Example text 42: Lord Jim, excerpt two Conrad 1920:13
18 Jim felt his shoulder gripped firmly. 19 ‘Too late, youngster.’
20 The captain of the ship laid a restraining hand on that boy, who seemed on the point of leaping overboard, and Jim looked up with the pain of conscious defeat in his eyes.
21 The captain smiled sympathetically. 22 ‘Better luck next time. This will teach you to be smart.’
Lines 18 and 19 apparently continue Jim’s point of view from before, from the fact that he felt his shoulder gripped firmly and heard an unidentified speaker. Line 20, however, seems to contain elements
from the captain’s point of view: the reference that boy, and the fact that Jim seemed on the point of leaping overboard. Such multiple internal points of view in a single paragraph may be rare, but the fact
that it exists suggests that, in English fiction at least, maintaining a single internal point of view throughout a discourse space is not an actual requirement, simply an “easy comprehension practice”
§2.6.6.
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In other languages, however, or in other genres in English, it may be a more rigorous norm.
3.6.3 Division of labor in text-internal deixis
It seems common for the narrator and the subjective character to divide the deictic dimensions between them, each accessor serving as deictic center for only certain dimensions or certain types of
elements. For Example text 37 from Lord Jim, reference grammatical person and verbal tense for text space 2 reflect speaker access, whereas spatial orientation, such as in below the rail line 10, reflect text-
internal access. The same division of labor is found in the following example of “stream of consciousness” or “free indirect perspective” discussed by Sanders and Redeker 1996:301: He heard
something and turned around. There were the three Englishmen again. Now, could they really be tourists? No, no way They looked just too shabby. In the perceived space of the three Englishmen, “the
referential center stays with the narrator,” as well as the tense were, could, looked, whereas the spatial orientation there were is with the subjective character. Similarly, Chafe 1994, ch. 19 indicates that
reference and tense remain with the narrator in general, with spatial orientation based on the subjective participant. It would be important to establish if this reflects a universal norm or one which is specific to a
language or a genre.
Tense and temporal adverbials can have different deictic centers, tense commonly having speaker access, but adverbial expressions having text-internal access. The following passage is discussed by
Zubin and Hewitt 1995:137: Twelve more years passed. Each year the Bagginses had very lively combined birthday-parties at Bag End; but now it was understood that something quite exceptional was
being planned for that autumn Tolkien 1965:29. Here, the tense has speaker access, but the temporal adverbial now has a text-internal deictic center. In the expression that autumn, the narrator uses that text-
internal deictic center as one reference point and his own external deictic center as another, similar to the use of the pluperfect tenses had crashed … had seen in line 04 in line 04 of Lord Jim. Similar
examples are discussed by Chafe 1994:251. In the following sentence O’Connor, Frank. Guests of the nation. in Guests of the nation. 1931. New York: Macmillan. Reprinted in Pritchett, V. S., ed. 1981. The
Oxford book of short stories. Oxford U. Press, 379, we find a less common division of labor, with tense having text-internal access and the adverbial then having speaker access: Then Belcher quietly takes out a
handkerchief, and begins to tie it about his own eyes…. See Langacker 2002 for conceptual differences between tense and temporal adverbials.
The reverse situation can occur with deictic verbs of motion and locational adverbials. We noted this
above in regard to “The train ride”: the family came to a railroad crossing line 46 where the train hit a car, and they sat there until all that was taken care of and cleared away line 49. The verb came has a
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For Polanyi 1982:169, when there is “a combination of several points of view peeking through in one single utterance,” there is “a problem of telling,” of performance.
text-internal deictic center, whereas the verb there reflects speaker access to the text-internal deictic center. The division of labor among different deictic centers, therefore, can be quite complex.
As noted with Example text 37, the text world has both text-external and internal modal access: the narrator but not Jim knew who had witnessed the accident and the source of the shouts, whereas all of the
events in the accessed space of Figure 25 are presented as being perceived or experienced by Jim, through his modality. This is similar to the example of the three Englishmen cited above: the initial uncertainty as
to whether they were tourists belongs to the subjective character, not to the narrator, and the facts presented—the presence of the Englishmen and their appearance—are from the subjective character’s
perception at that time. The same is true in the two texts from Mbyá Guarani that were presented in §3.6.2. In the coati text Example text 35, the epistemic particles ty ‘surprise’ and ra’e ‘just discovered’
reflect text-internal modality, as well as the reported thought “He’s smiling,” which would have been incorrect coming from the narrator’s point of view. In the “Golden grandson” text Example text 41, in
addition to verbs of perception that were already noted, three additional lines are formally based on the epistemic modality of the subjective character: ‘it seemed as if there were roosters crowing on the ridge’
line 190, ‘he listened again and thought he heard sheep bleating’ line 191, ‘it was in the sky that the sheep were bleating…’ line 194. This last line has the epistemic particles ty ‘surprise’ and ra’e ‘just
discovered’ mentioned above. What is subjective about a subjective character seems always, and necessarily, to involve that character’s epistemic and evidential modality in place of the narrator’s.
Figure 26 shows a common division of labor for accessing deictic dimensions.
Deictic dimensions Speaker access
Text-internal access
tense + past
- Time
adverbials - +
now deictic verbs
- + come
Place adverbials
+ here, there + here, there
1
st
2
nd
pr + I, you
+ I Reference
3
rd
person + he, she, it, NPs
- Modality epistemic
- +
perception evidential
- +
evidence
Figure 26: A common division of labor for accessing deictic dimensions
The deictic dimensions in the right-hand column of text-internal access are closely associated with the person of the subjective character especially place deixis or reflect his mental processes time adverbials
and modality. The deictic dimensions that commonly occur with speaker access, on the other hand, have mostly to do with the action tense or with other referents. It is true that third-person references to a
subjective character also reflect speaker access, but sometimes a subjective character is referred to in first person. Alternatively, the division of labor may derive from the common “remembering” mode of text-
internal access, in which the subjective character is coreferential with the narrator but is displaced in time and sometimes space, as the narrator “remembers what it was like” when he experienced certain things
see Chafe 1994, ch. 15. This division of labor requires much further study.
“Easy comprehension practice” §2.6.6 requires deictic shifts to be identified in a clear way, since in text comprehension, addressees need to know the locus of epistemic modality in defining their own
evidential modality. “There are times when the boundaries between real world and storyworld discourse [are] not clearly marked, as there are times when the location of the deictic center is not clearly marked….
In these cases, the reader reaches a point of confusion…. One task for the writer or discourse presenter is to select boundary cues that can be identified by readers” Segal 1995a:77. Existing data—
“performance”—establishes a zone of permissible variation, but it is also useful to identify central practices that contribute to easy comprehension.
3.6.4 Subjective character as accessor and discourse topic
