THE USE OF EXPRESSIVE REPORTING VERBS VS THE USE OF EXPANSIONS Tannen (1986) uses the term ‘graphic introducers’, a term coined by Labov (1972), for

reporting verbs that are not neutral, but are used to ‘hone’ the author’s description of the characters. This term resembles Wennerström’s (1964) ‘expressive reporting verbs’ (my translation), which is the term I will continue to use in this section. Tannen suggests that using a reporting verb such as GRIMACE to describe speech, is ‘a more concise and effective way of describing how [someone speaks] than would be a more pedestrian sounding “[someone] said with a smile”’ (1986:323). It is possible, Tannen adds, that using a graphic introducer, or an

expressive reporting verb is a ‘compensation for the loss of expressive voice quality in print by packing more expressive power into the words chosen’, so that ‘more work is done by the meanings of the words, less by the way they are spoken’ (1986:323). Tannen also believes this is more common in children’s books than in adult fiction. In other words, the use of expressive reporting verbs makes it possible to pack more information into fewer words than the use of a neutral reporting verb plus an expansion. This corroborates with Chafe’s (1982) observation that written discourse is more ‘integrated’ than oral discourse, which means that it has more information packed into fewer words.

As seen in Figure 4.4, the number of reporting verb types used per book varies from 15 to 60 out of 117 possible. And as Table 4.7 shows, the number of expansion types per book varies from 13 to 71. Knowing that authors have the choice between using expressive reporting verbs and using neutral reporting verbs and expansions, the question arises whether there is any relation between the use of expressive reporting verbs and the use of expansions in the corpus.

In order to find the so-called expressive reporting verbs, we take Figure 3.5 as a starting point (cf Section 3.6.2.) The reporting verbs that are most expressive, ie can be used to describe the speaker’s attitude to what is being said, the sound of the speaker’s voice, or the manner in which an utterance is made, are the reporting verbs in Verb Groups 1, 2 and 3d. That leaves out the reporting verbs in Verb Group 3a, since this group contains the most neutral verbs, Verb Group 3b, because the verbs in this category are related to the turn-taking in the conversation, and Verb Group 3c, because if contains only verbs that have to do with questions and answers.

Table 4.11 shows the relation between clauses with expressive reporting verbs, clauses with expansion and clauses with neither expansions nor expressive reporting verbs in each book (The table with the raw numbers is found in Appendix O). The numbers are given in percentage of the total number of reporting verb tokens.

Table 4.11: The use of expressive reporting verbs vs the use of expansions

Nancy

reporting verb nor expansion .40 .36 .74 .46 .80 .40 .52

The average number of clauses with an expressive reporting verb is around one third of the total number of reporting verbs, and three of the books, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and

Goosebumps, have a higher percentage than the average. Hardy Boys has the highest

percentage of expressive reporting verbs; almost every other reporting clause contains one. In Narnia, by contrast, only every tenth reporting clause contains an expressive reporting verb.

When examining the books group wise, we find that in Group 1 Hardy Boys has a slightly higher percentage of expressive reporting verb tokens than Nancy Drew, in Group 2,

Goosebumps has a twice as many clauses with expressive reporting verbs as Animorphs, and in Group 3 the percentage of expressive reporting verbs in Harry Potter is three times larger than in Narnia.

When comparing the percentage of clauses with expressive reporting verbs with the percentage of clauses with expansions, we find that the books in Group 1 and Group 2 have a lower percentage of expansions than of expressive reporting verbs, while in Group 3, Narnia has a higher percentage of expansions than of expressive reporting verbs, while Harry Potter has the same percentage of expansions as of expressive reporting verbs. There are also big differences between the six books when it comes to the percentage of expansions: around one third of the reporting clauses in Harry Potter are expanded, five times the number of

Animorphs, twice the number of Goosebumps and Hardy Boys, and three times the number of Narnia. Over three fourths of the reporting clauses in Narnia either make use of a reporting verb that is more or less neutral or have no expansion.

As mentioned above, using expressive reporting verbs is a way of packing more

information into fewer words, and it does seem that in the popular fiction books in Group 1 and Group 2, using expressive reporting verbs leads to less use of expansions. This, since both the books which use few expressive reporting verbs and those that use many expressive reporting verbs have a roughly twice as high percentage of expressive reporting verbs than expansions.

In the quality books of Group 3, however, the picture is different. In Narnia the percentage of expansions is larger than the percentage of expressive reporting verbs, while in Harry Potter the percentages are the same for expansions and expressive reporting verbs.

Only two books, Narnia and Animorphs, have a higher percentage of reporting clauses used without an expansion or an expressive reporting verb than of reporting clauses used with expansions and / or an expressive reporting verb. In other words, reporting clauses with expansion and / or expressive reporting verbs are more common than the opposite.

4.6 SUMMING UP

This chapter has presented the findings of direct speech in the corpus. A total of 1,201 reporting verb tokens were found, spread over 117 different verb types. Nancy Drew and

Hardy Boys have the largest number of verb types, Hardy Boys makes use of twice as many different reporting verbs as Animorphs and Goosebumps, and four times as many different reporting verbs as Narnia. The books in the corpus have roughly the same number of verb tokens, ± 59 tokens, but there are big differences when it comes to the number of verb types.

Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys have the largest number of unique reporting verbs per book and in the entire corpus, while Narnia and Goosebumps have the smallest.

The four reporting verbs that are most frequently used make up more than half of the occurrences of reporting verbs. The verb SAY is especially interesting, since it accounts for around half of the 1,201 verb occurrences. Narnia has the highest percentage of SAY; more than two thirds of the reporting verb occurrences in this book is a form of SAY. Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew have the lowest percentage of SAY; only around one fourth of all verb occurrences in these two books are a form of SAY.

It comes as no surprise that Verb Group 3a, which contains the most neutral verbs, among them SAY, has the highest number of occurrences. As regards the number of verb types within each verb group, we find that Verb Group 1 and Verb Group 3d have the largest variety, as many as 41 and 34 different verb types, respectively, while Verb Group 2 and Verb Group 4 have the lowest numbers of verb types, only seven and one, respectively.

On average, half of the reporting clauses are found in final position, a fact which is probably related to the high frequency of SAY in the corpus, and the fact that many reporting clauses are expanded and thus usually placed in final position. Around one third of the occurrences of direct speech has no reporting clause, and the least frequently used position is medial position; only Narnia has more reporting clauses in medial position than in initial. The percentage of inversion in the corpus is 32 per cent on average, a number that can be hugely misleading: Animorphs and Goosebumps have no occurrences of inversion at all, Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys have seven and eight per cent inversion, respectively, and Narnia and Harry Potter have 86 and 88 per cent inversion, respectively.

161 expansion types and 195 expansion tokens are found in the corpus, and SAY is by far the verb most frequently used with expansions. The highest number of expansions is found in Harry Potter, twice as high as in Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, four times as high as in Animorphs and three times as high as in Goosebumps and Narnia. Correspondingly, the three books with most expansions are also the three books using most expressive reporting verbs, and the three books with the lowest percentage of expansions are the ones with the lowest percentage of expressive reporting verbs.

It seems appropriate now to go back to the aim of the thesis and ask: Which books contain the most varied language for reporting direct speech? It is difficult to generalise without jumping to conclusions, but if we use the aspects of frequency of expansions,

frequency of expressive reporting verbs and unique reporting verbs, and number of reporting verb types as a measure, the following picture emerges: Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys seem to have the most varied language for reporting direct speech, followed by Harry Potter,

Goosebumps, Animorphs and Narnia. In other words, the two oldest popular fiction books seem to be most varied, followed by the new quality fiction book, the two new popular fiction books, and last, the old quality fiction book. But I will come back to this in more detail in the next chapter.

5 DISCUSSION

5.1 INTRODUCTION

I this chapter I will compare and contrast the findings reported in Chapter 4 in order to see whether my hypotheses stated in Chapter 1 are borne out. Therefore I will mainly concentrate on the

reporting verbs and the expansions, since these are the two aspects where variation becomes most apparent. First, I will consider the corpus books in three pairs, Groups 1, 2 and 3 (cf Section 1.3), to see whether the findings correspond for the two books in each pair. Sections 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 will therefore be discussing of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, Animorphs and Goosebumps and finally Narnia and Harry Potter respectively. Then, I will compare the three groups of book, in Section 5.5, and discuss differences and similarities.

As mentioned in Section 1.3, dividing the books into three pairs depending on old and new, popular fiction and quality fiction, is only one way of arranging the books. Another way is to divide them into older books, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Narnia and newer books, Animorphs, Goosebumps and Harry Potter, regardless of book type, and see whether any new results will appear in the light of this comparison. This is done in Section 5.6. Yet another aspect of study is whether the fact that three of the books have been written by female authors while the three other books have been written by male authors has had an effect. This comparison will be done in Section 5.7, which will also include a comparison with the studies of two other scholars. Section 5.8 compares the results of the present study with the results of two other similar studies and Section 5.9 focuses on finding some reasons for the outcome of the study.

Throughout the chapter, I will compare the findings of the present study to the findings of Arctaedius (1981) and Lundquist (1992), to see whether the results of those studies also apply to my study. I will also bring in the results of a few other similar studies (Liljestrand 1983; Tannen 1986; Garme 1988) where this is relevant.