The article explores the peculiarities of speech representation in narrative text and proposes Mikhail Bakhtin’s Metalinguistics as a theoretical framework for studying representation of narrative discourse. In modern narratology, the term “speech...
The article explores the peculiarities of speech representation in narrative text and proposes Mikhail Bakhtin’s Metalinguistics as a theoretical framework for studying representation of narrative discourse. In modern narratology, the term “speech representation” considers the means by which a narrator conveys a character’s speech. This term is used to describe relationship between two different utterances; that is, the narrator’s text and the character’s text. We can use it to help us adequately understand the interaction of two different speeches in narrative text. This kind of speech interaction is also a topic of concern for M. M. Bakhtin. He drew attention to dialogical relationship between utterances in literature and clearly defined language in novel as a medium of literature and, at the same time, an object of art description. Moreover, Bakhtin proposed metalinguistics as a new methodology of language that study utterance as a units of speech communication, discourse genre, and the relation between text and context. His metalinguistic approach plays an important role in the study of speech interference in narrative text.