The Pragmatics of Revision by Siobhan Chapman

The Pragmatics of Revision by Siobhan Chapman

Author:Siobhan Chapman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030412685
Publisher: Springer International Publishing


Two turns in the conversation represented in Drama are omitted in Muslin, together with an explicit account of Alice’s moral judgement. For Graham Owens, the omission of Alice’s sympathetic comment on the peasants straightforwardly exemplifies the removal of ‘the severe criticisms of the gentry and the Vice-regal court’ that occurred in the process of rewriting (Owens 1966, 194). However, in the rewritten version Alice’s very lack of response to her mother’s question is of course pragmatically significant in its own right. Mrs Barton’s question would normally require an answer; more specifically, the fact that it is a tag question means that the expected answer would be one of agreement. Alice’s failure to answer her mother’s question could be seen as licensing a Q-based implicature that she does not agree with her mother’s evaluation. That is, her drastically underinformative silence implicates that a more informative response, a verbal agreement with her mother’s opinion, is not appropriate or possible. What is made explicit in Drama between daughter and mother, and by extension between narrator and reader, is conveyed by implicature in Muslin. It is of course possible to read Olive’s exclamation in Muslin, unlike in Drama, as an interruption. This might to some extent alter the reader’s understanding of Alice’s reasons for not answering her mother, but probably not the pragmatic interpretation of her non-response.

The return journey from church offers another example of how authorial comment is reduced and reader inference is concomitantly increased. This example does not relate specifically to Alice’s consciousness, but is does add to the general lessening of narratorial authority and the increase in the reader’s responsibility to infer what motivates characters and how they are thinking. As they returned from church, a horseman was seen riding rapidly towards them. It was Captain Hibbert. The movement of his shoulders, as he reined in his mettlesome bay, was picturesque. Never was a batch of ladies more favourably impressed by his beauty. Their glances were enveloping and absorbing; and he was coaxingly and gushingly upbraided for neglect of his religious duties. (Drama, 73)

As they returned from church, a horseman was seen riding rapidly towards them. It was Captain Hibbert. The movement of his shoulders, as he reined in his mettlesome bay, was picturesque, and he was coaxingly and gushingly upbraided for neglect of his religious duties. (Muslin, 72)



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