Search

As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the digital journal e-Rea, this paper aims to look back to the issues of this journal from a statistical perspective. It analyses significant data and figures such as the quantity of published articles or book reviews, with a view to shedding light on editorial choices as seen over the years in the emergence of new sections. Visitor statistics highlight the internationalization of the journal and its increasing visibility in the field of English studies.

In the wake of the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the digital journal e-Rea, this paper aims to look back to issue number 17.2 entitled “Reported speech and the expression of subjectivity”, which was published in this journal in June 2020. Presenting the research topic and the different theoretical approaches selected for the volume, it links this publication to current research on reported speech, especially discourse analysis based on digital posts from social media.

This research aims to describe the representation of orality in fiction by analysing utterances of direct speech. The didactic approach adopted here highlights the concept of “diamesic variation” which is at work in the process of adapting an oral conversation to a written transcription of a speech act. This study mainly analyses the semantics of introductory verbs announcing reported speech, and the composition of preposition and adverb phrases. It also focuses on the way punctuation contributes to representing oral conversations.

This paper offers a synthesis of recent research works focusing on direct reported speech used in the British press. Thanks to a didactic approach, it aims to analyse the way reported words are inserted into newspaper articles. It emphasizes some specificities of utterances of direct speech that are linked to the stylistic norms of journalistic discourse. Various strategies of anonymizing reported sources are also investigated.

A newspaper article belongs to a speech genre that is particularly suited for the quotations of other people’s words. When writing an article, a journalist very often quotes words that have been uttered by different sources, which is common practice in the press. By doing so, the journalist is supposed to link the quoted words to an original speaker for every occurrence of direct speech inserted in a newspaper article.Due to the choice of direct speech as a form of reported speech, the journalist, namely the reporter, can adapt the original speech sequence in some way or another so that it might easily be embedded within the body of the article or within the peritext.The current study focuses on “secondary aphorisms” (Maingueneau 2012, our translation) that are present in the headlines of newspaper articles. Each aphorism is usually detached from an original text and it contains some words borrowed from a speaker, who is generally identifiable.This article aims at showing that secondary aphorisms have a syntax that is largely determined by the specificities of journalistic discourse and that also has some limitations originated from the journalist’s choices and from various pragmatic and semantic constraints.

Word order in an utterance produced by a speaker in connected speech is not supposed to be chaotic. Even though word order differs from one language to another, a given person who speaks his/her own mother tongue is normally able to say whether a given utterance is grammatical or not. This proficiency to point out what is correct and what is erroneous is a characteristic of an individual’s speaking his own language as a native speaker.The main focus of this paper is on how a producer of reported speech, namely a reporter, when led to build an occurrence of direct speech in English, will choose one word order for a sequence of words. In some cases, another word order would have given another fully grammatical utterance. What are the reasons behind a reporter favouring one particular word order? This analysis particularly tries to highlight what is at stake in this choice.

As the French psychoanalyst André Green puts it: “[l’activité de lecture d’un texte par un critique psychanalyste] est attentive à tout ce qui est supposé tromper l’attente du lecteur. Elle suit la trame du texte (texte = tissu [… ]), mais en refusant le fil d’Ariane qui est proposé au lecteur” (La déliaison 18). The linguist, like the analyst himself, aims at exploring the various underlying meanings of given textual sequences. This paper will examine the textual phenomena of déliaison or “unlinking”, by giving examples of potential disconnections between form and meaning in utterances of direct speech.An instance of disconnection emerges whenever there exists a certain level of discrepancy between a sequence of signs in a text including punctuation and the pragmatico-semantic analysis of this sequence. On the syntactic level, an utterance can be described as an occurrence of direct speech but a careful analysis of this utterance can sometimes invite a reassessment of its status, even challenging its inclusion within the sphere of reported speech. This study will highlight the type of material with which a phenomenon of disconnection between form and meaning is likely to emerge. The prominence of form in a written production presumably enables the emergence of disconnections between form and meaning, which would be some instances of “syntaxe mensongère”, according to the expression used by Monique De Mattia-Viviès (Bulletin de la SAES 84 22).

Hemingway’s short story, “Hills Like White Elephants”, is largely built around a reported dialogue involving two main characters. Although many critical studies have been devoted to this short story, focusing especially on Hemingway’s style, this paper seeks to explore a relatively neglected theme, namely the introduction of direct speech, which acquires significant importance in the reception of the short story.Thanks to the dialogue that materializes as an occurrence of reported speech produced by a reporter, we will study how the narrator chooses to introduce the various turns constituting the dialogue. This analysis, inscribed within the framework of an enunciative approach, aims at pointing out the stylistic devices used by the author. Both linguistic and semantic aspects will be taken into account as well as the specificities induced by the genre of the short story and their influence on the stylistic choices made by the author. The analysis will be backed up with statistical data related to the composition of the various structures introducing the characters’ words.