SPEECH PRESENTATION
In the anterior, reported situation Stef talks to Mick.
In the posterior, reported situation Dawn talks to you and tells you what Stef said to Mick. As the
posterior situation is current for you it is close, and the anterior one is more remote.
If we thought about the speech presentation in terms of a novel, Dawn would be a first person
narrator, telling you, her narratee, what the character, Stef, said to Mick, the other Character in the
story.
In the 1st-person novel, the narrator effectively reports to the narratee (posterior situation) what he
or she heard one character say to another (anterior situation). So the reporting discourse is that
between narrator and narratee (level 2 above) and the reported situation is that between character A
and character B (level 3 above). In 3rd-person narration, because the narrator is not a character in
the story, and is conventionally assumed to be omniscient, the effect is more like one where we 'look
in' on the characters' conversation, as it unfolds, without the effect of report. The kind of narrator that
a novelist chooses to use thus affects how we view the speech which is presented to us.
FIRST PERSON
Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would
go back to the widow and be respectable.
(The Adventures of HuckleBerry Finn)
THIRD PERSON
Perhaps it had something to do with living in a dark cupboard, but Harry had always been small and
skinny for his age. He looked even smaller and skinnier than he really was because all he had to wear
were old clothes of Dudley's, and Dudley was about four times bigger than he was.
(Harry Potter)
Below are four sentences. They all report the same conversation between two
characters which a 1st-person narrator in a novel reports to us.
Drag the sentences to what you think are the appropriate places on the scale
below and then compare them with our ordering. Can you label any of the
presentational forms (e.g. direct speech, indirect speech)?
She told him that she had not been there the day before.
She spoke severely to him
She pointed out his error.
'I wasn't here yesterday, you idiot,' she said.
THE SCALE
'Know most detail about what 'she'
said'
1. 'I wasn't here yesterday, you idiot,' she said
2. She told him that she had not been there the day before.
3. She pointed out his error.
4. She spoke severely to him.
'Know least detail about what 'she'
said'
What we have here are just some of the ways in which speech can be reported in real life and
the speech of characters can be presented in novels. Effectively, we have a varying mix of
character and narrator.

Direct Speech (DS) - the reported clause
o
it connects to the reported discourse situation, exactly what the character said and
the words and grammatical structures used to say it.
o
Main indicator: the quotation marks e.g. 'she said', which is normally called
the reporting clause because it connects to the reporting discourse situation.


'I wasn't here yesterday, you idiot,' she said.
Free Indirect Speech (IS) – between Direct Speech and Indirect Speech.
o
We know what was said, but it is difficult to know whether the words used to say it
belong to the character or the narrator.
o
This kind of ambiguity is often very helpful for novelists in manipulating viewpoint
relations


She wasn’t there yesterday, the idiot!
Indirect Speech (IS) - we know the propositional content of what the character said from
the reported clause, but the words and structures used to report it belong to the narrator, just
like those of the reporting clause, not the character.


She told him that she had not been there the day before.
Narrator's Representation of Speech Act (NRSA) - the words and structures belong to the
narrator, and the only trace of the character is a summary of what she said, including an
indication of the speech act used by the character.

o
Unlike DS and IS, there is no reported clause at all.

She pointed out his error
Narrators's Representation of Voice (NV) - all we know is that the female character said
something to the other character. We don't even know what speech act was used, let alone
what was said or what words were used to say it.


She spoke severely to him
Narrators's Representation of Speech Act (NRA) – no speech presentation involved here.
The narrator just tells us what happens in the fictional world of the story and so everything
we are told comes straightforwardly from the narrator.

She pushed him
For each sentence of the little story below, indicate which speech presentation category you
think is involved.
IS = Indirect Speech
FIS = Free Indirect Speech
N = Narration
NV = Narrators's Representation of Voice
DS = Direct Speech
NRSA = Narrator's Representation of Speech Act
1. John told Mary, his fiancée the story of his upbringing.
NRSA
2. 'I lived in a pig sty until I was seven,' he said.
DS
3. He talked with a charming soft grunt.
NV
4. Then he rolled on his back on the floor.
N
5. Mary told him he ought to get up before her parents came back from the kitchen.
IS
6. And he really ought to stop that ridiculous snuffling too!
FIS
7. He damn well wasn't going to put up with personal jibes like that, he replied.
FIS
8. 'Either you love me for what I am or we're finished'.
DS
9. Mary apologised for her unreasonably swinist attitude.
NRSA
10. They lived happily ever after in a small bungalow near Damansara Damai.
N
The passage below is from a popular romance novel. Lais and Peach are two sisters who are alone
on a cruise ship together, travelling from America to France. Peach is five years old. Lais, who is in
her late teens, is meant to be looking after her. But she is more interested in having a good time
dancing in the ballroom of the ship, and so is hastily putting Peach to bed in their cabin, before going
back to the ballroom.
Using your Speech Presentation checksheet, for each sentence, or part of a sentence, note down
the mode of speech presentation you think is used. The speech presentation modes you are looking
for are DS, FIS, IS, NRSA and NV. (Note that you may find more than one category in some
sentences.) Some sentences do not involve speech presentation at all, and you may find it helpful to
label these with 'N' for Narration.
Lais unlocked the cabin door and pushed her inside. ‘Come on then, into bed with you.’ She
pulled off Peach’s pretty white dress hurriedly.
Peach sat on the edge of her bed sliding off the little red slippers. ‘What about my teeth?’ she
asked, thinking of her mother.
‘In the morning,’ called Lais, already at the door.
‘But Lais. Where are you going?’ Peach sat up in bed anxiously. She still wore her vest and
knickers and her socks. There was no sign of her nightie, or a drink of milk or anything. And
where was Teddy?
Lais hesitated then hurried back across the room and hauled the teddy bear from beneath a
pile of clothes. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now go to sleep.’
(Elizabeth Adler, Peach)
The speech presentation in the passage is almost all in DS. This makes the presentation of the
speech seem simple and straightforward, and helps to bring out the perfunctory way in which Lais is
'looking after' her younger sister (which is also seen in what she does, or rather does not do - she
does not let Peach brush her teeth, does not give her a drink and does not find her nightie for her).
The one exception to the DS 'rule' in the passage is the use of FIS for Peach's
question about the whereabouts of her teddy, something which is clearly
important for her.
‘But Lais. Where are you going?’ Peach sat up in bed anxiously. She still wore her vest and
knickers and her socks. There was no sign of her nightie, or a drink of milk or anything. And
where was Teddy?
The distancing effect produced by the FIS form is presumably to help us see that Lais is not much
interested in the question. But this 'local' strategy seems strangely at odds with the fact that
elsewhere in the passage we are allowed to see inside the mind of the Peach, the five-year old.
Indeed, until we read Lais's response at the end of the extract, we could be forgiven for thinking that
'And where was Teddy?' is a question that Peach asks silently to herself, rather than something
which she says out loud. This speech/thought ambiguity does not seem to be for any useful purpose
in the passage either. So, it looks as if this writer might not be quite in control of the discourse
presentational forms she is using.
More analysis at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/stylistics/topic9/11lolita.htm
Under narrator’s control
Narrator’s report of voice (NV)
He spoke to her.
Narrator’s report of speech acts (NRSA)
He asked her about her future plans.
Indirect speech (IS)
He asked her what she was planning to do the following year.
Free Indirect Speech (FIS)
He finally came to the point. What was she going to do next year?
Direct speech (DS)
HE asked: “So … what are you going to do next year?”
Free Direct Speech (FDS)
“So… what are you going to do next year>”
Under character’s control
THOUGHT PRESENTATION
Kinds of Thought Presentation
Besides using narrators to present what their characters say, novelists can also use them to present
what their characters think. The presentation of thought involves the same basic categories of
presentation as the presentation of speech does, but the effects of these categories are sometimes
rather different. This is essentially because, in real life, although when we present or report the
speech of others we have normally heard the speech we report, we know that this can't possibly be
the case for thought. Indeed, even when we present our own thoughts, there is an issue, because it
is not at all clear how much verbalisation thought involves.
In 1st-person narrations we would normally expect the narrator only to present his or her own
thoughts in the story about his or her past. Logically, 1st-person narrators can only have direct
access to their own thoughts.
In 3rd-person narrations, on the other hand, where the convention is that the narrator is omniscient,
it is common to get the thoughts of more than one character portrayed in the same story, perhaps at
different points in the story.
[He wondered/thought/remembered …. (NRT) – ‘reporting’ clause and similar phenomena]
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
He wondered, “Does she still love me?” (Direct Thought - DT)
Did she still love him? (Free Indirect Thought - FIT)
He wondered if she still loved him. (Indirect Thought - IT)
He wondered about her love (Narrator’s Representation of Thought Act - NRTA)
He thought for a long time. (Narrator’s Presentation of Thinking - NT)
He felt utterly bereft. (Narration of Internal States - NI)
Speech presentation
Thought presentation
Direct speech (DS)
Direct thought (DT)
Free indirect speech (FIS)
Free indirect thought (FIT)
Indirect speech (IS)
Indirect thought (IT)
Narrators representation of speech act (NRSA) Narrators representation of thought act (NRTA)
Narrators representation of voice (NV)
Narrators representation of thought (NT)
Below are five instances of thought presentation. Place the sentences in what you think are the
appropriate places on the scale below:
‘What will I do for the rest of my bloody life?’ she asked herself
She asked herself what she would do for the rest of her life.
She thought for a long time
She carefully considered her future
What would she do for the rest of her bloody life?
THE SCALE
'Know most detail about what 'she'
thought'
1. ‘What will I do for the rest of my bloody life?’ she asked
herself (DT).
2. What would she do for the rest of her bloody life? (FIT)
3. She asked herself what she would do for the rest of her
life. (IT)
4. She carefully considered her future. (NRTA)
5. She thought for a long time. (NT)
'Know least detail about what 'she'
thought'
1. ‘What will I do for the rest of my bloody life?’ she asked herself (DT)
'This is an example of the apparently rather conscious, soliloquy-like, kind of thought. It seems
deliberate and coherent.
2. She asked herself what she would do for the rest of her life. (IT)
We are given the propositional content of the thought, but through the narrator's words and
structures, not the characters. So we are given the information in a distanced, filtered, way. IT
tends to have an even greater distancing effect than IS.
3. She thought for a long time. (NT)
This kind of presentation of thought is at the extreme 'narrator end' of the thought presentation
scale. All we know is that the character thought something, but nothing else. And so although we
know she was thinking, we are distanced maximally from those thoughts. We don't know the
topic of her thoughts, or what she thought about that topic, let alone what form those thoughts
took.
4. She carefully considered her future. (NRTA)
If we compare this example with the NT and IT examples, we can see that in terms of effect it
falls between the two. We are distanced more than for IT but less than for NT. We know the kind
of thinking involved and the topic of those thoughts, but no more.
5. She was very angry indeed (N)
This is clearly a sentence of narration, but unlike narrator sentences like 'She put her dress on.'
we have a narrator statement about the 'inner reality' of some character - her emotional
response to something - rather than what we might call 'outer reality'.
Narrators, especially 3rd-person narrators, have the ability to make statements about the insides
of character's heads, as well as the rest of the fictional world. So we could call this Internal
Narration (IN).
PRACTICE
(i) decide which thought presentation category you think the emboldened part of the quotation
belongs to and (ii) indicate the kind of effect you think this choice of thought presentation
category has in context.
In the first extract, Chandler's famouus detective, Philip Marlowe, is trying to understand the
significance of what he has just been told.
It got darker. I thought; and thought in my mind moved with a kind of sluggish stealthiness, as
if it was being watched by bitter and sadistic eyes. I thought of dead eyes looking at a moonless
sky, with black blood at the corners of the mouths beneath them.
(Raymond Chandler , Farewell my Lovely, chapter 34)
In the first emboldened clause 'I thought;' all we know is that thought occurred, and so we have a
classic case of the narrator's representation of thinking (NT). And in the rest of the sentence we
have another example of NT. We know nothing more at all about what was thought, even though
we are given an extended characterisation of the general manner in which Philip Marlowe, the
famous private investigator, is thinking.
She considered her case as she walked down the Charing Cross Road.
(Virginia Woolf , Night and Day, p.272)
This is a clear example of a narrator's representation of a thought act (NRTA). We know what act
of thought occurred and its topic.
In the passage below, the detective Philip Marlowe has just regained consciousness after having
been knocked out by a blow from behind in the dark while talking in a canyon to what he thought
was a companion sitting behind him.
'Four minutes, the voice said. 'Five, possibly six. They must have moved quick and quiet. He
didn't even let out a yell.'
I opened my eyes and looked fuzzily at a cold star. I was lying on my back. I felt sick.
The voice said: 'It could have been a little longer. Maybe even eight minutes altogether. They
must have been in the brush, right where the car stopped. The guy scared easily. They must
have thrown a small light in his face and he passed out - just from panic. The pansy.' . . .
. . . I balanced myself woozily on the flat of my hands, listening.
'Yeah, that was about how it was,' the voice said.
It was my voice. I was talking to myself, coming out of it. I was trying to figure the thing out
subconsciously.
'Shut up, you dimwit,' I said, and stopped talking to myself.
(Raymond Chandler , Farewell my Lovely, chapter 10)
Here, all of the emboldened parts except the last one are Direct Thought (DT).
The quotation marks signal the direct form, and the tense, other deictic signals are all appropriate to
the character in the fictional world, not the narrator, looking back on the events, and telling them to
us at some later time. The 'voice' is clearly Marlowe's 'inner voice', which directly 'addresses' him as
he tries to work out what has happened to him. It is difficult at first to be sure whether Marlowe is
literally talking to himself, or 'hearing himself think', as it were, but when the narrator tells us 'I was
trying to figure the thing out subconsciously.' We know he must have been thinking, not speaking.
At the end of the passage, we presumably get DS, not DT, when he tells himself to shut up, given
what he has just told us about his thought process. But even this could be DT, being part of the
representation of his fractured of working out what has happened to him