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Article published In:
Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 16:2 (2018) ► pp.399–430

The ‘listen to characters thinking’ novel

Fictive interaction as narrative strategy in English literary bestsellers and their Polish and Spanish translations

| Zhejiang University
| University of Social Sciences, Warsaw

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

Keywords: direct speech, fictive interaction, nominal compounds, literature, translation, rhetorical device
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
  • 3.Analysis: Fictive interaction as literary strategy
    • 3.1Access to characters’ mental worlds
    • 3.2Relationship and non-verbal communication between characters
    • 3.3Categorizing function
    • 3.4Humor and other rhetorical effects
  • 4.Discussion: Metaphor and metonymy in fictive speech
  • 5.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00016.pas
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