1. The quality children’s books, Narnia and Harry Potter will make use of a varied and diverse language for reporting speech.
4. There will not be much difference in the language for reporting speech in the old quality children’s book, Narnia, and the new quality children’s book, Harry Potter.
Being quality books, I assumed that Narnia and Harry Potter would have a varied language for reporting speech, in that they would use many reporting verb types, expressive reporting verb types and types of expansions. It seems, however, that my hypothesis was partly wrong.
Both books use few reporting verb types, and both books have a fairly high percentage of
SAY,which can indicate little variation. On the other hand, Harry Potter contains more expansions, more expressive reporting verbs and uses a higher number of different verb types than Narnia does. In sum, Harry Potter can be said to have a varied language for reporting direct speech, while Narnia has a less varied and more monotonous language for reporting direct speech.
2. The popular fiction books, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Animorphs and Goosebumps will make use of fewer reporting verbs and expansions, and have a poorer language for reporting speech than the quality children’s books.
3. The old popular fiction books, Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys will have a poorer and less diverse language for reporting speech than the new popular fiction books, Animorphs and Goosebumps.
I presumed that the quality children's books would have a more varied language for reporting direct speech than the popular fiction books, since the latter is usually believed to have a repetitious, cliché-filled, formula-based language, and I also presumed the old popular fiction books would have a poorer language for reporting direct speech than the new ones. It seems, however, that while the two oldest popular fiction books, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, use a wide range of reporting verb types, expressive reporting verb types and expansion types, the two newer popular fiction books, Animorphs and Goosebumps, on a general basis, use fewer reporting verb types, fewer expansion types and fewer expressive reporting verb types. The new books also have a higher frequency of SAY and a lower frequency of verb types occuring once per book and in the entire corpus. Therefore, it seems that the old popular fiction books have a more varied language for reporting direct speech than the new popular fiction books.
The fact that there are large differences in the use of reported speech both among the quality fiction books and the popular fiction books makes it difficult to say whether the quality fiction books contain a more varied language for reporting speech than the popular fiction books. Nevertheless, we do know thatquality book Narnia uses the smallest number of reporting verb types in the corpus, while popular fitcion books Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew uses the largest. Harry Potter makes use of more reporting verb types than Animorphs and Goosebumps, but fewer than Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. All in all, the hypothesis is incorrect; one of the quality books, Harry Potter, has a more varied language for reporting speech than two of the popular fiction books, but less varied than Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Narnia, on the other hand, has the least varied language of all the books.
In sum it seems that none of the four hypotheses I proposed are true. Based on the number of reporting verb types, expansion types, expressive reporting verb types, frequency of SAY and frequency of reporting verb types that occur only once, the two books with the most varied langauge for reporting speech are Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, followed by Harry Potter, Goosebumps, Animorphs and Narnia.
On a general basis, the analysis has shown that the structure of the reporting clause, usage of different reporting verb types, expansions types and expressive reporting verb types is individual and changes from author to author. On the other hand, the tendency shows that the most important function of the reporting verbs is to determine who is saying what. This can be verified by the fact that half of the reporting verb occurrences in my study are occurrences of the neutral verb SAY. The fact that more than half of the clauses in my study consist of simply a verb and a noun or pronoun supports this assumption. However, in many cases the reporting verb’s function extends to describing the speech situation, for instance the
manner in which an utterance is made, the attitude of the speaker, the circumstances under which the utterance is made or the turn-taking in the dialogue. The choice of reporting verb and the variation between the verb types is up to the individual author.
Parts of this study are based on different categorisations I have made in order to get an overview of the material. For instance I have used Arctaedius' (1982) model for categorising reporting verbs based on their function in their sentence, I have divided expansions into three different groups, based on function, and I have put reporting clauses in different groups depending on their position in the clause. As mentioned in Section 4.2.1, it is possible that the results regarding the position of the reporting clause would be different had my analys been different. It is also likely that an analysis using other verb categories, for instance those of Fónagy (cf Section 3.6.2) could give slightly different results, yet, I do not believe the differences would be particularly sensational.
6.3 ASPECTS OF FURTHER STUDY
In this thesis, I have only focused on one type of reported speech, ie direct speech, but in order to get a full overview of the way reported speech is used in children's books, one would also have to study indirect speech and free direct / indirect speech. Such a study could reveal interesting things such as to what degree the narrator controls children's books, and how boys and girls are portrayed; if female protagonists use typical female speech traits for instance. It would be interesting to study the translations of children’s books, to see what happens with the language when translated into eg Norwegian; whether SAY is still the most prominent reporting verb, and how are the expansions are translated. If I had the time I would also have liked to study the use if direct reported speech in even more children’s books, in order to find out if the tendencies I have discovered can be found in other children’s books, both quality fiction and popular fiction. But in order to do a larger study, it would be helpful, and time-saving, to computerise the books and tag each word so that the books become a tagged corpus.
Children's literature is a young discipline compared to other literary categories, and the interest in the language of children’s books is even more recent. I hope this thesis, although small in scope, has contributed to draw some light on this understudied area.