The Construal Configurations of Speakers’ Subjectivity in Narrative Fictions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1305.15Keywords:
narrative fictions, speaker’s subjectivity, construal configurations, narrative strategies and effectsAbstract
The paper examines different degrees of the subjectivity of speakers who act respectively as a narrator, a character in the story, and the author in narrative fictions. According to the speaker’s four different cases of being on stage, off stage, whether serving as a reference point and cross-world identification, eight types of construal configurations of speaker’s subjectivity have been summarized. Findings show that the speaker is characterized to be maximally subjective when he/she is an author, and minimally subjective when he/she is a character in the story. The degree of speaker’s subjectivity is greater outside the story than that inside it, and it is also greater when he/she is being weakly perceived than that being strongly perceived. Overall, each configuration is a particular narrative strategy adopted by the author to achieve certain effects, and these configurations, to some extent, provide some cognitive interpretations for these achieved narrative effects.
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