4 - “Oh talking voice that is so sweet”: constructing dialogue in conversation

Summary

Oh talking voice that is so sweet, how hold you alive in captivity, how point you with commas, semi-colons, dashes, pauses and paragraphs?

Stevie Smith, Novel on yellow paper, p. 46

The previous chapter examines synchronic repetition: repeating one's own or another's words within a discourse. It also, however, says a bit about diachronic repetition: repeating words from a discourse distant in time. One way that people frequently talk about a situation in which a speaker repeats another's words at a later time is the situation generally referred to as “reported speech,” generally assumed to come in two forms: “direct” and “indirect” speech, discourse, or quotation. “Direct quotation” is commonly understood to apply when another's utterance is framed as dialogue in the other's voice (“Sam said, ‘I'll come”’). “Indirect quotation” (or “indirect discourse” or “speech”) iscommonly understood to apply when another's speech is paraphrased in the current speaker's voice (“Sam said hewould come”).

In this widely-accepted schema, “direct quotation” and “indirect quotation” are clearly distinguished in the abstract, but in actual discourse many equivocal cases arise. For example, Voloshinov ([1929]1986:131) describes the power of what he calls “texture-analyzing” indirect discourse in the novel which

incorporates into indirect discourse words and locutions that characterize the subjective and stylistic physiognomy of the message viewed as expression. These words and locutions are incorporated in such a way that their specificity, their subjectivity, their typicality are distinctly felt …