deixis,

perception and affectivity if they are not construed as having a past value or, if they are the past

forms of can and will, then the narrator's mediation has operated on the temporal level.

b) Attitudinal disjuncts:

The import of the next passage is that the two uses of perhaps belong to two different

consciousnesses:

She looked at him, somewhat surprised, forgetting perhaps that she was talking to him. And she

lost her thread. She looked round the room, vaguely. Birkin could not guess what she was looking

for, nor what she was thinking. Evidently she noticed her sons. "Are my children all there?" she

asked him abruptly. He laughed, startled, afraid perhaps. (WIL:27-8)

In the first sentence, Birkin, observing Mrs Crich, is the one not certain about her present

thoughts or feelings. The approximator somewhat adds to this guessing operation (chapter six)

together with the perceptual certainty of "evidently" (see above). However, the second use of

perhaps in the last sentence cannot be his since he is expected to know his own motivations. The

lack of certainty is more plausibly Mrs Crich's.

c) Modifiers:

At the marginal level of what is standardly considered to be modal, sort of suggests that the

speaker is unable to definitely categorize the object of perception and that he is therefore more

likely to be a character:

It had a sort of art-nouveau affair at the bottom of one column that might be an advertisement (it

showed a woman in an impossibly big hat), and in the upper left-hand corner was an unmistakable

weather chart of Western Europe, with coloured isobars, or isotherms, or whatever they are and the

inscription: "To-morrow's Weather." (QSBLN:29)

The clear estrangement indicates that the speaker is perceptually and cognitively the character

holding the newspaper in his hands. The past tense renders the narrator's mediation but the spatial

coordinates take their definition deictically with respect to the person of the perceiver.

Uncertainty can be suggested by the "either..or" construction, as in the next extract:

It was printed in either three or four columns- for the life of him he cannot remember which-

and there were column headlines under the page streamer. (QSBLN:29)

This, in addition to the modal auxiliary can, the negation and the colloquial register (see below)

suggest that the speaker is the character holding the newspaper. However, the third person and the

past tense suggest that he is being mediated by another character who in turn is being mediated by

the narrator.

d) Particular modalizing verbs:

An interesting discussion of the modal element in verbs like "I suppose/presume/think"

could be found in Benv‚niste (1966:264) and in Kress & Hodge (1979) to the effect that they

undermine the strength of a full assertion.

e) Through Uspensky's "words of estrangement":

Linguistic devices indicating the speaker's estrangement have already been alluded to

(especially with the quantifiers in chapter six). Their effect is to emphasize the speaker's limitations

by foregrounding the act of interpretation (Fowler, 1986). Thus they have a modal value of

uncertainty (Kress and Hodge, 1979). The following are the most common:

Adjectives like "strange", "mysterious" and "unusual" are egocentric, that is, they

presuppose a locus of consciousness who is unable to account for the perceived phenomenon at his

present of perception because they deviate from a tacit norm. As an illustration, the perceptual

centre in the next excerpt:

She smiled mysteriously at him. She seemed to be suddenly affected with an unusual

tenderness. (FEP:112)

is Mrs Gabbitas' husband who is puzzled by a change in his wife's attitude towards him.

The lack of certainty could also be indicated by seem, as in the next passage:

The girl grew white and trembled. She clenched her hands together, and her voice seemed to

catch in her throat. (PDG:116)

where it indicates Dorian's limited point of view as a perceptual and cognitive centre in the

story. His latent present is mediated by the narrator.

Equally modal is the emphasis on appearance which exempts the speaker from committing

himself to the truth of the utterance:

Her hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be seeking for him. (PDG:117)

The speaker as a perceptual centre, Dorian, cannot be sure whether Sybil is or is not seeking for

him. The progressive aspect strengthens this subjective effect (chapter four).

The use of as if/ also falls into this category. For instance, in the next extract:

"If," said the second man, his voice a little unsteady, as though he was moved, "if it eases your

mind to talk of your nose, pray talk." (MWN:2)

the speaker is one of the two characters engaged in dialogue and cannot be the narrator since he

apparently does not know the real motivation of his interlocutor.

VII.1.3 Deontic modality:Deontic modality expresses what the speaker considers obligatory, permissible or forbidden

(Palmer, 1986). For instance, the following examples will be assigned features of plus or minus

necessity.

Must tends to be used to express the speaker's modal belief in the absolute necessity of the

dictum [he personally vouches for it]. For instance, the appositive "he must not presume" in the

next passage:

"Let me look," said Gerald, reaching forward for the book. But Hermione ignored him, he must

not presume, before she had finished. (WIL:134)

is causally linked to Hermione's reported ignoring of Gerald's proposed action. However, it is

difficult to determine whether the speaker is Hermione or Gudrun who is observing the scene and

interpreting Hermione's gesture.

Deontic necessity could also be expressed by the auxiliary should, as in the next passage:

He was between two ridges in a hollow. So he swerved. Should he climb the other ridge or

wander along the hollow? How frail the thread of his being was stretched! He would perhaps climb

the ridge. (WIL:532)

The combination between this modal, the question and exclamation marks (see below) and the

tentative perhaps (see above) leaves no doubt that the perceptual and cognitive centre is Gerald.

Deictically, the degree of the narrator's mediation depends on whether should and would are meant

as modals on their own or past forms of shall and will. If they are past forms, then the narrator's

mediation operates at the level of time [i.e Gerald's present is turned into the story's past as viewed

from the narrator's present]. The first two sentences remain ambiguous. Are they the narrator's

relating the character's position or are they Gerald's own visual perception and also awareness of the

causality between the present situation and the swerving? If the second option is adopted, then the

narrator's mediation operates at the level of person [shift from Dasein's first person to the story's

third person as defined against the narrator's first person].

If the necessity is negated, need not be the case is used. For instance, Connie's reported

resentment in the following example:

But she knew he was leaving her free, free to go back to Wragby and to Clifford. She resented

that too. He need not be so falsely chivalrous. (LCL:283)

paves the way for the subjective modality which follows to be hers. The distancing

demonstrative that functions here affectively and collocates with the value judgment in "falsely

chivalrous" (chapter five).

VII.1.4 Expressive modality: the mood:Since an utterance is inseparable from a specific act of speech made by a speaker who is

motivated (he has what Joly (1981) calls "sens d'intention" or "vis‚e d'effet"), any form it takes is

the result of a particular orientation to which the speaker gears it. Talking of sentence moods Joly

& Roulland (1981:547) quote Guillaume as saying:

l'emploi des modes ne relŠve pas des servitudes grammaticales mais de la pens‚e introduite sous

les mots par le sujet parlant.

In fact Guillaume goes even further in the assertion of the centrality of the speaker (as a

subjective and manipulative agent) behind the choice of the mood the verb takes (indicative or

subjunctive):

Le problŠme du mode est essentiellement un problŠme de vis‚e. Le mode ne d‚pend … aucun

degr‚ du verbe regard‚, mais de l'id‚e … travers laquelle on regarde ce verbe. (as quoted in Joly &

Rouland:1981:549)

Bearing this conviction in mind, the mood will be taken as particularly revealing of the

speaker's attitude and hence of the subjectivity informing the utterance. Mood can suggest that the

speaker's approach is tentative, as in the use of the doubly modal would in the next passage where

the speaker does not wish to be categorical:

Finally he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. In the dim arrested light that

struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed.

The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the

mouth. It was certainly strange. (PDG:118-9)

The strength of the claim is doubly attenuated. First, there is a displacement of the latent first-

person "I" into the third-person "one" (chapter two). Second, the aspectualised modal past (chapter

four) relegates the status of the claim to a mere hypothesis. The disengaged speaker is none other

than Dorian.

Similarly, the conditional is necessarily egocentric since it deals with what the speaker

considers to be a hypothetical nonfactual state of affairs:

It was absolutely incomprehensible. If a button, or a silver spoon, or his watch, or something of

that sort had been missing, that would have been understandable. But for his nose to disappear

from his own flat...(The Nose:59)

This passage is heavily modalized. There is a high degree of epistemic certitude in "absolutely"

(see above and see also chapter six). The adjectives "incomprehensible" and "understandable" are

egocentric since they presuppose a latent "to me" (see subjectivity in language involving perception

below). Besides, the use of italics is a means of registering heightened emotions (see below).

Perceptually and cognitively, the speaker is Major Kovalov. The narrator's intervention is limited

to the levels of time and person.

VII.1.5 Implicit modality:In disengaged utterances, the speaker's modal investment can be subtly implicit and only

marginally modal [according to the standard acceptance of modality]. For instance consider the

following passage:

The nearby flagstones are perfectly clean. They are frequently washed - as recently as this

afternoon. The smooth stone has a dull, grayish surface, oily to the touch. (Jealousy:109)

Spatial proximity is evidently a precondition for touch. Therefore, the locative nearby is deictic

(chapter three). Inseparable from spatial presence is the temporal presence indicated by "as recently

as this afternoon". The demonstrative this points to a temporal location conceived of as now.

Similarly, the adverb recently leads to or ends in the deictic centre's now (chapter four). The

attribution of smoothness and oiliness to the stone is occasioned by a present act of tactile

perception (which does not exclude, however, the perceiver's familiarity with this sensation

whenever he touches the stone "it has always felt like this").

In other words, the act of tactile perception is present and unique. Yet, it confirms previous

instances of what are conceived of as similar acts of tactile perception to the same effect. Both the

familiarity and the novelty are mingled into one and the same response and could give the

impression of attributing constant "objective" traits to the stone. The act of tactile perception is

transformed into a virtual feature: "Should anybody touch it, this is how it will feel". The text adds

to this complexity by having clues suggesting both readings.

VII.2 Selective subjectivity: lexical items:Linguistic research has remarkably been conducted into the emotive register of language

(Jakobson, 1973). It is universally attested that certain areas of the lexicon are impregnated with

value judgments and subjective attitudes. Ideally, it would be extremely rewarding if the degree of

speaker involvement could be measured. Osgood et al's semantic differential procedure (1957) as

summarized in D. Crystal (1987:103) seems to be an interesting attempt to measure the affective

meanings and the emotional reactions attached to a word using a scale of features to locate a

concept in semantic space. Another serious attempt at inventorying linguistic items along affective

parameters is Charleston's Studies on the Emotional and Affective Means of Expression in Modern

Engl (1960). A more established framework would be Fillmore's interpretive semantics where

lexical items are granted pride of place (1970:271-2). What makes these attempts particularly

rewarding is their sensitivity to the central role of ego's subjectivity in the selection of linguistic

items.

Attention should be given to the affective cues in the lexicon. Any lexical choice on the part

of the speaker should be taken to reveal a certain attitude towards both the message and the

addressee. As Delphine Perret (1970:228) has put it:

Enfait tout terme du lexique quand il est employ‚ par un locuteur dans son discours représente

un choix particulier que celui-ci fait par rapport … ce dont il parle (et non seulement un choix

lexical paradigmatique). Il désigne ce dont il parle d'une certaine fa€on pour une certaine raison et

il prédique de cette sorte sa relation au sujet de son discours en modalisant celui-ci. Cet aspect du

langage a autant d'importance que son aspect reférentiel ou sémantique.

Lexical items will be considered along the parameters of distancing versus closeness;

familiarity versus estrangement; neutralizing strategy versus subjectivizing urge; ideological

statements and class prejudices etc.. As will be illustrated below, the selection of lexical items

helps to indicate whether a narrative sequence is experiential or reportive and provides an insight

into the speaker's mind style (Fowler, 1986) and world view.

VII.2.1 Conceptual vs associative meaning:Linguists have capitalized on the need to distinguish between

denotational/conceptual/referential meaning on the one hand and the connotative/associational

meaning on the other (Crystal, 1987; Leech, 1974:chp2; Lyons, 1977:ch7; Mounin, 1974). Whilst

insisting on the methodological need for the distinction and the absolute priority in linguistics for

the conceptual meaning, Leech does acknowledge the existence of demarcation problems (p.20).

Besides, meaning, he argues, implies some latent intention on the part of the speaker which can be

recovered (p.22). Therefore Leech's "seven types of meaning" will be seized upon as major sources

of information on the speaker's attitude, and hence as major clues in the identification of the

speaking voice in narrative.

VII.2.2 Leech's social and affective meaning:This is one of the vital aspects of meaning detected by Leech and which have a direct

relevance for the present purposes of the argument (1974:15):

From this it is only a small step to the consideration of how language reflects the personal

feelings of the speaker, including his attitude to the listener, or his attitude to something he is

talking about. AFFECTIVE MEANING, as this sort of meaning can be called, is often explicitly

conveyed through the conceptual or connotative content of the words used.

This point will be extended here to the effect that language always provides information on the

attitude of the speaker. What varies is the amount of information given which depends on the

degree of emotional investment on the part of the speaker.

Thus language can reveal class prejudice. For instance, the derogatory remark against the

"stupid peasant" in the next passage:

The police officer bowed very low and went out into the street, where Kovalov could hear him

telling some stupid peasant who had driven his cart up on the pavement what he thought of him.

(The NOSE:61)

is a clue indicating that the sentient centre must be Major Kovalov.

Similarly, it can indicate aesthetic haughtiness. Thus the sensitivity to the rough lifestyles of

the working classes in the following passage:

Women, their arms folded over their coarse aprons, standing gossiping at the end of their block,

stared after the Brangwen sisters with that long, unwearying stare of aborigines; children called out

names. (WIL:12)

together with the negative stereotypical image of a typical aborigine is more akin to Gudrun's

haughty ideals.

It can also betray the speaker's racial prejudice. A pronounced racial prejudice informs the

next passage:

The Hindoo looked pensively out of the window and hummed a barbaric tune of two notes.

(FEP:115)

The speaker is Mr Gabbitas investing all his racial prejudices against his wife's religious

instructor.

VII.2.3 Leech's collocative meaning:A word has about it certain cultural associations which cause it to co-occur with particular

other words and to preclude co-occurrence with incompatible words. If the tacit conventions of

collocation are fouled, the outcome is a highly subjective uneasy cohabitation that reveals

information on the speaker's frame of mind and his attitude towards his d‚locut‚(s) and towards the

utterance. For instance, in the following passage:

The old gentleman growled approvingly, and rang the bell for his servant. (PDG:59)

the growl does not normally indicate approval. Indeed it indicates, if at all, disapproval.

Besides, a growl is an unpleasant sound that is not expected of refined men as it betrays lack of self

restraint. Therefore, the speaker is anything but friendly to the d‚locut‚. He must be Lord Henry

feeling antagonistic to his uncle.

VII.2.4 Subjectivity in language involving perception:The words revealing the degree of the speaker's ability to perceive or denoting feelings,

thoughts, and perceptions are primary signals of a subjective point of view (Fowler, 1986:136).

VII.2.4.1 Egocentricity in the categorisation of perceived items:

No act of reference is totally attitude-free. Reference to an object of perception implies

categorizing it according to a tacit norm or world view (see the introduction to chapter eight). This

section aims at illustrating how aspects of the speaker's intention are reconstructable from the

language used.

First, in cutaneous perception the next passage illustrates Leech's "reflected" or "associative"

meaning:

He [the gipsy] pulled the horrible wet death-gripping thing [Yvette's dress] off her, then,

resuming his rubbing, went to the door, tip-toeing on the wet floor. (V&G:246)

The speaker's vivid experience of the dreaded prospect of drowning in the flood and suffering

from soaking in icy water projects on to what could otherwise have been a romantic referent a death

significance. He must be the gipsy.

Second, in an example illustrating visual perception the proximal demonstrative in the next

passage has a deictic and not simply anaphoric function (Chapter five):

He laid his hand on this shivering mound, as if for company. It did not stop shivering.

(V&G:247)

Both the gipsy and the narrator know that the d‚locut‚ is actually Yvette. However, for the

speaker to refer to her as a "shivering mound" signals that the most salient feature in his mind about

her is the immediately observable visual stimulus of her shivering. The speaker has to be the gipsy.

Third, in auditory perception, the categorisation of the auditory stimuli in the next passage:

There was still the strange huge noise of water, and the horrible bump of things bumping against

the walls. The wind was rising with sundown, cold and hard. The house shook with explosive

thuds, and weird, weird frightening noises came up. (V&G:246)

reveals that the speaker is frightened since both "horrible", and "frightening" are egocentric

presupposing "to me" (see evaluative adjectives below). The use of the vague "things" also betrays

his limitations in identifying what "things" they are (see underlexicalisation below). The

experiential dimension is further enhanced by the use of the progressive (chapter four) and the

sensitivity to cutaneous stimuli (chapter eleven).

VII.2.4.2 Egocentricity in verbs of perception:The following are verbs which by their very nature presuppose a latent act of perception.

Their use is determined by the speaker's orientation (Toolan, 1988). Therefore their occurrence in

narrative is a presence-indicator.

a) The process of perceiving is highlighted:

Verbs such as "to display", "to show out", "to come through" in visual perception, or "to

sound", "to convey", "to signal" in auditory perception are egocentric. They signal access to the

experience of a perceptual centre.

For instance, in visual perc, the speaker in the next passage:

She wore a red dress, her long black hair caught in a matching bandeaux. Her skin displayed a

healthy tan. Blue eyes stared back at him in the mirror. (SRB:29)

is Dasein as a perceptual centre looking through the mirror whereas the perceptual centre in the

following passage:

Yellow celandines showed out from the hedgebottoms. (WIL:13)

is Ursula looking out of the train's window.

A reported act of watching acts as a perception heralder strengthening the experiential

reading of these verbs:

Ursula was watching him as if furtively, not really aware of what she was seeing. There was a

great physical attractiveness in him - a curious hidden richness, that came through his thinness and

his pallor like another voice, conveying another knowledge of him. (WIL:48)

The usual egocentricity of "come" has already been emphasized (chapter three). Besides,

Ursula's reported close watch prompts the reader to consider her as the perceptual centre.

In auditory perception the egocentricity of a verb like "to sound" could be illustrated in this

example:

"How do you do, Miss Brangwen," sang Hermione, in her low, odd, singing fashion, that

sounded almost as if she were poking fun. (WIL:40)

where the perceptual centre evaluating Hermione's tone is Ursula or by a verb like "to signal" as

in the next passage:

A click signalled the breaking of the connection. (SRB:65)

where the perceptual centre is Dasein as he was engaged in making a telephone call.

However, the speaker's reported inability to perceive does not mean absence of a perceptual

centre. For instance, the verb "disappear" and the adjective "visible" in the following passage are

egocentric:

Yvette had disappeared right under the bedclothes, and nothing of her was visible but a

shivering mound under the white quilt. (V&G:247)

The experiential dimension could also be inferred from the perfective aspect (chapter four) and

the negation (see below). The perceptual centre is the gipsy.

b) The effect is highlighted:

The effect on ego can be highlighted through egocentric verbs such as "to express", "to bring

[home]", "to betray", "to reveal", or adjectives like "convincing", "indicative of", etc.

For instance, there has to be an ego to whom a sound stimulus "betrays" an attitude on the

part of the d‚locut‚:

"It's a good name," the Baron growled, and his voice betrayed his impatience...(DUNE:12)

This verb suggests that the speaker has always nurtured a suspicion running against appearances

and that this suspicion has been proved right. Besides, like "come" the verb "bring" is egocentric:

Dasein smiled. Selador's accusatory tone brought not a twinge of guilt. (SRB:196)

The comment on Selador's tone is causally linked to Dasein's smiling.

Similarly, there is a clear interpretative effort behind the use of a verb like "to express", as in

the following passage:

A flunky came running over to help, and the two men tried to hustle Drioli through the door.

The people stood still, watching the struggle. Their faces expressed only a mild interest, and

seemed to be saying, "It's all right. There's no danger to us. It's being taken care of." (SKIN:86)

However, despite this egocentricity, the identity of ego has to be ascertained: is he Drioli or the

narrator? On the one hand, he could well be Drioli especially in view of the negative "only" which

presupposes "but I expect more" and thus reveals the speaker's dissatisfaction. On the other hand, it

might be argued that Drioli was too busy in the hustle to have time to scan through people's facial

expressions. "Only" would then emanate from a sympathetic narrator. However, the first option

seems to be more appropriate since Drioli could have looked for help from the audience or at least

for signs of their indignation at his ordeal.

Finally, what is "convincing", or by extension "persuasive", "eloquent" etc. (see below

evaluative adjectives) is relative to ego's point of view:

There was a strange chuckle in her tone, a dangerous and convincing humour in her bearing.

(WIL:32)

The speaker is Gerald commenting on Hermione's tone.

VII.2.4.3 Subjectivity in the selection of a relevant feature in the object of

perception:As will be made clear in chapter eight, there is too much for the eye to perceive at once.

Every perception necessarily presupposes an act of selection (Brown and Yule, 1983). Relevance

(Sperber and Wilson, 1986) seems to motivate the selection. Once a particular feature is selected, it

reveals some information on the personality and interests of the perceiver. Thus, in the next

passage:

And he perched there on the ladder, an unmarried man, clutching the window in peril, not

knowing what to do.(V&G:249)

"he" refers to a policeman who has ascended the ladder to rescue Yvette, only to find her lying

virtually naked in bed. It seems that this sight has provoked in him this response. The inner voice

is his. The third person turns out to be a first person.

VII.2.5 lexical selection provides information on the speaker's attitude:It has been repeatedly argued that selection entails point of view. Here strong emphasis will

be laid on the selection of lexical items as particularly suggestive, perhaps to a greater extent than

many other formal devices, of a latent subjectivity. This point has been cogently put by Charleston

(1960:106):

Thus it is possible for the subjective attitude of the speaker towards the object spoken about, or

towards his interlocutor, to be revealed by his choice of a certain word rather than of another one

which nevertheless has the same dictionary connotation, i.e by choosing the word with a favourable

or unfavourable association...

The following discussion will explore first how some kinds of lexical items reveal information

on the speaker's attitude and second how the finding is instrumental in the identification of narrative

voice.

VII.2.5.1 Evaluative adjectives and adverbs:

Evaluative adjectives and adverbs go beyond qualifying a noun to express the speaker's

attitude towards the person or object named by the noun (Charleston, 1960:chp3). This confers on

the selection of the adjective a unique egocentric significance (Adamson, in progress 2:49-50).

a) They embody the speaker's interpretation of the action:

Categorisation is inseparable from interpretation. This could be illustrated in the following

passage:

"Precisely," said Ganpat. "Nothing worth fighting for." He smiled reassuringly at Mrs.

Gabbitas.(FEP:115)

The quoted speech must have caused Mrs Gabbitas some alarm, hence the speaker's perception

of the need for her to be reassured. The implicit causality between the interpretation of the smile as

one of reassurance and the direct speech signals that the speaker is aware of it. The speaker

therefore is either Mrs Gabbitas feeling reassured, or, more plausibly, Mr Gabbitas suspecting some

mysterious relationship between his wife and her Hindu adviser.

b) They reveal the speaker's attitude:

Speakers' attitudes range from a tendency to be neutral, to biased judgments [either friendly

or hostile with a whole cline in between]. A few illustrations will be sufficient to make the point.

The speaker's attitude could be neutral or sympathetic. Thus, an adverb like "sadly"

normally carries highly emotional overtones especially when used in the first person. However, in

the next passage:

"He is gone," murmured Sibyl, sadly. "I wish you had seen him." (PDG:95)

it reveals a mild sympathetic narrator's report.

It can be very positive. To express the strength of the speaker's feelings, some adverbs have

a strong emotional force. When determined by an intensifier, they take on yet a higher degree of

subjectivity, as in the following example:

He was so beautifully blond, like wheat. He pulled off his overcoat. (WIL:388)

The speaker is experientially involved in appreciating Gerald's beauty. She definitely is

Gudrun.

On the other hand, the attitude can be hostile. The motivation behind the hostility can be

moral as in "harshly" which presupposes [I morally disapprove of the d‚locut‚'s action]. It can be

emotional as in "pathetically" presupposing [I hate anddespise it] or evaluative as in "querulously"

presupposing [I do not like the d‚locut‚]. In all these cases, there is a latent egocentric first-person

judgment being made.

To illustrate such hostile attitudes, the high emotional investment in the next passage:

"when we have knowledge, don't we lose everything but knowledge?" she asked pathetically.

(WIL:45)

is Gudrun's. Sometimes a narrator systematically denounces one character and implicitly invites

the reader to do so:

"I don't know how we could manage without him," answered the elder woman, querulously.

(PDG:86)

The old woman is viewed with anything but favour by the narrator.

Often, evaluation is based on tacit moral criteria of what is right and wrong. For example,

an adverb like "harshly" involves a clear value judgment:

"You don't know his name, though," said the lad, harshly. (PDG:90)

Some narrators, in the course of their character build-up, qualify their respective characters'

actions contrastively so as to support one and denounce the other:

"He is a gentleman," said the lad, sullenly.#"A Prince!" she cried, musically. "What more do

you want?" (PDG:94)

The personalities of the two characters, we are invited to believe, are totally opposed.

VII.2.5.2 Covertly in the semantics of the verb (narrative introducer):Special attention should be given to narrative introducers (Johnstone, 1987) as they provide

information not only on the d‚locut‚'s action but especially on the speaker's attitude towards it. A

few samples will be given without the need to go through them in detail.

A verb like "to strain" reveals that the speaker dislikes the action as in the next passage:

"You are mine, my love, aren't you?" she cried, straining him close. (WIL:350)

where the speaker, Birkin, does not enjoy what, under different circumstances, could have been

relished as a blissful embrace.

With verbs like "to pretend" the speaker claims to know better and thus to expose the

d‚locut‚. Thus in the next passage:

Meanwhile the men stood in calm little groups, chatting, smoking, pretending to pay no heed to

the rustling animation of the women's world. But they could not really talk, because of the glassy

ravel of women's excited, cold laughter and running voices. (WIL:25)

the speaker is either the narrator or an observer closely monitoring the movement of the men.

The second possibility is more probable especially since both Ursula and Gudrun are present and

seem to be bent on monitoring the situation. The speaker therefore must be one of them.

The verb "to try", by emphasizing the effort, casts the result in doubt:

"I cannot go on like this - dearest," said Gabbitas, trying to put as much tender passion as

possible into a hoarse whisper. (FEP:111)

The speaker is not really impressed by the effort. She is Miss Hawkins.

The speaker's selection of a lexical item can indicate that he perceives the d‚locut‚ or the

reported action to be unpleasant. A consistent assigning of verbs with an aura of disapproval

(charleston, 1960) to a character can reveal the narrator's attitude towards him and invite the reader

to entertain a negative attitude as well:

"Perhaps," the Baron said. "Ah, well ...." He took a deep breath, belched....#"No, it would

not!" the Baron growled. "I must have him dead and his line ended."...#"The Ambassador to the

Smugglers," the Baron chuckled...#"Don't be dense, Feyd," the Baron snapped...#"Piter," the Baron

rumbled...#(Dune:11-17)

None of the highlighted narrative introducers (Johnstone, 1987) has pleasant associations.

What these examples show is the wealth of possibilities for shades of meanings attached to

the narrative introducers. Since every use of a form entails an act of selection, it necessarily serves

as an indicator of point of view. To illustrate their role in narrative, consider the following passage:

"In the courtyard, in front of the northern facade of the house, the sound of a motor starting up is

immediately followed by the shrill protest of gears forced to make too fast a getaway. Franck has

not said what kind of repairs his car has needed." (Jealousy:58)

The italicized part will provide the analytic focus here. Franck leaves A...'s place in a hurry

after having given her a lift home from their journey together to town. His departure is significantly

referred to as a "getaway". A getaway is an act of escaping especially by criminals. An inescapable

implication of the use of this lexical item is that the speaking voice accuses Franck of having

committed some criminal act of the sort which would impel him to escape before being found out or

caught red-handed or made to confess under cross-examination.

The sound emanating form the gears has some associations which the reader cannot help

making. Thus, some scenarios of holdups; acts of violence, rapes etc... involving dangerous car

pursuits of the sort one is accustomed to see in the cinema are immediately conjured up in the

reader's mind. The typical expectation is that the one making the getaway tends to be the villain.

Like the film viewer, the reader is invited to entertain a negative, unfavourable attitude toward

Franck, if not actually to denounce him outright. The speaking voice attempts to win the sympathy

of the reader and to secure him on his side. Besides suggesting the idea of violence indirectly in the

associations of the word "getaway", the speaking voice drives home this suggestion by explicitly

using the adjective "forced". The reader is required to believe that even the gears, the objects of

Franck's violence, have already taken sides since the sound they produced is interpreted as a sign of

protest. They set the example for the reader to follow suit and align himself against Franck.

VII.2.5.3 Overt evaluation of the reported action:The speaker's evaluation could be more pronounced. Comments can be made on any aspect

the speaker finds relevant in the délocuté's person or action or even in the scene. The following are

a few illustrative samples.

a) Comment on the délocuté's manner of speech:

A nice discussion of verbs involving such evaluative comments could be found in Brown

(1977) to which the present account is partly indebted. Thus, in the next two examples, the speaker

is critical of the délocuté's manner of speech:

Mr Twit went over to the monkey cage. "Attention!" he barked in his fearsome monkey-

trainer's voice. (TWT:63)

"Foolish child! foolish child!" was the parrot-phrase flung in answer. The waving of crooked,

false-jewelled fingers gave grotesqueness to the words. (PDG:86-7)

But in view of the absence of any character who would be motivated to make such criticisms,

the speaker must be a biased narrator who invites the reader to share in this judgment.

b) Investing the délocuté's speech with significance:

No categorisation of somebody's speech can dispense with an interpretive classificatory

effort on the part of the speaker, as could be seen in the following examples:

Her voice carried a withdrawing note compounded as she pulled back. Dasein felt the night's

coldness then, the stillness of their companions. (SRB:101)

"Oh, hello, Gilbert."#Dasein experienced a cold sensation in his stomach. Her voice was so

casual. (SRB:111)

In both passages, the speaker has to be Dasein as a perceptual and cognitive centre.

c) Comment on délocuté's course of action:

The perceptual and cognitive centre categorizing Lady Harry's laugh as "sudden" and "silly":

"I am afraid I must be going," exclaimed Lady Harry, breaking an awkward silence with her

silly sudden laugh. (PDG:71)

should in principle be either Dorian or Lord Henry himself. However, the speaking voice is

more probably Dorian's in view his reference to her as "Lady Harry" where her husband would have

used a more intimate and perhaps sarcastic mode of address (chapter two) and of the perceived

"sudden"(ness) of the laugh since Lord Harry is only too used to this kind of behaviour from his

wife.

d) Comment on délocuté's character:

It can reveal information about the speaker's attitude to the délocuté's. Thus, the speaker in

the next passage is not exactly friendly towards the délocuté:

The speaker wore black morning coat. He was plump and short and had a very white face. It

was a flabby face with so much flesh upon it that the cheeks hung down on either side of the mouth

in two fleshy collops, spanielwise. (SKIN:86)

This hostility is inferred from the associations that the selected words have. If a person's

appearance evokes in the speaker the image of a dog, then this speaker's attitude cannot be said to

be positive. Here the speaker must be Drioli.

However, in the final analysis, such comments are reflexive since they also reveal

information about the person of the speaker. Thus, the speaker in the next passage:

She was aware of Mademoiselle standing near, like a little French beetle, observant and

calculating. (WIL:268)

is a deictically present perceptual centre in view of the egocentricity of near (chapter three), an

English person in view of the selection of the "French" feature (chapter two) and quite hostile to the

d‚locut‚ [a beetle is not exactly a nice association to have in mind about a person]. The speaker is

therefore Gudrun.

VII.2.5.4 Onomatopoeic language:A systematic recourse to onomatopoeic expressions can function as a stylistic device

revealing information on the speaker. For instance their occurrence in the next passage:

Click, clack, clackety-clack; Click, clack, clackety-clack; click, clack, clackety-clack; clackety-

clackety-clack!#Hip, hop, hackety-hack; stip, step, rackety-rack; come and fetch it, come and fetch

it, hickety-hickety-hack!#Rock, reel, smash, and swerve; hit it, hit it, on the curve; steady, does the

trick, keep her steady as a stick; eat the earth, eat the earth, slam and slug and beat the earth, and let

her whir-r, and let her pur-r, at eighty per-r! (OTR:87)

strongly suggests a drunken man's perception of the train's monotonous movement.

VII.2.5.5 Other instances of Uspensky's verba sentiendi:As defined in Fowler (1986:136-7), Uspensky's verba sentiendi include "words denoting

feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, primary signals of a subjective point of view" and form thus

quite a heterogeneous class as they apply to many of the indicators of subjectivity inventoried

throughout. To complete their inventory, the categories of linkers and various sorts of connectors

will be construed as answering more than logical exigencies. In particular, as will be seen through

illustrative examples, they reveal a high degree of subjectivity.

Attention can fruitfully be directed at conjuncts like anyway or at any rate since they do

reveal the speaker's subjectivity. For instance, the causal relation between Yvette's indifference and

the concessive anyway in the next passage:

"Oh, yes!" said Yvette, with indifference. The gipsy was gone anyway. (V&G:251)

indicates that the speaking voice is hers whereas the qualification brought about by the

concessive at any rate:

Neither was her neck perfectly clean. Even in that he seemed to belong to her, rather than to the

rest of the company; though, he thought to himself, he was always well washed, at any rate at the

neck and ears. (WIL:26)

attenuates the strength of the claim (see chapter four for the generalising tendency of always).

The speaker is Birkin.

Similarly, logical connectors such as (al)though or but are not simply for "purely"

grammatical reasons. They embody the speaker's subjective attitude which could be inferred from

the choice of one connector rather than another. For instance,the contrast signalled by though in the

next passage is highly significant:

"Everything will be all right," she whispered. "You'll see."#The worry remained in her voice,

though. And Dasein sensed menace in the night. The guitarist struck a sour note, fell silent.

(SRB:100)

The contrasting effort presupposes a motivated perception of some significance in the contrast.

It also presupposes the frustration of some prior expectation to the contrary. The motivated speaker

here is Dasein.

But is even more emphatic on the contrast and the tacit expectation to the contrary:

They thought she had finished. But with a queer rumbling in her throat she resumed...Again

they thought she had finished. But just as he was going to reply, she resumed her queer rhapsody.

(WIL:44)

It is not easy to determine who the speaker is. The speaker's exasperation signalled by the use

of the iterative again and by the repetition of but suggests that s/he is one of the diners on the table

and not the narrator. However, is the speaker Rupert who is being constantly interrupted, or Birkin

who hates Hermione, or the collective voice of all those present?

VII.2.6 Subjectivity in reporting an embedded speech:The reporter of somebody else's utterances experiences a certain attitude towards what he is

reporting [he may like it or dislike it, he may believe or disbelieve in it, etc..]. Therefore reports

contain various degrees of involvement on the part of the speaker. Here are sample effects.

a) Narrator's ironical judgment of a character's discourse:

The speaker's attitude can be subtle and produces an ironic effect. For instance, the next

passage contains two voices, namely one embedded discourse and one embedding discourse giving

it the lie:

In his lecture, Taillade-Espinasse described him as living proof of the validity of his theory of

earth's fluidum letale. While he stripped Grenouille of his rags piece by piece, he explained the

devastating effect that the corruptive gas had perpetrated on Grenouille's body. One could see the

pustules and scars caused by the corrosive gas; there on his breast a giant, shiny-red gas cancer; a

general disintegration of the skin; and even clear evidence of fluidal deformation of bone structure,

the visible indications being a club-foot and a hunchback. The internal organs as well had been

damaged by the gas - pancreas,liver, lungs, gall bladder and intestinal tract - as the analysis of a

stool sample (accessible to the public in a basin at the foot of the exhibit) had proved beyond doubt.

(Perfume:146-7)

Deictically and perceptually, there is an overlap between the embedding entity and the

embedded entity [except, that is, for the first sentence which is direct narratorial report and the

second sentence which is partly narrated at the beginning and partly ambiguous at the end] but

cognitively, there is a subtle clash. The irony is best insinuated through the epistemic devices "one

could see", "the visible indications", "beyond doubt" (see above). In fact, the reader knows that the

experiment is both a delusion and an act of cheating. By giving us access to the gist of the lecturer's

very thinly mediated "original discourse" the narrator is inviting the reader to draw his own

conclusions.

b) Critical summary:

A higher degree of speaker involvement is registered when the speaker is overtly critical of

the account he is reporting. However, in a passage aspiring for total disengagement the effect is a

disconcerting lack of reliability. The next passage is an excellent stylistic manipulation of biased

report by a speaker whose presence is suppressed:

The main character of the book is a customs official. This character is not an official but a high-

ranking employee of an old commercial company. This company's business is going badly, rapidly

turning shady. This company's business is going extremely well. The chief character - one learns -

is dishonest. He is honest, he is trying to re-establish a situation compromised by his predecessor,

who died in an automobile accident. But he had no predecessor, for the company was only recently

formed; and it was not an accident. Besides, it happens to be a ship (a big white ship) and not a car

at all. (Jealousy:148)

That there is a locus of consciousness confronting the conflicting accounts could easily be

inferred from the egocentricity behind the disengaged "one learns" (chapter two) and the

connectives but, besides (see above). Two possibilities emerge. The first is that A... and Franck are

perceived to have given different and conflicting summaries of the book they are supposed to have

read together and that the speaker seems to find this contradiction very significant. The second

posis that A...'s and Franck's collective account is confronted against the speaker's own

knowledgeable account and found wanting. However, the speaker's emphasis on the reception in

"one learns" suggests that the first possibility is more plausible. Thus the speaker must be a

character in the story who is told these accounts, who is motivated to contrast them, and who finds

the contrast significant. A...'s husband is the likely speaker.

VII.2.7 Leech's Social meaning: Register variations:The dualism of the English lexicon between a high Latinate learned and literary register and

a low popular Germanic one is an acknowledged fact. The literary exploitation of the phenomenon

for the representation of self especially its vital role in the representation of narrative voice has been

well argued for by Adamson (forthcoming:28-33) and demonstrated through illustrative examples

in Adamson (in progress2).

VII.2.7.1 H/L glossing as an index to change of point of view:Adamson's argument is that the High and Low forms can be used as indices of different

perspectives on life (forthcoming:17) with the H forms being the language of euphemism, literature

and pertaining to the conceptual noetic mode (ibid:22) whilst the L forms stand for na‹ve speech

being, as it were, the language of experience and facts and pertaining thus to the experiential mode

(ibid:13;24). Whilst the H forms are meant to be emotionally neutral the L forms are subjective1:

The H forms have connotations of conceptual clarity and emotional neutrality, while the L

forms are associated with physical reality and subjective response. (ibid:12)

Thus H forms tend to be used by narrators whilst L forms are more readily used by characters.

Throughout the thesis, the implications for point of view in the contrast between these two forms

will be discussed (especially in part two). Here, only the L form will be illustrated since the H form

is by definition the language of literature. Consider the following passage:

With slam-bang of devil's racket and God-damn of curse- give us the bottle, drink, boys, drink! -

the power of Virginia lies compacted in the moon. To you, God-damn of devil's magic and slam-

bang of drive, fire-flame of the terrific furnace, slam of rod, storm-stroke of pistoned wheel and

thunderbolt of speed, great earth-devourer, city-bringer - hail! (OTR:89)

There is no way this passage could be the narrator's voice. There are so many swear-words, so

many exclamations (see below), so many inconsistencies that the speaker is very likely to be drunk

(i.e one of the three drunk characters).

H-L switching could register a shift in perspective, as in the opposition between past and

present states of consciousness or between the observing and the feeling selves (see illustrations in

part two). It will be argued, together with Adamson, that glossing from H to L or vice versa is a

highly significant clue since it functions as a boundary marker foregrounding the point of transition

between character focus and narrator focus and corresponding thus to the structural layering of

narrative.

a) H to L shift: narrator's to character's voice:

The shift can be top-down from the narrator's speech to the character's speech, as in the

highlighted part of the next passage:

Because of the river just below, Yvette could not hear what Aunt Cissie said, but she guessed,

and shook her head. An early cup of tea, indoors, when the sun actually shone? No thanks!

(V&G:2440)

The speaker is Yvette and not the narrator. This is signalled by a slight change in register

manifested in the use of question and exclamation marks which are normally associated with the

experiential mode (see below) and the informality of "thanks".

b) L to H shift: character's to narrator's voice:

On the other hand, the shift can be bottom-up from the character's back to the narrator's

voice. For instance, the euphemism in the next passage:

Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might be

called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. (LCL:6)

reveals the narrator's satire against the character, or more probably his rebellion against the

norms that need such euphemisms.

VII.2.7.2 The lexicon as a dynamic process: lexicalisation as a consistent act of

selection:The following account is mainly inspired by Fowler (1986) to the effect that the lexicon is a

major indicator of the vocabulary range or what he calls lexical repertoire of a person (Fowler,

1986:151):

the vocabulary speakers command is a strong influence on, and indicator of, the range and

structuring of their experience... The lexical structure of a text, or of a person, can be thought of as

a distinctive, but changing, set of relations and processes.

The following discussion will show how the detection of the speaker's lexical repertoire serves

as vital clue in the identification of the speaking voice.

(i) Underlexicalisation:

It is the avoidance of the simple and most efficient term. The speaker's resort to

circumlocutions signals his lack of familiarity with the concept in question or difficulty of access to

it (Fowler, 1986: 152-3). In other words, the selection of particular lexical items reveals

information on the speaker [here on his limitations]. To illustrate this, the next passage renders the

limited perception of a young child:

She had seen some of the things as she came back. One of them had struck at her, but it had

misjudged her height, and the sting had passed over her head. It frightened her, and she ran the rest

of the way home. After that she had been very careful about the things, and on further expeditions

had taught Tommy to be careful about them, too. (DOT:212)

The use of the vague "things" [duly italicised twice in the text] signals Susan's incomprehension

of the identity of the triffids.

(ii) Overlexicalisation:

On the other hand, the speaker could have available at his command a profusion of terms for

an object or concept. Any extensive or repetitive use of terms for related concepts sets into relief

particular lexical systems, and the ideas they symbolise (Fowler, 1986:154). Two examples will

illustrate the point.

Overlexicalisation can reveal the perception of specialist through the use of expert

specialised jargon. Thus, the following passage reveals the critical perception of a craftsman

evaluating the performance of what he believes to be an apprentice:

The little man named Grenouille first uncorked the demi-john of alcohol. Heaving the heavy

vessel up gave him difficulty. He had to lift it almost even with his head to be on a level with the

funnel that had been inserted in the mixing bottle and into which he poured the alcohol directly

from the demijohn without bothering to use a measuring glass. Baldini shuddered at such

ineptitude: not only had the fellow turned the world of perfumery upside down by starting with the

solvent without having first created the concentrate to be dissolved - but he was also hardly even

physically capable of the task. (Perfume:84)

Grenouille's action is clearly filtered through Baldini's expert but biased perception. Not only is

there a causality between Baldini's reported shuddering and the repeated perception of failures (see

negations below) but the speaker shows evident vestiges of knowledge of what are meant to be

established norms in perfumery.

Overlexicalization can also reveal signs of learning and aesthetic appreciation in the speaker:

Yet she was curiously listless. She showed no sign of joy when her eyes rested on Romeo. The

few words she had to speak:#Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,# Which mannerly

devotion shows in this;# For saints have hands that pilgrims'hands do touch# And palm to

palm is holy palmers'kiss-#with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thorough artificial

manner. The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view of tone it was absolutely false. It was

wrong in colour. It took away all the life from the verse. It made the passion unreal. (PDG:111)

The text provides Dorian's cultured appraisal of Sybil's theatrical performance. The fouled

expectations arhis.

(iii) Loan words:

Loan words are used for a variety of reasons all of which reveal some information on the

speaker's motivation for using them. The following are a few sample illustrations.

First, they can have emotional associations. Indeed, certain foreign words have "an aura" of

associative meanings. For instance French is conventionally held in Anglo-saxon countries [and

this was especially so in "cultured" circles at the time of D.H Lawrence] to be a romantic language

suitable for love-making pursuits. The use of the French word in the next passage has this

significance:

"How things went. I think it is best to take the honeymoon before the wedding - don't you?#She

was pleased with this mot. He laughed.(WIL:419)

Birkin's reported laughing suggests retrospectively that the perception of Ursula's pleasure is

his. The selection of the French word also signals that he is aware of the romantic charge this word

has.

Sensitivity to fashion [and the French are conventionally renowned in this respect] can

reveal information on the speaker's social status:

She wore no hat in the heated caf‚, her loose, simple jumper was strung on a string round her

neck. But it was made of rich yellow crˆpe-de-chine, that hung heavily and softly from her young

throat and her slender wrists. (WIL:71)

The speaker must be rich enough to be able to identify a particular fashionable make at the

beginning of the twentieth century. He must be Gerald observing Minette.

(iv) Leech's stylistic meaning: Literary allusions:

Intertextual reference has already been discussed (chapter four). Here, one instance of

intertextuality, namely the use of literary allusions, is discussed as a source of information on the

speaker's lexical repertoire. Thus the quote from Shakespear in the next passage is unmistakable:

"Wobin?"#That was the question - wobin? Whither? Wobin? What a lovely word! She never

wanted it answered. Let it chime for ever. (WIL:528)

The question and exclamation marks, the emphasis signalled by the italics (see below) and the

"magical" (Fillmore, 1973) function of let confirm the impression left by the Shakespearian

quotation that the speaker is the educated Gudrun.

(v) Registers: plurality of ideational perspectives:

It might have been concluded from the above that every speaker has one single characteristic

register. However, this is not the case. In fact, it will be argued, together with Fowler (1986:149)

that:

every person's socio-linguistic abilities are diverse, so that their language-use incorporates a

repertoire of ideational perspectives. It would be incorrect to think that each individual possesses

one single, monolithic, world-view or ideology encompassing all aspects of his or her experience;

rather, the ideational function provides a repertoire of perspectives relative to the numerous modes

of discourse in which a speaker participates.

This view is in keeping with the functional conception of self adopted in this thesis (Brown and

Yule, 1983; Quirk, 1986; Rommetveit, 1976).

VII.3 Formal and Presentational indicators of subjectivity:The effect of certain devices available for and readily used by writers, advertisers,

journalists, etc. is to control and constrain the reader's (or addressee's) responses. The exposure of

these mechanisms is the major task of an analyst searching for clues indicating the attitude of the

speaker and his strategies in mediating it. This section explores the role of formal devices

pertaining to punctuation, text formatting and presentation as indicators of a latent subjectivity. It

will be assumed, together with Charleston (1960:chp2), that the use of these devices goes beyond

grammatical exigencies to express emotional elements pertaining to the speaker's attitude.

VII.3.1 Thematisation:One discursive device is thematisation (Brown and Yule 1983). The role of titles, headings,

typing character, special highlighting devices, indenting, formating the text in a particular way is to

provoke and constrain the reader's expectations. Indeed, some writers systematically exploit the

graphic system of their language to produce revealing visual cues (Quirk 1986)2:

Italics are used for a variety of emphatic reasons. For instance, they can signal emotional

emphasis:

Ah, if she could be just like that, it would be perfect. (WIL:424)

Gudrun flushed deeper. She could not bear it that Gerald gave her away - even to Birkin.

(WIL:427)

In both passages the speaker as an affective centre is Gudrun. Italics may also signal a

quotation:

Imperial Caesar dead, and turned to clay#Would stop a hole to keep the wind away. (WIL:539)

or simply access to a character's consciousness. In The Santaroga Barrier and in The Sound and

the Fury italics are systematically used to signal access to a character's consciousness.

In addition, in narrative, the author's manipulation of idiosyncratic spelling (Brown and Yule

1983) can be indicative not only of the person of the speech event actant (say a character), but more

importantly, it could uncover the narrator's or author's attitude toward that character (hence all the

possible effects suggested by Booth 1961)

VII.3.2 Subjectivity in punctuation:The present account is inspired by Charleston (1960:chp2) where there is a vital inventory of

what he calls "presymbolic expressions of emotions". The main argument is that the speaker's

emotional and affective drives motivate the use of particular linguistic forms. Punctuation

(especially phonetic punctuation) is more than a mere grammatical convenience. It reveals

interesting information on the attitude of the speaker towards his very utterance. In its own way, it

acts as an indicator of the identity of the speaking voice.

VII.3.2.1 The full stop:The full stop can signal an emotional pause for emphatic purposes. In the next passage:

There was no response from that which had been Gerald. Strange, congealed, icy substance - no

more. No more! (WIL:539)

the full stop, the commas, the dash and the exclamation mark (see below) chop the speaker's

utterance into small outpourings of emotions commensurate with Birkin's despairing weariness.

VII.3.2.2 The comma:Similarly, the comma can produce this emotional effect:

Birkin went home again to Gerald. He went into the room and sat down on the bed. Dead, dead

and cold! (WIL:539)

The first two reported actions of Birkin's herald our access to his consciousness in the last

utterance.

VII.3.2.3 The dash:The dash has the same effect:

Enough, enough - there was an end to man's capacity for complications, even. Or perhaps there

was no end. (WIL:525)

Together with the other subjectivity indices such as the modal "perhaps" (see above), the

exclamatory "enough" (see below), the dash signals Gudrun's subjectivity.

VII.3.2.4 The exclamation mark:Exclamation marks are perhaps the less controversial indicators of a high degree of

subjectivity on the part of the speaker. They are used in collocation with various expressions of

emotions some of which will be sampled here.

a) With Primary interjections:

The nearest forms to involuntary sound-reactions such as "Oh!", "Ha!" are inventoried in

Charleston (1960:44 ff). Here it will be shown how their occurrence in narrative serves as an

indicator of latent subjectivity. For instance, the next passage provides an interesting case of

ambiguity in assigning the interjection to its affective centre:

The woman went away mortified. Not a word, not a tear - ha! Gudrun was cold, a cold woman.

(WIL:534)

At first sight, the reported mortification of the woman might give reason to believe that the

following perception of a failure (see negation below) and value judgment is hers. However, the

estranged reference to the d‚locut‚ as "the woman" (chapter two) suggests that the point of view is

more plausibly that of Gudrun satirically interpreting the woman's facial expressions.

The next passage is more clearly told from Gudrun's point of view:

There came a tap at her door. She opened. There stood a woman, saying softly, oh, far too

reverently: "They have found him, madam!" (WIL:534)

The perception of the sound "coming" towards ego (chapter th), the progressive aspect (chapter

four), the evaluative adjectives (see above) all add to the subjective charge of the interjection "Oh".

b) With outright ejaculations:

Within one language representing the values of one particular culture3, certain monosyllabic

words such as "alas", "by golly" "God!", "Heavens", "O boy" are conventionally recognized as

expressions of emotion.

These monosyllabic expostulations can signal the speaker's dissatisfaction with a present

state of affairs and tend to be signalled by "alas":

It [Wragby] stood on an eminence in a rather fine old park of oak trees, but alas, one could see

in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit. (LCL:13)

The disengaged use of person deixis (chapter two), the egocentricity of spatial location (chapter

three), the modal "could" and the qualitative "rather" (see above) all indicate Connie's present of

consciousness. Therefore the dissatisfaction detected in "alas" is hers.

They can signal the speaker's astonishment which can be either positive or negative. In a

positive sense, "Oh boy" is used in the next passage:

The great black coat seemed to slide onto her almost of its own accord, like a second skin. Oh

boy! It was the queerest feeling! She glanced into the mirror. It was fantastic. (MBC:200)

the only narratorial statement which is not Mrs Bixby's is "She glanced into the mirror".

However, in a negative sense, an expression like "by golly" [which is an attenuated form for a

vituperative expression] may be used. ThusMrs Twit's looking down in the following passage:

Mrs Twit looked down at her feet and by golly the man was right. Her feet were not touching

the ground. (TWIT:31)

acts as a perception heralder indicating the reader's access to her own consciousness. The

ejaculation "by golly" is doubly revealing as it indicates, apart from the emotional investment, her

own low register (see above). This is corroborated by the distancing reference to her husband as

"the man" as they are engaged in a quarrel (chapter two) and the experiential dimension of the

progressive aspect signalling her own present perception. The narrator's intervention is in the

temporal decadence and especially in refining Mrs Twits' original vituperative into something

socially acceptable for his young readership.

Reference to God and to the heavens seems to be a common and for many believers

probably blasphemous or abusive means of expressing spontaneous expressions of emotions:

It was a fine November day...fine for Wragby. He looked over the melancholy park. My God!

What a place! (LCL:25)

Poor Gerald, such a lot of little wheels to his make-up! He was more intricate than a

chronometer-watch. But oh heavens, what weariness! What weariness, God above! A chronometer-

watch - a beetle - her soul fainted with utter ennui, from the thought. So many wheels to count and

consider and calculate! (WIL:525)

The only narratorial statement in the first passage is "he looked over". All the rest is Michaelis',

namely the qualified perceptual and affective evaluation of the day and of the park, the exclamation

marks, the first-person pronoun "my" and the expostulation "God" whereas the speaker in the

second passage is Gudrun.

c) With exclamatory phrases and sentences:

At a more elaborate linguistic level, whole phrases or sentences can be invested with strong

emotional power and turned into exclamations:

The outsider! The outsider! And they called him a bounder! How much more bounderish and

assertive Clifford looked! How much stupider! (LCL:25)

The speaker is Connie responding to what she feels to be the hypocrisy of Clifford compared

with the underdog d‚locut‚ Michaelis.

d) With invocations/supplications:

Because of the emotional fervour that tends to be associated with them, supplications often

require exclamation marks:

Thence, all at once, I must, must, must go to the bottom of my garden and pick strawberries and

eat them. Oh, my God! my God! my God! Is there a God? If there is one, deliver me, save me, help

me! Have mercy on me! How I suffer! How I am tortured! How terrible this is! (The Horla:65)

The speaker is the I-protagonist being given expression by the I-narrator. In other words, the

distinction between the two levels of story and discourse is here blurred. The speaker's fervour

about needing help, although originally felt in his capacity as protagonist, is still felt at the narrating

level to be holding. The narrator is as unreliable as the protagonist.

e) With wishes:

Wishes also require a fair amount of fervour:

How dark, like a night, his eyes were, like another world beyond! Oh, if he were the world as

well, if only the world were he! If only he could call a world into being, that should be their own

world! (WIL:440)

The main feature of this passage is that it is modally charged, namely by the use of the modal

past (chapter four) or subjunctive mood (see above). The speaker is Ursula.

VII.3.2.5 The Question mark:Questions are clear presence-indicators. A direct question cannot be asked other than at

somebody's present. It also involves some emotional charge on the part of the speaker normally

indicated by the tonal voice (Brown, 1977). Some of the pragmatic manipulations of question

marks will be sampled here.

Interrogatives have a modal component in them as they relate to sentence mood (Benv‚niste,

1966). Therefore the occurrence of an interrogative question in narrative is taken as a clue

indicating access to some consciousness [usually the character's]. For instance, in the next passage:

Connie looked at the burly Scottish knight who had done himself well all his life, and her eyes,

her big, still-wondering blue eyes became vague. Nothing in it! What did he mean by nothing in it?

If the critics praised it, and Clifford's name was almost famous, and it even brought in money...

what did her father mean by saying there was nothing in Clifford's writing? What else could there

be? (LCL:18)

the questions are virtually rhetorical and, together with the exclamation mark, the italics, the

modal could (see above), the disengaged use of person deixis in "her father" (chapter two) etc.,

indicate Connie's angry voice.

Question tags are yet clearer presence-indicators since they add to the question another

register dimension (see above) since they indicate colloquial speech (see Jakobson's conative

function) and also usually a modal dimension since they signal lack of certainty:

Never had she seen mink like this before. It was mink, wasn't it? Yes of course it was. But

what a glorious colour! The fur was almost pure black. (MBC:200)

The question tag in this passage is one of disbelief, as the "yes of course" indicates. The

speaker is clearly Mrs Bixby.

Finally, the most subjective of question forms are the interronegations since they imply that

the speaker only wants to confirm an established view:

Was that not terrible? and also splendid and at the same time, perhaps, purely absurd? (LCL:12)

The confusion is definitely in Clifford's emotional response to his becoming heir to Wragby.

VII.3.3 Subjectivity in negations:Negations are primary indicators of the speaker's subjectivity (Kress and Hodge, 1979).

They serve various pragmatic purposes all of which reveal information on the attitude of the

speaker. Their occurrence in narrative is taken here as a clue helping in the identification of the

speaking voice.

Negation is often tentamount to ego's perception of a failure or noticing the absence of a

desired state of affairs:

They turned off the main road, past a black patch of common-garden, where sooty cabbage

stumps stood shameless. No one thought to be ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all. (WIL:12)

The speaker who is outraged by the effect of coal pollution on nature must have some aesthetic

sensitivities. An artist, Gudrun, is the speaker in this text.

Negations tend to expose ego's frustrated expectations. The speaker could take the absence

to heart and feel directly affected by it:

There was not a word about herself, or to her. Connie resented this. He might have said some

few words of consolation or reassurance. (LCL:283)

Connie's reported resentis a clear sign that the perceiver of the absence is she. The reproach

signalled by the modal "might have" (see above) and the speaker's need for a quantity she considers

minimally sufficient (see chapter six for the positive orientation of some and a few) also

substantiate this reading.

Negations can be implicit either morphologically through the use of negative affixes such as

"un", "dis", "mis" or suffixes such as "less", "free" or lexically through the use of negatively

charged lexical items:

Hilda had lived among the real political intellectuals, so she was disastrously

unanswerable.#The nondescript evening in the hotel dragged out, and at last they had a nondescript

dinner. (LCL:252)

All the lexical items in this passage are negative (see above). The speaker is experientially

reacting to the scene. She must be Connie.

Finally, the rhetorical figure of litotes whereby the speaker negates a state of affairs to

emphasize its opposite is a convenient means for speakers who do not want to commit themselves

to a direct statement:

She saw his smallish, sensitive, loose hand on the table. He was no simple working man, not

he: he was acting! acting! (LCL:255)

Connie is highly eulogizing of Mellors but subtle in her judgment. Her present of subjectivity is

also signalled by the progressive aspect (chapter four) and the exclamation marks (see above).

VII.3.4 Subjectivity in comparisons:The point of this section is that comparisons do presuppose somebody's present of

subjectivity, his drawing on personal memorised experience [perhaps on unconscious obsessions]

and on the world views of his culture [ideology, religion], his motivations for so doing, the

relevance of the comparing activity for the immediate present purposes, etc.. This present can be

either implicit or explicit.

The use of the comparative "like" is the most common means of comparison. The argument

is that speakers do invest their own feelings in the comparing act. The next passage comes after

Sybil's brother threw a hypothetical threat against her beloved idol, Dorian:

She looked at him in horror. He repeated his words. They cut the air like a dagger. (PDG:95)

Sybil's horror paves the way for the reader to have access to her consciousness. Sybil is actually

investing her own na‹ve fear of her brother's threat into the act of visual perception.

The present of comparison can however crop up to the surface as an overt present of

subjectivity as in the next passage where the present:

There was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are suddenly awakened.

(PDG:44)

is the narrator's explanatory remark.

VII.3.5 The expressive function of syntax:Expressive modalities refer to the syntactic patterning or what Guillaume calls "syntax of

expressivity", that is the order and arrangement of words in an utterance, the focus which certain

parts of the utterance receive (words or verbs set into relief), foregrounding and thematisation and,

in case of oral speech, gestures. Syntactic patterning can reveal information on the identity of the

speaker:

Now Virginia lay dreaming in the moonlight. In Louisiana bayous the broken moonlight

shivers the broken moonlight quivers the light of many rivers lay dreaming in the moonlight

beaming in the moonlight dreaming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight seeming in the

moonlight moonlight moonlight to be gleaming to be streaming in the moonlight moonlight

moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight. (OTR:88)

The nonsensical repetitions, together with the speaker's lack of perception of any causality or

logical coherence suggests that he is not totally sober (cf Halliday's transitivity patterns as

expounded in Fowler, 1981, Halliday, 1971, Kress and Hodge, 1979). The progressive aspect

signals an experiential mode (chapter four). The speaker must be one of the drunken boys in the

train.

The analysis of these "expressive modalities" takes a much more interesting significance in

the analysis of long texts. Samuel Beckett's short stories provide interesting examples.

VII.4 Language as an index to personality:It will have ensued from the preceding discussion that language is an interesting index to the

speaker's personality. Cumulatively, a consistent use of particular linguistic items builds up an

impression of what Fowler (1986:150) calls mind-style conceived as:

the world-view of an author, or a narrator, or a character, [as] constituted by the ideational

structure of the text.

This impression could be gathered either at a local microlevel in one passage or at an overall

macrolevel in a whole novel (Van Djike, 1973, 1978).

VII.4.1 At the microlevel:Traits of a person's character can be either long-term or short-term. Long-term defects can

include pathological limitations such as the schizophrenic perception of a mentally deranged

narrator-protagonist. Thus in the following passage the narrator's account of what "happened" to

his self as a protagonist reveals a pathological deficiency in understanding the normal functioning

of mirrors:

the room was as light as day, and I could not see myself in my looking-glass! It was empty,

transparent, deep, filled with light! I was not reflected in it... and I was standing in front of it. I

could see the wide limpid expanse of glass from top to bottom. And I stared at it with a distraught

gaze: I dared not step forward, I dared not move; nevertheless I felt that he was there, whose

immaterial body had swallowed up my reflection, but that he would elude me.#How frightened I

was! A moment later my reflection began to appear in the depths of the looking-glass, in a sort of

mist, as if I were looking at it through water; this water seemed to flow from left to right, slowly, so

that moment by moment my reflection emerged more distinctly. (The Horla:72)

His obsession with "the other" is characteristic of a schizophrenic doubling of identity where I-

qua-speaker can not come to terms with I-qua-third person. There does not seem to be any

distancing of the narrator from his self as a protagonist. By offering this account, the narrator

remains very much the mental case he was as a protagonist. Both points of view merge.

Another permanent perceptual handicap is the limited perception of a blind woman. As an

illustration, the next passage is taken from The Day of the Triffids where the first-person narrator

relates at his present of narrating an account that was given to his earlier self as an I-protagonist in

the narrated story. A blind woman-character, Joyce, must have recounted her story to the then I-

protagonist. Her originally first-person account is rendered here in the third person:

She went to the door, and began to feel her way with a stick outstretched before her. She was

barely over the threshold when something fell with a swish across her left hand, burning like a hot

wire. (DOT:220)

The I-protagonist then, the I-narrator now definitely know and even Joyce herself must have

been told of the reality of what happened. However, the estrangement inherent in the use of

something (chapter six and see also above) emanates from somebody who does not seem to know

the identity of the originator of this act of violence, who is the perceiver of the auditory stimulus

"swish" and who suffers experientially from the effect "burning like a hot iron".

Defects can however be short-term such as the limitations due to drug hallucinations. Thus

the reference to the d‚locut‚s in the next passage as "gods":

"It was kill or cure," the yellow god said.#"I wash my hands of you," said the white god.#"What

I offered, you did not want," the red god accused.#"You make me laugh," said the black

god.#"There is no tree that's you," the green god said.#"We are going now and only one of us will

return," the gods chorused.#There was a sound of a clearing throat.#"Why don't you have faces?"

Dasein asked. "You have color but not faces."#"What?" It was a rumbling, vibrant voice.

(SRB:188)

with "colors but not faces" stems from Dasein's distorted perception under the drug effect.

Limitations can be caused by temporary bewilderment. The import of the next passage is

thait highlights Dasein's estrangement:

There was a smell of exhaust gases and oil in the air. From somewhere inside the building came

the faint sound of music - a radio. The gravel of the driveway felt hard and immediate under his

feet.#Slowly, Dasein brought his right hand from his pocket, opened it to stare at the small ball of

matter there - an object indistinctly seen in the light from the Inn sign. (SRB:101-2)

This limitation is signalled by the speaker's apparent inability to locate the source of the sound

as signalled by the use of somewhere (chapter three), his limited degree of perception indicated by

"faint sound" (chapter nine) and by "indistinctly seen" (chapter eight) and also suggested by the

underlexicalisation in the categorisation of the object of visual perception as a "small ball of matter

there" (see above and also chapter eight).

VII.4.2 At the macrolevel:The recurrence of typical actions or characteristics throughout a whole novel, if not an

author's writings such as Halliday's squealing or Hermione's sing-songing in Women in Love

should be taken to indicate an interesting preoccupation with a particular object of perception or a

particular referent (Fowler, 1986:155). Part two illustrates this preoccupation in Jealousy.

Summary:

In an extended framework modality in its various forms [whether canonical or oblique]

seems to be a constitutive ingredient of every utterance since it embodies the speaker's attitude

towards the message. In the various degrees of speaker involvement that its manifestations reveal,

modality serves as an instrumental tool in the identification of the speaking voice in narrative. The

selection of lexical items carries information both on the speaker and on his attitude to the

d‚locut‚ and to the object of his talk. Even the various formal devices pertaining to sentence

structure and text presentation go beyond grammatical exigencies to express the speaker's latent

subjectivity. All in all, nothing is arbitrary in an utterance and thus everything is potentially

revealing as a clue in the identification of the speaking voice.

1/ This could especially be observed in the formal, in a way euphemistic, report of unpleasant or

swear words. For instance a BBC journalist from Radio 4 reported from the House of Lords one of

His Lordship's confession to House that whilst he had been a referee in football matches, more often

than not, the legitimacy of the marital status of his parents had been called into question.

2/ For instance, one caption on a furniture store in Fulham reading "SOFA SO GOOD"

capitalizes on the ambiguity in the phonic realisation of this commercial announcement.

3/ As could be deduced from the translation of films or comic strips, say from French into

English or vice versa, it is apparent that languages vary in assigning these monosyllables.