REPORTING CLAUSES

As described in Section 3.5.1, a reporting clause consists of at least two components: a subject and a verb. The subject is normally a noun or a pronoun, and the verb is usually in the past tense. In addition, the reporting clause can be expanded with an adverb or a prepositional phrase. In this section I will focus on two aspects of the reporting clauses in the corpus: the

positions in which they occur, as presented in 4.2.1, and the use or non-use of inversion, as presented in 4.2.2.

4.2.1 The position of the reporting clause

The reporting clause can occur in three different positions, referred to as initial, medial and final, as explained in 3.5.1. It can also be omitted, provided it is clear from the context who the speaker is. The number of reporting clauses found in the different positions is presented in Appendix L, while Table 4.1 shows the numbers in percentages per book:

Table 4.1: The position of the reporting clause in direct speech

Nancy

Drew Hardy Boys Ani-

morphs

Goose-bumps Narnia Harry Potter

Ave-rage initial position .09 .06 .02 .01 .03 .03 .06

medial position .05 .04 .00 .00 .08 .03 .03

final position .47 .50 .68 .69 .57 .47 .55

reporting clause omitted .39 .40 .30 .30 .32 .47 .36

Around half of the reporting clauses in this corpus are found in final position, while the initial position is the least frequently used. Goosebumps has the highest number of reporting clauses in final position, followed by Animorphs, while Harry Potter and Nancy Drew have the lowest number of reporting clauses in the same position.

The percentage of clauses in initial and medial position is rather low in all books.

Interestingly, Narnia has a lower percentage of reporting clauses in initial than in medial position, while the other five books show the opposite result. Animorphs and Goosebumps have no reporting clauses in medial position at all, and they also have the lowest percentage of reporting clauses in initial position. On the other hand, these two books have the highest

percentage of omitted clauses and clauses in final position, when the two categories are merged into one. It seems that Animorphs, Goosebumps and Harry Potter show the least variation as far as position of reporting clauses goes, while Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Narnia show a more varied picture.

The overall average percentage of omitted reporting clauses is fairly high. A reporting clause is omitted in more than one third of the instances of direct speech. Harry Potter has the highest percentage of omission in the corpus; yet, the percentage of omitted reporting clauses in this book is the same as the percentage of reporting clauses in final position. In the other books, the percentage of final clauses is higher than the percentage of omitted clauses. The fact that the average number of omitted reporting clauses is relatively high (one third of all

reporting clauses is omitted) is probably partly related to the way I have chosen to analyse

them. When a reporting clause is placed between two parts of direct speech, and the clause ends with a full stop, I have analysed it as a reporting clause in final position. Consequently, the part of direct speech which follows this reporting clause will be regarded as direct speech with the reporting clause omitted. In [64] the reporting clause is regarded as being in medial position, since it ends with a comma, in [65] in final position, since it ends with a full stop.

[64] “If you let us go for our dinner now,” said Polly, “we could come back after dinner” (Narnia 1955:19) [65] ‘Hagrid!’ said Harry loudly. ‘There’s an owl -’ (Harry Potter 1997:49)

Admittedly, one could claim that the reporting clause in [65] is in fact placed in medial

position, being enclosed by direct speech utterances, but, for practical purposes, I have decided that any reporting clause which ends with a full stop will be counted as an example of ‘final position’, whether or nor it is followed by direct speech.

4.2.2 Inversion

In present-day English the subject is normally placed before the verb (cf Section 3.5.2).

However, under certain conditions, the verb precedes the subject, and that is what is referred to as subject-verb inversion.

How frequently inversion is used is up to the author of the book. Consequently, the use of inversion is not evenly distributed in the corpus, as reflected in Appendix M, as well as in Figure 4.1 below. The numbers at the end of the bars represent the percentages of inverted reporting clauses in each book:

.86 .88 .08

.07

..00 .00

0 20 40 60 80 100

Harry Potter Narnia Animorphs Goosebumps Hardy Boys Nancy Drew

Figure 4.1: Percentage of reporting clauses with inversion in each book

There are two immediate results to be extracted from Figure 4.1. First, two of the books, Narnia and Harry Potter, have a very high percentage of inverted reporting clauses compared

to the other books. Secondly, Animorphs and Goosebumps, have no reporting clauses with inversion. When looking at the results group wise, it is interesting to notice that the results for one book seem to correspond well with the results for the other book in the pair. In Group 1, both books have less than ten per cent inversion, in Group 2, neither of the two books have inversion, while in Group 3, more than three-fourths of the reporting clauses are inverted. In other words, the books in Group 3 have a more than seventy per cent higher frequency of inversion than the books in the other two groups. It is possible that there is a link between the use of inversion and the use of expansions, and I will return to that subject in Section 4.4.3.