17.720, Review: Pragmatics/Romance Lang: Marnette (2005)

Wed Mar 8 21:00:56 UTC 2006

LINGUIST List: Vol-17-720. Wed Mar 08 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.720, Review: Pragmatics/Romance Lang: Marnette (2005)

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1)
Date: 04-Mar-2006
From: Ana Masalagiu < anamas82 at yahoo.com >
Subject: Speech and Thought Presentation in French 

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 15:57:02
From: Ana Masalagiu < anamas82 at yahoo.com >
Subject: Speech and Thought Presentation in French 

AUTHOR: Marnette, Sophie
TITLE: Speech and Thought Presentation in French
SUBTITLE: Concepts and strategies
SERIES: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 133
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2888.html 

Ana Masalagiu, Department of Letters, ''Alexandru Ioan Cuza'' 
University of Iasi, Romania, MA student in Translation Studies, English-
French

SYNOPSIS

The book analyses the way in which people quote themselves and 
others (speech and thought presentation) from a theoretical 
perspective, as well as the author's and other scholar's opinions about 
this issue. Its purpose, as expressed by the author, is to provide 
further understanding of the concept of reported discourse and to 
bring to light the strategies of speech and thought presentation that 
determine the essence of specific genres. It also aims at giving the 
Anglo-Saxon scholars the desire to learn more about the frameworks 
elaborated in the French-speaking area. This choice of audience 
determined the book to be written in English instead of French, which 
is the author's mother tongue. The book presents the 
French ''théories de l'énonciation'' (discourse theories), that is, the 
rhetorical & narrative strategies that people use when speaking. It is 
structured into two parts, 1. Theoretical Concepts, and 2. Discourse 
Types. The first part comprises three chapters, which describe the 
purpose of the work and the theoretic base for the discussion: 
Enunciation Theory and S&TP, What is 'reported discourse'?, and To 
the limits of reportability. The second part of the book analyzes, in four 
distinct chapters, real instances of written and spoken French, 
medieval and modern literature, fiction and non-fiction, and in all these 
the expression of the point of view in narratives and the construction 
of the Self versus the Other in discourse. The choice of the analyzed 
instances was determined by the influence of the oral nature of 
French medieval literature on nowadays speech.

Sophie Marnette bases her discussion on a corpus of contemporary 
spoken French, gathered at the French University of Provence by 
the ''Groupe Aixois de Recherche en Syntaxe'' (GARS). From this wide 
corpus, she selects 25 varied texts and uses them to identify broad 
trends and types of discourse in speech and thought presentation 
strategies in spoken French.

The first part of the book, Concepts, represents a study of reported 
discourse, starting from the theory of the 'split subject' developed by 
Ducrot. Marnette develops his analysis of the argumentative value of 
predicates. In her work, the author also uses Bakhtin's concept of 
dialogue and his theory of ''polyphony'', that is, the presence of 
several ''voices'' in a single utterance, even if they are not always 
identifiable with a specific name or a real person. She also 
distinguishes between the speaking voices, between the speaking 
subject - the physical person who produces the utterance; the locutor -
 the person responsible for the act of enunciation and referred to 
as 'I', and the enunciator, or the point of view of the voice(s) 
expressed. Marnette also distinguishes between the types of 
discourse: direct discourse, in which case the reporting speaker 
evokes the original speech or thought situation and conveys the exact 
words of the original locutor; indirect speech, in which the speaker 
transposes the original utterance in his/her own words; free indirect 
discourse, that is, direct discourse reported in the fashion of an 
indirect one by means of shifted pronouns and tenses, and narrated 
discourse (identified by Genette). All these differences are stated and 
analyzed in the book from the syntactic point of view and by taking 
into account syntactic rather than semantic markers. Therefore, in the 
case of free indirect discourse, the author takes into account the 
presence of shifted pronouns and tenses. Also, narrated discourse is 
identified by its reference to an activity of speech or thought not 
followed by a completive or infinitival clause.

The second part of the book, Strategies, is more practice-oriented as 
it analyzes in distinct chapters the strategies used in spoken and 
written French. The author distinguishes between the various types of 
discourse and presents the specific markers and strategies used in 
differentiating them (the direct discourse, the free indirect discourse, 
the indirect discourse, the neutral discourse, and the writing 
presentation). In analyzing written forms, she starts from medieval 
literature -- which has a great influence on the oral features of 
nowadays spoken and written discourse -- and develops her study 
with examples from nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and 
contemporary written press. She analyzes the development of forms 
and functions and the evolution of the staging in orality from the 
medieval ''chansons de geste'' to contemporary speech acts, as well 
as the expression of the rhetoric of truth, and also the evolution of the 
point of view as thought presentation from medieval romances. She 
then analyzes the emergence and evolution of the free indirect 
discourse in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. In the end, 
the author focuses on contemporary press and on the way different 
publications can be individualized based on the strategies of the 
journalistic discourse. Sub-types of journalistic discourse can be 
pointed out according to the speech and thought presentation 
strategies used for sharing values, entertaining, or informing and 
teaching.

In a nutshell, the author manages to perform a vast analysis, touching 
important issues in the theory of discourse. The main problems that 
are discussed and for which a solution is attempted through the study 
of speech and thought presentation strategies are: the separation of 
literary genres according to the strategies they employ, the point of 
view through which a narrative is filtered (the relationship between 
author, narrator, characters and the recipients), the relationship 
between internal attitudes and external speech, the discourse of the 
Other vs. the discourse of the Self, and of the past vs. the virtual, or 
the rhetoric of truth. The author analyses the modality of a situation of 
communication, that is, the speaker's opinion about the facts that are 
discussed, the staging of the discourse (the locutor seen as an actor, 
speaking of himself as of somebody else), and the importance of meta-
linguistic comments. She also analyses the reasons why in many 
situations, although several strategies are possible for communication, 
only a restrained number is favored by the speakers.

EVALUATION

The originality of the book consists in the fact that it manages to 
establish connections between linguistic, stylistic and narrative 
frameworks that had only been analyzed separately in previous works. 
It combines the French ''théorie de l'énonciation'' with Anglo-Saxon 
approaches of reported discourse and creates a new paradigm for 
speech and thought presentation strategies.

The book is very well documented, developing various theories and 
concepts regarding speech and thought presentation. It is also based 
on thorough research performed on a large corpus of Medieval 
French literature, of contemporary French literature, and of 
contemporary written French press.

Actually, this effort is consistent with other contemporary trends in 
SPEECH AND THOUGHT PRESENTATION analyses worldwide, as 
many other scholars and institutions are working on annotating 
corpuses according to the SPEECH AND THOUGHT PRESENTATION 
strategies they use (Elena Semino and Mick Short's Speech, Writing 
and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing, 2004, The 
Lancaster Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation Written Corpus 
maintained by Martin Wynne, to name only a few).

The shortcoming of this work, if we can point out one, is the fact that 
the book is intended for scholars, and therefore its language and 
style -- long sentences and numerous references -- makes it less 
accessible to the general public. Also, the perspective of the analysis 
is, as the author herself states, grammatical (syntactical) rather than 
semantic or pragmatic, which renders some communication situations 
ambiguous, especially if the viewpoints of different scholars are 
considered for the analyzed utterance.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Harvard 
University Press, 1986.

Ducrot, Oswald, Dire et ne pas dire, Hermann, 1991. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a graduate student in Computational Linguistics and Translation 
Studies (English-French-Romanian) and my main research interests 
are related to the translation of culture specific terms and situations. 
My diploma paper was concerned with the translation of tourist 
brochures from Romanian into English. I also spent a semester in 
Middlesex University, London as a Socrates student. I work as a 
technical writer and translator.

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