Journal of Pragmatics 13 (1989) 577496

North-Holland

Receiwed June 1988; revised version October 1988

For those who are accustomed to viewing language as a means for com,rrruni-
cation, the phrase, ‘a sentence without a speaker’ may seem just as unthink-
able as, say, ‘a building without bui ders’ : It may be f6r granted that
where there’s a sentence there’s a speaker. So a which tries to
monstrate the absence of the speaker might be untenable, o
ut after sympathetic reading of her provocative work entitle
Cs-sztsnces.one mav agree. to some extent at least, wit
advances a theory that in the world of narration there exist
a speaker, sentences which are independent of the usu
r’unctioi3of the spoken language, viz. ‘unspeakable sentences‘.
Ever since her ina raf article on free indirect
Speech and Thought ST)) was published ii1 I973,
ST has given rise to m
IXllon and Kirchhofi
on (1981)). %h
of her previous articles (
to address the controve
(1983 : 17)) even for iihmry
generative grammar” (1983 : 17).

* RW~W of: Ann Bar?field, Umpeahble Sentences: Narration and ,Repre.sentation

in CZCLam
guuge qft;iction. IY&L kilosron: koutlec!gf -42 K~gna Paul.

‘* hthcx’s address: H. Yamaguchi, Faculty of Education, Kanazawa IJniversity, 1-I

Uchi, Kanazawa, Ishikawa 920, Japan.
i v&h to express my gratitude to professor Masahiko Ohnuma for his guidance and valuable
comments on the draft. I am also indebted to Michae:lCox and Ken-Ichi Seto for kirg@ ctaecking
my English. Last of all, I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Jacob L. Mey, who
recommended me to write this review article,

0378-2166/89/$3.50 0 1989, Elsevier Science Publishers I&V.(North-Holland)

578 . H. Yamaguchi 1 On ‘Umpeakable Sentences’

Full of insights into ST and narration in general oak deserves such

special attention. In fact, Unspeakab moment the most
stimulating and comprehensive work rettably, as far as
1 know, Ranfield’s proposal has not been duly discussed in lingspistic terms
(but cf. Woli (1986)): Although several counter examples to her theory have
been offered by her literary opponents, its grammatical arguments have not
been directly subject to linguistic comments. 9 this book, based
on formal analysis of generative grammar, ha misunderstanding
in literary circles. Therefore, there is a special need for linguistically proper
~v~l~~ti~~ of this imlX3
In addition to the li ligence mentioned above, there is another
reason why 1 would like to att emgt a review of the book which was published
an half a decade ago. (And this w the present article is
erely a linguistic but also a pra .) Banfield aims to
construct a grammatical theory of narration in terms of subjectivit Her
proposal, therefo,rp-, sholuld rightly be accepted as a theoFf of gram-mar. ut as
the subject of the book implies, the syntax of narration often calls for
laira i 4~ 91c Tme that BznMd’s ground-bre work fairly
es the characteristic grammar of RST and ted speech in
general with a lot of illustrating examples. It is also true, however, that her
rule-oriented grammatical analysis does not explain why RST
ue interpretation concerning the assignment of point of view.
r pragmatics.
in this paper, would like to comment on anfield’s theory mainly
from a pragmatic hpoint of view. hile introducing her arguments and
appreciating them to an extent, I m clear where her theory is lacking in
adequacy. I also present a few examples of which she does not take notice, in
al context in which RST forms appear. Concentra-
from talking enough about her other unspeakable
tences representing non-reflective
ut thic will be excuse cause her entire
the discussions

As a preliminary discussion to the grammatical analysis of R

v&y, Banfield sets out to characterize the difference between
S) and Indirect Speech (IS). (1) is the list of the con
are absent in IS but present in IX:

(la) sentences which have undergone root transformations (e.g., subject-atixi-

liary inversion, topica!ization, etc.)
L
 H. Ymaguchi 1 On ‘UnspeakableSentences’ 579

non-embeddable expressive elements such 8s exclamations and verbless

exclamatory st,,ntences
incomplete senttences
S ectkss i~qeratives
direct address
ifferent dialects or languages in introductory and embedded clau
addressee-oriented adverbials such as ‘between you and I’ and ‘confiden-
tially’.

er example9 are:

(2a 1 ‘Absurd, she is,’ Clarissa insisted.

(2b) Clarissa insistell that (*absurd she was.
\ she was absurd. (PO29
3
( a) ‘Yes, this is lcvle,’ Constance sighed.
(3b) Constance sighed that (*yes,) that was love. (p. 31)
(4a )\ e answered, ‘Nt only upon the suffe&gs I have infE_=ted.
(4b) answered that not o fferings he had inflicted. (p. 32)
(k] r Chubb rencated: ‘E
(5b) :ieated that to excttsc him. {p_33)
(Qa ) The private answered, ‘Sir, I not carry these orders.’
(6b) The private answered that r) he cou ‘t carry out these orders.
33)
(7a ) unna yer think so yersen, like? said Cli , mocking the vernacula
(?b) *Clifford asked
_ - __*_ whether she didna think
(8 )a John said, ‘ tween you and me, she is lying.”
@b) *John said t between him and her she as lying. (p. 34)

Upon examining the differences exemplified in (9-o-(), one may rightly

redict that the reported clause of IS retains the features common to the
embedded clause wh!:reas the quoted clause of is characterizable as an
independent sentence. In order to e ences bet\veen these two
IllCXkS anfield proposes to replace t initial symbol of the phrase structure
es in Chomsky (1!)73), i.e., (E stands for (ex
ression). The maio differen lies in recursivity :

l Batield’s examples are not restrictedto Eng!ish sentences. She also cites French ex2mples in
order to present“a special categoryof evidence making explicit Jvhatremainshidden in English”
(p. 13). As can be known from these words of hers, Bangeld intends her theory to be universal.
Here we should not misunderstand her intention. Her entire goal may be to construct a
gta tical t;leoryon (narrative)‘style’which is characterizedby “the presenceor the absence of
[the] subjective asp& of language” (p. 7), and therebv _ &mcnst-@ her non-communicz~ive
theory of literaryw-ration (xe section 6). Therefore,the uGversal claim, I think, is made to her
grammaticaltheory oar - ?=ary
..+- narration,but not to RST itself:which, though ubiquitous in kdo-
~mpean lmqp2ges,may not be a ~universst- ,,eans for s--h and thought presentation.
580 H. Ymaguchi 1 On ‘UnspeakableSentences’

is recursive and embeddable, E by definition is no -embeddable. She hypothe-

on-embeddable expressive elements are directly generated under
nd, therefore, barred from appearing in an embedded clause. She
proposes several phrase structure rules to formulate the syntax of such
expressive constructions as :

Were I will not touch upon the effect of the E node on the entire theory of
generative grammar (about which Banfield &so holds silent), and concentrate
instead on what benafi Q ts the introduction of the node E brings to us
concerning the problem of subjectivity. The E node enables us to talk about
the expressions of subjectivity which have often evaded t eshes of the
formal analysis: It makes c where subjectivity lies. For example, according
to her the quoted clause of is an E, whereas the reported clause of IS is an
s complement, thus excluding the constructions listed in (1) (which imore or
less reflect the speaker’s subjectivity). In this way, the intro tion of the E
node enables us to explain the syntactic differences between and IS. And
sion of expressive elements from an s complement, but
us with an importan
, introductory and qu
as two different consecutive 3s. For instance, (10a) is derived
transformatiesa % conjunction, provided that “this’ in (10’~

r said to me, “Oh, no, baseball in Japan is not baseball at

(10 h, no, baseball in Ja

at all.

0 difkitiiii rat& because t ey fom two different

25, Of
r thechnical term for a sequence of one or more appropriately
the quoted can introduce
ents are attri is not the case
in IS.
To illustrate this anfield analyzes the behavior of
6xpreosive constructions in I , among which
questions and indirectly quoted excla
i*wedin the embedded clause of indi
including deictic adverbs, tense5 h.cd first and second person pronouns”
53). Interestingly, their .:++
.. ..-%pretation requires reference to the reporting
aker instead of the reported speaker. These are some of her examples:
 H. Yamaguchi / On ‘UnspeakableSentences’ 581

Sir William asked himself, “There is no God?”

*Sir William asked himself ther there was no God? (p. 53)
John said, “That idiot of a doctor is a genius.”
John said that the idiot of a doctor was a genius. (p. 5
Mary told me yesterday at the station that she would meet me there
today. (p. 25)

A directly quoted question like (1 la) can be paraphrased into an indirect

form like (1 lb). The asterisk attached to (1 lb) is intended to show that the
rephrased version can no longer retain the original interrogative force. And if
(1 lb) is still understood to have interrogative force, it is normally ascz-&ed to
the indirect reporter of the original question. In (12aj “That idiot of a doctor”
reflects a particular psychological state and attitude of John, but when
embedded in an indirectly reported clause this expressive phrase is not
attributable to John, the quoted speaker, but instead to the speaking (quoting)
I of the entire E. The deictic elements in (13) are calculated on the basis of the
place and time in which the speaker of the entire sentence (“me”) reports
Mary’s utterance.
From these findings Banfield deduces a principle by the name of:

) I E I I 1”:For every expression (E), there is a unique referent of 1 (the

), to whom all tributed, and a
rent of you (the (P- 57)

Judging from the syntactic phenomena discucsed above, 1 E / 1 I (S

ER) seems to be a reason2 ble principle and c orrespond to our intuition. It is
this reasonable principle that, when revised, leads
conclusion, namely, the to.4 absence of the s

After characterizing the sentences of RST as non-em

out to demonstrate the absence 4-m/\~&rQ+;-pi
“4;rrrQri~&Au.~%-*&
starts with the revision of principle. She offers four
cases in which I E / P SPEA
narration.
Ii) Expressive ele nts in (the third person) are not at&but
the first person. For example, the exclamatory force of (15) is attrib
subject of the parenthetical verb (“she”) and not to the hidden 6:

(15) Oh hew extraordinarily nice wo&zen were, she thought. {p. 73j
582 XI. Yamaguchi / On ‘Unspmkabie Sentences’

eddable expressive elements in t the point of view

of a third person pronoun:

news affected Connie in her state of semi-stupefied well-being with

vexation amounting to exasperation. Now she had got to be bothered by
the beast of a woman! (p. $9)
... terms in RST indicate the relation between a third person
(111I
and the person so referred to:

(17) She loved her Daddy. (p. 90)

(iv) Italicized elements indicating contrastive or emnhatic stress are inter-

preted as the emphasis placed by a third person: a

(18) e sat still, feeling as if he had had a blow, instead of giving one. Their
eight years of friendship and love, the eight years of his life, were
nullified. (p. 90)

(1Q-o--(8) illustrate that the third person pronoun in ST apparently plays

the role usually reserved to the I of s, the role as the
subjective source for expressive elemen atield forms an opinion
“that the notion o oint of view or subjectivity is not finition tied to the
decides to refo~mulke ;IE / i ST into:

(19a) 1 E / 1 SEL or every node E, there is at most one referent, called the
‘subject of consciousness’ or SELF, to whom all expressive elemects are
lizations of SELF in an E are coreferential.
there is an 1. I is coreferential with the SELF.
absence of an I, a third person pronoun may be interpreted as

d anaphorically to the complement of a consciousness verb,

is coreferential with the subject or the indirect object of this

educes her narratorless theory of

’ (19ib) predicts that:

erstood to represent a third person point of view if it

rson pronoun. In other words, it is only in the absence
at represented IEs with a third person SELF become
 H. Y&nagachi / On ‘ihspeakalde Sentences’ 583

To test this claim she presents the following example in which the original
third person pronoun is altered into the first person (cf. (15)):

(21) Qh how extraordinarily nice I was! (*she thought). (p. 94)

Once the fist person I appears, the exclamatory force of the sentence is no
longer attributable to person. It seems that (21) supports the claim
put forward in (20). uld we accept (20) as true? Should we admit
anfield that there is no speaker assumed in the sentence of RST,
ontinual denial of ‘dual voice’ theorists, who insist that in
ST “there is a blending of two points of view or ‘voices’, the
character’s, whose consciousness is linguisticall resented, and the narra-
tor% who ‘adopts the character’s point of view’ 185; cf. Pascal (1977))?
Let us consider this absence of the speaker m detail. The question cast
in preceding dkvides into three parts: (i) expressions in RST
re c&y the s subjectivity?; (ii) Is the EAKER absent in
RST?;. (iii) Does the absence of the SPEAKER entail the absence of the
narrator?
(i) Judging from Banfield’s argumentation, it seems highly probable that
subjectivity expressed in RST is attributable soleiy to the third person SEL
namely, the character whose words or reflections ar represented.
run counter to a stronger version of the dual voice t eory (see, e.g.
ut if one intends to deny d’s grammatical argument and
the subjectivity renected i is alho attributable to a covert
narrator, he/she should prove that the subjective intrusion of the narrator is
not only possible in a particular text, but s)ist~~aticaZly possible on the
grammatical level. I think that her ‘single-voice’ interpretation of expressive
elements corres to our (or at least y) impression about some paradig-
matic examples T, in which charac s’ reflections are directly represen-
ted (except for the concord of tense and person; see, e.g., (1Sj and (16)).
eiements other than expressives (e.g.
this question cannot be answered in gr
tical terms (see, e.g., er problematic explanation in terms of the
onsciousness in chapter 5 of the book). This
is because dual voice phenomena such as double intonation and stylistic
intrusion of the author presuppos e act of reading and writing, and thus
require pragmatic consideration. anwhile, we should put them aside in
order to concentrate on’ her grammatical description
can be syntactically characte s the referent of k’
ion of expressive elements, as is in (14). There-
fore, Banfield is right in saying that there is no speaker in sentences of
SO far as this ‘speak& means a speaker who can (diratly) inscribe his/her
own subjectivity on a text. It should be kept in mind, though, that her theory
does not specify, in a strict sense, whether this inability of the speaker to
inscribe his/her subjectivity is caused by his/her total absence in RST or by
some other systematic reaso the discussion in section 4).
(iii) Then, does the abse of the SPEAKER entail the absence of the
narrator? ds on how we interpret the terms. Banfield’s usage of the
terms ‘SP ‘, ‘speaker’, a& ‘-.
--ti .- narrator’ implies that they are
interchangeable in the context of third person narration. Thus, she deduces
of the covert narra from the non-appearance of the first person
in the third person T (and the restricted distribution of the first
person in the first person RST):

(22) Since no first person1 may appear in represented speech and thought
le as the E’s SELF and since that first person must
y parenthetical attached to the represented E, this
means that represented Es cannot be simultaneously attributed to a
covert or ‘effaced’ narrator. than being narrated, consciousness in
this style is represented un d by any judging point of view. No
one speaks in represented Es, although in hem speech may be repre-
sented. (p. 97)

ere exists an important difference between so-called covert

nfieldian speaker. While her SPEAKER stands solely on the
obvious grammatical evidence concerning subjectivity, a covert narrator,
according to the opinions of her opponent relies on two types of e
linguistic (grammatical) and pragmatic arkers. The linguistic
include such constructions as third person F~nouns and back-shifted tense in
evaluative adject i 9 es. he pragmatic markers are
fi% ose the act I:- re ing, as Ss indicated by the
following remark of Chatman (1978: 197)1 “‘In covert narration we hear a
voice speaking of events, characters, and set@ng, but its owner remains hidden
in the discoursive shadows.” For example, rony conveyed by RST sentences
may count as an explicit example of thr pragmatic markers. The covert
narrator characterized by the pragmatic markers is hardly distinguishable
from the implied author.
Now, can we sav that the absence of tht entails the absence of
the covert narrator? I think anfield”s argument does not provide enough
evidence to prove the absence of the narrator. observed above, the term
covert narrator is not identifiable with her S ER, and thus, the (appa-
rent) absence of the latter does not guarantee the total absence of the former,
the covert narrator. We should be more careful in discussing such a notion as
the speaker in the text, which at the moment still lacks satisfactory linguistic
foundation.
 H. Yamaguchi1 On ‘UnspeakableSentences’ 585

4. RST and echo questions

Having looked over Banfield’s narratorless theory, I would like to move to the
point that I myself find most enlightening. Paradoxically enough, it is at this
enlightening part that I find a primary mistake in Banfield’s approach. First,
let us follow her discussion on violations of the priority of SPEAKER (cited
in (19b)) and see what the violations bring to her principle. Consider the

(23) Did I really know the road? Ralph asked me. Were the muleteers to
be trusted? Would there be beds and eatable rooti l.?hen we ar-
rived? (p. 123)

Unlike the examples cited IJOfar, the above are sentences of represented
speech in a first person narrative. They are interpreted as representations of
what I heard. Interestingly, subjectivity expressed by the inverted questions is
attributed not to 1, the SPEAKER, but to the SELF of his partner, Ralph.
These sentences clearly count as violations of the priority of SPEAKER which
states that if there is an 1, I is coreferential with the SELF, Here as in the case
of 1 E / 1 I, the priority of SPE must undergo a revision.
But before setting about a revision, Banfield first deals with a construction
in which I exhibits the same behavior concerning the assignment of point of
view, that is, the Echo Question (EQ). In an EQ “I refers, not to the echoed
speaker, but to the echoing speaker, and pou refers to the echoed speaker”
(p. 126)9the latter playing the role of SELF:

(2W ere can I buy pretTe?a at this time of night?

(24b) Where can you buy pretzels? At this time of night? At
CoUrss;.
- -- (Sperber and Wilson (1981: 306))
(25a) What a fool I am!
(25b) What a fool you are?
(25~) WhaE a fool I am?
(25d); What a fool you are! (p. 127)

((25b) is an appropriate for (25a), whereas (25c) is not. (25~) would

instead be an EQ for (25d
Note that the interrogative force of (24b) and the exclamato
(25b), following the lead of
the utterance (the echoin
r)* This characteristic
or of I is similar to that of I the role of

In addition to the behavior of & EQ shares several properties with RST,

such as the exclusian of addressee-oriented adverbials, direct address, and
indications of pronunciation (see section 5). Except for the frequent appearan-
shows remarkable syntactic resemblance to RST, so that we
t the mechanisms underpinning the syntax of RST and EQ are
Banfield seems to regard EQ as an equivalent of
rence of contexts in which they occur. In some cages
Jishable. Banfield says:

In addition to the echo question, the spoken language shows a similar

convention for ‘echoing’ heard speech in statements, although it does not
concomitantly question all or a portion of the echoed utterance. An
le is given below:
Every time I see him he ridicules me. Oh, I could never repair the car
myself. What was I doing lying in the middle of the road? No5 that
wasn’t the way to go about it. ere, he”d show .298-299)

It is this indication of the syntactic resemblance that I find most enlighten-

ing. ut regrettably, anfield does not try to explain problems inherent in
main concern lies in the apparent anomalies of the
) not playing the role of SELF, viz., violations of

In order to take these vi ount, nfield adds the following

amendment to her priority

127) Div(j,*(-aa (ffJp&~fiFj$ @&j &gTA&y =‘e 8”:

AArl;~~ei; d first person in an E who is
echoing another ady heard by this S R, then
may rels,iquish his rogative as SELF and the refere
:erlocutor may be rential with the SELF. (p. 128)

second person, she goes so far

unction of two roles

wised priority of SPEA e is a s

either the SELF or the corefe
indirect object o a parenthetical verb, i.e. the S
1291
.'-=nAm~~
\k’. Xd:Lj
f-
Nij iSi2~mx~

iously, these revisions tend towards ad hoc explanation. She has stirted
I, which is able to explain why IS rejects the
ut in order to describe such particularized
anfield’s priniciple must be less and less general.
 il. Kmaguchi 1 On ‘UmpeakableSentences’ 507

4 what is worse, though her 1 E / 1 SELF and its concomitants predict,

$2’ _ycorrectly, tFe characteristic behavior of the first and third persons in EQ
;dnd RS’T, they can not explain why EQ and RST receive such unique
interpretation concerning the attribution of point of view. What is wrong with
them?
Consider the following piece of constructed dialogue:

(24) Jim : What a peach of a

Liz: What a peach of a giri I am?

The embeddable expressive phrase “a peach of X9’ shows the speaker’s

attachment to a certain person or object. bus, Jim expresses his affection
towards Liz by using this phrase. And it seems probable that the s
reflected in Liz’s “a peach of a girl” originates in Jim’s words.
echo express the same pleasant feeling as Jim’s original? Ev
ixrfect accord with Jim’s cpinion, does not and can not express that SMUG
feeling by echoing Jim’s words (c aberland’s remark that a speech act is
not etg%rckd but displayed in report (IIaberland (1986: 220)). Batield’s
formal analysis misses this expressive difference between the echoed and the
and applies the attribution est on subjectivity (which is successful in
to expressive elements in T. In (29) Liz is only mentioning
what Jim has just said, and not using the phrase in order to express herself. It
is this use-mention distinction that Banfield’s analysis is lacking in. (Banfield
only points out that there is “a close gemantic relation” (p. 1
e echoing utterance; as to the use-mention
ilson (1981).)
of mention. So rxprcssive elements appearing in an do not
subjectivity of echoing speaker, but subjectivity of echoed
speaker, i.e., the HEA of the EQ. In a li anner, RST, the underpin-
ning mechanism of which is identifiable with s, should also be viewed as
an echoic mention. Characterizing these two stricted contexts as hoic
mention makes it possible to dispense with above-mentioned ad hoc
revisions and to conserve the generality of 1 / 1 I. What is more, this
characterization enables us to explain why sentences of RST in third person
narration receive such unique interpretation in regard to the assignment of
point of view. And I believe that the questions inherent in RST such as irony
and double intona&G can be answer4 &gantly by this approach B
shall restrict myself to giving second thoughts on the absence of the
ER. (For the precise characterization of RST as echoic mention and the
consequences of this view, see Yamaguchi (in
I have mentioned in the preceding section s right about the
absence of the SPEAKER in so far as her ‘speaker’ means a speaker who can
;c own subjectivity on a text. The mention theory of RST
(directly) inscribe h..,
588 H. Yamaguchi / On ‘UnspeakableSentences’

makes clear the implication of this remark. In order to keep the status of
echoic mention, sentences of EQ and RST in principle cannot tolerate
elements which express the SPEAKER’s subjectivity. For example, EQ and
ST cannot introduce addressee-oriented adverbials such as ‘ca~!idly’ and
‘between you and I’ (cf. section These adverbials, when placed sentence-
initially, behave as a metalinguis modifier, i.e., they comment in advance,
from the point of view of the SPEAKER, on the way the following informa-
tion should be taken by e hearer. Adressee-oriented adverbials, therefore,
cannot co-occur in an with an echoic representation of some prior
or thought which’reflects the point of view of the echoed (or rather
speaker. This expressive inability of the echoing (or representing)
may reveal that there is a grave shortcoming in Banfield’s logic.
That is, attribut ve expression in sentences of RST
the Csence of t Even if a speaker is present in .R
tions expressive of this speaker’s subjectivity are systematically prohibited
epresenlzli Es 9 &LX i&L tlic UdiiG x~ricuccz tddii 0. h
e see the primary mistake of Banfield’s approach.
Banfield’s failure in the analysis of the SPEAKER’s absence reminds us of
the hidden pitfall that often cat&es formal analysts of the syntax on the
discou25e IevcL In 2 unit 3arger than a sentence like a narrative, there are
indelzd many syntactic phenomena which should receive a formal treatment,
but careful consideration should be given when what is formalizable is
isolated under the rubric of a gramrfiar, for there are various non-syntactic, as
furors wh :h may affect the syntax of a given construction.
anfield fails to see the PY~~~~5vedifkrmce ?xt:?ez:n the echoing and
the echoed, and deductively infers from the
from the attribution test on subjectivity) the
A,t!~ethird person in EQ and RST are given
ed out that Banfield’s theory lacks
persuasion as regards the absence of the speaker. If one is to stick to the
speakerless position, he/she has to rely on different evidence.

In order to discuss first the absence of the SP willfully skipped over

the part an which Banfield tries to characterize RST as a non-communicative:
context. Clearly this non-communicative view of RST is a ccrollary of her
narratorless theory. Now field’s narratorless theory cannot be ac-
cepted at its face value, we CLrefd in evaluating the contents of this
non-communication view. ut whether or not we accept her opinion, the facts
cited by her remain of great interest for analysts of narrative.
 H. Y&konaguchi
/ On ‘WmpeakableSentences’ 589

For the purpose of demonstrating the non-communicative character of

RST, Banfield provides six constructions which are preen9 in DS but absent

subjectless imperatives
direct address
addressee-oriented adverbizls
indications of pronunciation
present tense
the second person

er logic is this: these constructions are in some way or other linked to ahe
unicative situation i which the addresser and the addressee
with each other; absence of these
constructions in ST sentences, then, indicates that is actually cut off
from the usual communicative function.
The first three constructions in (30) are those -which are excluded from s
but not from Es. Their exclusion from represented Es, as
“must be attributable to other than syntactic
arc her examples of (3Oa)-(3Oc)*

A wild idea shot through r Chubb’s brain: could this grand visitor be
arold Transome? Excu m: he had been given to understan
that a radical candidate . . .
you excuse him # Excuse tim (p. 113)
*sir,) he could not obey his orders, hz tek? the oi%cer (p. II1
entially, how extraordinarily r&e workmen were! (p 117)

anfield states that subjectless imperatives are usually absent in represented

s and that even if present as in (31a), they ‘Fannot be greted with an
underlying you” (p, 113), as is made explicit by (5 1b). Ati form normally
does not tolerate direct address, as is indicated by (32). If, as in (33),
addressee-oriented adverbials appear in narration, the mot% c,entcncc will
naturally be read as a statement by an i
in reted as a sentence of represented
at is common to these three const tions is that they retain a certain
nicative force, towards the addressee: Imperatives are used
ssee to XIII SOIW &4g~tzd set; direct address to
attract the addressee’s atte n, to confirm the social relation between the
addresser and tke addressee, etc. ; and addressee-oriented adverbial3 to convey
beforehand how the following information should be taken by the addressee.
The absence of these constructions iG represente anfield into a
590 H. Yavmguchi 1 On ‘UnspeakableSenter. I‘S’

rather strong claim that the communicative force inherent in these construc-
s is incompatible with MT, which, according to her, forms a non-
unicative context.
t one can derive from this a weaker alternative which goes: The
communicative force of these constructions deprives their mo
the status as echoic mention (or more generally narration; cf.
tion on the absence of the speaker m section 4) - when
interpretable as mentioned, i.e., characters’ words, they ma
in (31a). I conceive that the weaker claim is more proba
constructions, may be absent in narration in general, i
manrraiivein which we ciEI”I
cEe~dy i&z
course these constructions may occur
cf. “See” in (38) below.)
As to indications of pronunciation I do not have much to y, excer>t that,
if present in a literary text such as DOS Passos’ U.S.A. (cf. cHale (1983)),
th an be treated a.: a particular case of eye dialw;s.
nfi,eld claims that, “apart the historic and generic ~~resent’,(p. 1!8),
RST excludes the present tense. ut the ‘true’.present tense may be altogether
absent in all narrative contexts (except in DS).
Among others you is the most important evidence for the non-communica-
tive view of <ST, since its absence is “the key to the exclusion of the other
elements listed” (p. 119) in (30). Norma ly you is absent in RST. Consider the
following original-alteration pair : -

y couldn’t she have work en for friends?

y couldn’t she have you for a friend? (p. 119)

reted as a representation of the character’s (“she”)

the case of (33), must “be read as a question posed
first person and its past can no longer be understood as
cotemporal with NOW [the time designated by the present time deictics]”
(p. 119). Thus, the appearance of you usually deprives represented Es of its
status as echoic mention.
At times ysu appears in ST, but this ysu does not designate the addressee
(the reader). It means “one” (or “you” in talking to oneself), as
rightly points out in a footnote (p. 297). For instance, you in the following
example may be so interpreted:

(35) How often he had heard her tell the story, how often expatiate on the
beauties of that skillful imitation of an oleograph! ‘A real Artist in the
streets’, and you could hear the capital A in Artist as she spoke the
words. (A. Huxley, ‘The Gioconda Smile’)
 H. Ymaguchi / On ‘UnspeakableSentences’ 591

Banfield’s claim on the absence of you seems reasonable enough. In a

character’s utterance or inner reflection you may appear in order to designate
either the character’s interlocutor or general “one”. But the former you is to
be converted into he or she in third person narratirsn, and into the first or
third person in firc,t person narration. Only the latter, ‘general’ you can evade
the concord of person. In short, you, which is the result of the concord of
person and thus refers to the reader, is generally absent in RST.
ere we should turn to the overall context in which you is absent. YOUas
the reader is missing not only in RST but also in DS and IS in ordinary
narratives. In r the oral (or epistolary) narrative in which the
identity of a c des with that of the addressee. or except for the
narrational break in which the author cuts in to speak directly to the reader,
such you never appears in the context of narrative. It follows from this that
the absence of yoor is not specific to RST but to the narrative in general,
including oral narratives. (Banfield herself later in the book expands the
conte::t in which yaw is missing, from RST to her narr&~n; see section 6
below.)
But if a narrative is constructed in such a special way as’ to take in the
presence of the reader, you may well appear in RST. In fact this is occasion-
ally the case with the second person narrative:

(36) She looks at you as if you had just suggested instrumental rape. “I do
not speak English,” she says, when you ask again.
“Franc zis?”
AA ia@at you that vway,as if tarantulas
She shcakesher head. Why is she l,,k-,
were nesting in your eye sockets? (J. cInemey, Bright Lights, Big
City; italics in the original)

I see no obstacle in regarding the last sentence as an instance of

second person. Leech and Short (1981: 327) backs up my characterization of
the above sentence as an T form: “it would be more aTcurate to say that
the pronoun and tense se1 ion has to be appropriate to the form of narration
in which the FIS [Free Indirect Speech] occurs” (italics in the original). The
normal tense in this narrative is the present and through the whole of the text
the main character is referred to as you just as the character is called he/she in
the third perso ative. It may be that the original reflection oi
character goes : s she looking at me that way . . . ?“, and the yotl in
last sentence can be regarded as a result of the concord of person.
Though this you does not directly refer to the reader, it indirectly does SO by
making the reader play the protagonist’s part. It may, then, be that the second
person narrative like the above clearly presupposes the communicative para-
digm between the author and the reader, a-d you is the paradigm’s imprint on
592 H. Yarnaguchi+’On ‘UnspeakableSentencer’

the text. This means that the represented E in (36) exnibits the communicative
property. It is true that you is generally absent frcm represented Es, but this
absence is not confi ST alone, but to narration, especially literary
ere again we see that anfield’s evidence does not precisely point
mmunicative charac of RST but rather to the general charac-
ter of narration.
Now should we approve of the view of T as a non-communicative
context? From all these reasons I think that nfield’s claim is a little too
strong. It would be better to recast her distinction between communication
and non-communication into other less restrictive distinctions, such as be-
tween the dialogic and monologic (or narrative) situation. To say so may
inevitably entail revision of her major distinction between narration and
discourse, which is the theme of the next section.

. n

First of all, d’s distinction between narration and discourse should be

introduced. ing to her, narration consists of these three styles; narra-
tion per se (purely objective description of events), RST, and the representa-
tion of non-reflective consciousness (so-called represented perception), and
can be grammatically characterized by boih positive and negative features.
The negative features are the present tense and you, or rather the I-vou w pair,
the absence of which distinguishes narration from dis wrse; the positive ones
are those tenses which appear only in narration, i.e., tiorist, imparfait (PAST
cotemporal with NO ), and historical present. As the negative features
suggest, Banfield claims that narration forms a non-communicative context,
mmunicative context.
at there is a significant difference between the
narrative language and the dialogic language, but I have reservations about
describing the narrative style as a non-communicative realization of language.
One of the reasons is the difficulty in characterizing RST as a non-communi-
cative context (see section 5). The other is that oral narratives cannot duly be
treated along the lines Banfield suggests. As a matter of fact, her attitude
towards the oral narrative seems to me somewhat ambivalent.
There is substantial evidence which indicates that Banfield excludes oral
narratives from her narration. I will pick out three points. First, she suggests
in places that RST is an exclusively literary style. Second, she regards skaz (a
kind of first person (literary) narrative in which the speaking I directly talksto
the reader, as in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn) as a simulation of oral
discourse and apparently throws it out of narration. Third, she claims that the
act of writing has a great influence on narrative style and says that it is writing
which “allows the creation of a fictional NOW completely separate from the
 H. Yamaguchi 1 On ‘UnspeakabkSentences’ 593

real linguistic act which creates it and the creation of a fictional SELF
separate from any writing I” (p. 242). (But apart from these, the fact that the
oral narrative can be easily and correctly grasped within the communicative
paradigm shows the difficulty in incorporating it into narration.)
On the other hand, Banfield cites historical present as a feature of narration,
and gives examples of a highly particularized oral narrative, sportscast.
Notice, however, that historical present is frequently found in ordinary oral
narratives. Thus, we find incoherence in her treatment of the oral narrative.
(From overall impression, Batield seems to exclude oral narratives from
narration.)
It should be emphasized that other than historical present oral narratives
often exhibit the features of narration. Despite Banfield’s remark that “the
past tense [in an oral narrative] cannot be cotemporal with NOW” (p. 299),
we can find such past tense in oral narratives as in the following example:

(37) Those who really went through combat, t Normandy lan

heavy stuflt; might laugh at this little action ‘d been in, but for me . . .
We were passing people who were taki over from us, another
company. We had one da, -v of this. Our uniforms were now dirty and
bloody and our faces looked like we’d been there for week
had the feeling: You poor innocents. (S. el, ‘The Good
italics and the three dots are in the original)

ere NOW designated by the word “now” is cotemporal with PAST.

And we may also find RST sentences in oral narratives. (38) and (39)
respectively exhibit an example of represented speech and thought (which Is
indicated by my italics):

(38) My mom had always wanted me to better myself. I wanted to better

myself because of her. Now when the strikes started, 1 told her I was
going to join the union and the whole movement. I told her I was !--ping
to work without pay. She said she was proud of me. (His eyes glisten. A
long, long pause.) See, I told her I wanted to be with my people. If1 were
a company man, nobody would like me any more. I had to belong to
somebody and this was it right here. She said, “I pushed you in your early
years to try to better yourself and get a social position. But I see that’s
not the answer, I know I’ll be proud of you.” (S. Terkel, Working)
(39) In Ltidenscheid, we were in the hills looking down. It was dead silence in
the town, except that you became aware of German ambulances with the
big red crosses on the roofs. We didn’t know whether it was a trick.
There was something mysterious about that sight. The bells started
tolling in the city. You didn’t know what to make of it. Was this tke
594 If. Yamaguchi 1 On ‘UnspeakableSentences

opening of a major battle? Were they going away? There was very little
resistance and we took the town. (S. Terkel, ‘The Good War’)

Both examples contain several pieces of grammatical evidence for the RST
form. For instance, shifted tense, unchanged deictics (“this”, “here”), commu-
nication or consciousness verbs preceding the introdl:ction of RST forms (“I
told her”, “You didn’t know”), etc. There may be no objection in regarding
rms, though ST is generally considered to be a literary
rd person RST, however, is very rare in oral narratives (cf.
and may be regarded as a literary style.)
In this way, oral narratives occasionally display the features of narration,
though they clearly presuppose the speaker-healer paradigm, as is indicated
’ in (38) which is inserted in a narrational break. It should be cle
at Banfield’s narration-discourse distinction has a considerable
difficulty. er evidence for narration, in reality, points to a more general
distinction between narrative and dialogue.

To sum up, ST can be resolved into three major

contentions: (i) attribution of t of view solely to the character; (
absence of the narrator; (iii) as a non-communicative context.
accepting the fist, I have declined to accept the latter two, but this should not
be taken n that we should completely reject her theory. Indeed her idea
of unspe sentences, at first glance, might be a surprising one, but if we
give thought to the general significance of the third person narration, her
osal will not be so s rising. There may be two ways to look at the third
from which side one is viewing the problem,
i.e., from the author’s side or the reader’s.
The reason why the author chooses the third person narration instead of
the first may be, most simplistically, to avoid a fixed and limited point of view
from which the text is described. n order to narrate the event objectively or in
order to pick out from among several viewpoints of the characters the most

2 But cf. Polanyi (1982) and Haberland (1986), who point out that RST forms appear in spoken
English and Danish respectively.
Some literary critics also admit that the source of RST form can be found in ordinary speech,
though they are inclined to regard RST as a littrary style and emphasize “the distance between the
forms found in common parlance and in literature” (Pascal (1977: 19)). It should be noted here
that the ordinary source these literary critics have in mind is a kind of report which appears in a
dialogic situation, as is shown by Thibeaudet’s example: “a sergeant will ask his officer for leave
on behalf of a private in his platoon in some such terms as: ‘He’s asking to go on leave; his sister
is making her first communion”’ (excerpt from Pascal (1977 : 18); see Thibaudet (1935: 23 l-232)).
My examples, observed in oral narratives, demonstrate more affinity with the literary use.
convenient one for a particular passage, the author tries to
narrator’s existence. This view predicts that the third
tendeAlcy towards the impersonal style. From this vie int the narratorless
theory is no longer a surprising attempt, especially
third person narration in grarnnatical terms, si
characterize a covert narrator only by syntactic means (cf. Violi (1986)).
On the other hand, one can look at third person narration from the
reader’s side. Our rationale always s r the speaking subject. The
slightest trace is enough to make us imagine the personality of the speaking
subject. So in the act of interpreting there arises a strong desire to recover the
‘effaced’ narrator. I think that this is the position from which the standard
and the dual voice theory look at the third person narration.
oint ~1’view, a narrative without a narrator is hardly conceivable.
Then, why has RST been a battlefield for both sides, although the presence
or absence of the narrator may be a proper subject for the stttdy of the third
person style? To answer this, we should look at the matter from the reader’s
side. In interpreting a represented E like: ‘Where were her paints, her paints
yes” we, consciously or unto ously, recover the original form of the
character’s reflection, such as: “ here are my paints, my paints yes”.
doing, our rationale assumes a partictilar standpoint from which the present
tense and the first person in the original are viewed (or echoed) as the past
and the third, whether or not we call this a covert narrator’s point of view. In
this way, the third person ST systematically makes us feel the presence of
the narrator. Therefore, in spite of the apparent .absence of the speaking
subject, the third person ST provides us with some reason to talk about the
covert narrator.
Notei however, that the dual voice theory is at the moment also lacking in
adequate linguistic foundation. turning down CSS
theory, we should take into cons on her linguistic ect
it when it is not linguistically characterizable. Other than the ordinary more or
less metaphorical use of the term ‘covert narrator’, we now need a prtxk
definition of this covert speaker in the text. Thus, we should approve of’
anfield’s achievement also for her reaction against the linguistically naive
narrator theory, as s for the presentation of many interesting li
phenomena and the tion of the possibility that linguistics can con
to the study of (literary) narrative style. anfield’s theory will surely offer us a
linguistic starting point.

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