TOWARDS A PRAGMATICS OF REPRESENTED DISCOURSE, NARRATIVE, SPEECH AND CONTEXT IN WOOLF 'BETWEEN THE ACTS'

Standard descriptions of represented discourse in narrative are viated by a lack of general postulates about the role of context in the design and processing of the discourse representations. 'Context' is sometimes construed intratextually, sometimes intertextually, with the result that researchers have failed to provide any principled account of the relation between, on the one hand, different types of represented discourse in narrative and, on the other hand, different kinds of contextual constraint on the utterances represented. A closer rapprochement between linguistic pragmatics and narratology may help dispel the confusion at issue and so improved our understanding of the forms and functions of represented discourse. Synthesizing Prague School functional linguistics with narratological descriptions of represented discourse, this paper uses Woolf's Between the Acts as a case-study for exploring the pragmatic dimensions of narrative. The argument set forth is that narratives' representations of discourse correspond to modes of encoding or encrypting contexts-of-use into narrative form itself. A detailed examination of the various discursive layers in Woolf's text yields an enriched typology of represented discourse. That typology in turn suggests ways of ordering the different discourse types along a pragmatic continuum, stretching from context-backgrounding to context-foregrounding discourse representations. © 1993.