Toward a Poetic Theory of Narration: Essays of S.-Y. Kuroda 9783110334869, 9783110318388

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese
Chapter 2 On grammar and narration
Chapter 3 Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory, from a linguistic point of view
Chapter 4 Some thoughts on the foundations of the theory of language use
Chapter 5 The reformulated theory of speech acts: Toward a theory of language use
Chapter 6 A study of the so-called topic wa in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrence, and Faulkner (of course, in Japanese translation)
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Sylvie Patron (Ed.) Toward a Poetic Theory of Narration

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs

Editor Volker Gast Editorial Board Walter Bisang Hans Henrich Hock Natalia Levshina Heiko Narrog Matthias Schlesewsky Amir Zeldes Niina Ning Zhang Editor responsible for this volume Volker Gast

Volume 269

Toward a Poetic Theory of Narration

Essays of S.-Y. Kuroda

Edited by Sylvie Patron

ISBN 978-3-11-031838-8 e-ISBN 978-3-11-033486-9 ISSN 1861-4302 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: PTP-Berlin Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface As I write this, it is five years to the day since the death of my husband, SigeYuki Kuroda. Known in print as S.-Y. Kuroda, but universally among English – and French – speaking colleagues as Yuki, over a period of more than four decades he had an impact on virtually all areas of linguistics: phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, mathematical linguistics, historical linguistics, poetics, and narrative theory. Much of his work centered around his native Japanese, which he used to illustrate broader issues. That said, the very last thing he was working on, only two days before he died, was a way of looking at the issue of voicing assimilation in Russian. That too, however, stemmed from his earlier work on the phenomenon of rendaku in Japanese, in which he argued against the presumed source and derivation of voicing in certain kinds of compounds in Japanese. He had also recently been working on issues in the translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Japanese; he was dissatisfied with existing translations due both to word choices and primarily to the metrical choices made by the translators, and had started translating about ten on his own. At the UCSD tribute event in Kuroda’s honor a few weeks after his death, one of his former students, Samuel Epstein, remarked that much like the case of the parable of the blind men and the elephant, scholars in one sub-area of linguistics assumed that because of his prolific output in that particular domain, Kuroda was focused entirely on that area, and they would then be surprised to find out that the same Kuroda who had done such masterful work on, say, Japanese syntax had also done major research about formal pragmatics. That is in fact the case with the works gathered into this volume. Kuroda’s work on narrative theory constituted only a small part of his scholarly output and occupied only a few years of his long career, yet it has had a profound influence on many language and literature specialists. Outside of linguistics proper, at least if the English version of Wikipedia is to be believed, Kuroda is known largely for his worth in comparing the equivalence of various kinds of automata with various kinds of grammar. That too was consuming some of his attention near the end of his life. His influence in the field of mathematical linguistics has been recognized by the establishment in 2014 of the Kuroda award in mathematical linguistics by the Association of Computational Linguistics. While others have dedicated special issues of journals to his memory, this is the only enduring tribute to his influence. The main thrust of Kuroda’s work was in the domain of syntax and syntactic theory. Even before entering graduate school in linguistics, he had published a book in Japanese on Chomsky’s ideas. His 1965 dissertation places him in the position of being the father of modern Japanese generative linguistics, containing

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the germs of much of his future work as well as others who have followed him; indeed, almost every paper in Japanese linguistics still refers to it. Kuroda’s linguistics work used aspects of Japanese grammar to illuminate general issues in linguistics; indeed, much of his work has forced linguists to address issues that they might have previously swept under the rug. For example, point of view can help to determine which kinds of predicates in a sentence are grammatical and which are not, not only in Japanese but also in other languages like English. For example, while in English it is perfectly possible to say “I am hungry”, it is difficult if not impossible to say “you are hungry”; rather, the more natural way to say it is something like “you look hungry” or “you seem hungry”. In English a sentence like “you are hungry” is all right under some conditions, but the equivalent sentence in Japanese is totally ungrammatical. In my own early work on American Sign Language (ASL), I referred to Kuroda’s work in order to explicate one aspect of what is now called role shift, namely the use of what looks like direct quotation but is in fact closer to style indirect libre. Below are just a few examples of other ideas of his that have maintained their relevance for linguistic theory over many years: Multiple subjects: In series of papers including “Whether we/you agree or not”, Kuroda took advantage of an aspect of sentence structure that goes back to work by Chomsky in the late 1970s, namely the appearance of multiple specifiers (possible subjects) in syntactic structures. Exploiting that possibility, Kuroda proposed that sentences have subjects within verb phrases and that those subjects move up to the more usual subject position under certain circumstances. Such an analysis is now routine in linguistics, but Kuroda was the first to discuss it. Characterizing different kinds of subjects: Related to the discussion above is Kuroda’s resurrection of a very useful distinction first discussed by the German philosophers Marty and Brentano in the 19th century, namely the notion of categorical vs. thetic judgments. A categorical judgment is a statement that is about something or someone, namely the subject of the sentence, whereas a thetic judgment is a statement about a state of affairs that does not involve predication. This is another example of how Kuroda’s theories were informed by his work on Japanese: the subject of a categorical judgment is marked in Japanese by a different particle from the particle that marks the subject of a thetic judgment. Other linguists have noted the parallels between the categorical/thetic distinction and the distinction between stage- and individual-level predicates, and others have suggested that the subjects of categorical and thetic judgments occupy distinct positions in syntactic structures. Phonology: Kuroda’s work on Japanese phonology led him to propose a theory that could account not only for aspects of Japanese phonology but also Korean and, in his final incomplete work, Russian. Ironically, the lore (Morris

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Halle, personal communication) is that when he arrived as a graduate student at MIT in 1962, all he wanted to work on was syntax; in an effort to force him to pay attention to phonology, he was assigned to do a long paper in that area; he took an existing grammar of a Native American language and recast it in terms of thencurrent theory. The resulting work was published by MIT Press in the mid-1960s and is still read today. Boundary areas: Much of Kuroda’s work was concerned with the interface between syntax and semantics, or structure and meaning, and by extension the philosophy of language. One of his favorite sayings was “syntax without semantics is like a doughnut without a hole”, which was the source of the title of his first collection of papers, The (W)hole of the Doughnut, translated into French by Nicolas Ruwet as Aux quatre coins de la linguistique. In a way, the work on narrative theory collected in this volume could be seen as an extension of Kuroda’s fascination with the relation between structure and meaning. I am very glad that Sylvie Patron has engaged to gather the scattered papers from different times and sources into one place, and hope that this volume will enhance Kuroda’s influence in the fields of language and literature. Susan Fischer

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Susan Fischer, without whom this book would not have been possible. Deep thanks also to Ann Banfield, Marc Dominicy, Joe Emonds, JeanMarie Fournier, Jacqueline Guéron, Anne-Marie Le Fée, Rui Linhares-Dias, Christian Puech, Cécile Sakai, Didier Samain, Anne Zribi-Hertz, for their help, their support, their rereading or their collaboration on different points. Thank you to Susan Nicholls who has translated the introduction. Thank you to Françoise Lavocat, responsible for the HERMES program (History and theories of interpretations), financed by the Agence nationale pour la recherche (ANR), that provides financial support. I am grateful to the University of Paris Diderot, as well as to the Centre d’études et de recherches interdisciplinaires de l’UFR Lettres, arts, cinéma (CERILAC) and to the branch “Littérature au présent”, both of which also support this publication.

Table of contents Preface | v Acknowledgements | ix Introduction | 1 Chapter 1 Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese | 38 Chapter 2 On grammar and narration | 60 Chapter 3 Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory, from a linguistic point of view | 71 Chapter 4 Some thoughts on the foundations of the theory of language use | 102 Chapter 5 The reformulated theory of speech acts: Toward a theory of language use | 119 Chapter 6 A study of the so-called topic wa in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrence, and Faulkner (of course, in Japanese translation) | 133 Bibliography | 151 Index | 160

Introduction My interest in this area also has its origin in problems in Japanese syntax, but the problems dealt with in these articles are of a general character.¹ Last, Kuroda’s works on narrative theory […] seem to me to be fundamental for the light they throw on the links between language and communication. Chomsky had already queried the idea that language was defined by the communicative function in a few programmatic remarks. But Kuroda was the one who provided decisive evidence, based on strict linguistic and philosophic arguments, that language cannot be reduced to its communicative function; in particular, a “communicational” theory of narrative is incapable of accounting for all varieties of text.² For observing that a poem, a novel or a play is made of “words” is not enough to justify, on that account alone, accumulating in relation to such objects all the fragments of knowledge that they illustrate. To do so would be to drift toward an encyclopaedic enumeration of detail which would never amount to theorization – a little like Plato’s account of Hippias’ sophistry.³

The six essays contained in this volume are all concerned, either centrally or in a more marginal way, with the problem of fictional narration considered in a linguistic light. The texts question the linguistic foundations of particular existing theories of narration, as well as the place that a more descriptively adequate theory of fictional narration might occupy within a general theory of language use. Most of the essays were written and published in the 1970s (apart from the sixth, which was published in 1987, although the introductory paragraph specifies that it was written nearly ten years earlier). They should, of course, be read and resituated in the context of their time and their particular intellectual circumstances. Yet I shall consider that I have reached my goal in preparing this edition if I can show that despite their (relative) age, Kuroda’s texts are still of immediate theoretical import. It might I daresay be argued that this edition gives a distorted picture of the works of S.-Y. Kuroda. It is true that it ignores, or seems to ignore, an essential dimension of his research: its interdisciplinarity.⁴ Kuroda’s bibliography includes texts on phonology, syntax (Kuroda was the first linguist to apply the methods of transformational-generative grammar to the study of Japanese), semantics, 1 Kuroda 1979a: VIII. On Kuroda 1973a and 1976a (see Ch. 1 and 3 of the present volume). For complete references of the texts and articles cited, see the bibliography, pp. 151–159. 2 Ruwet 1979: 11 (trans. mine, S. N.). On Kuroda [1973a] 1979c and [1974a] 1979c (see, in this volume, Ch. 1 and 2). 3 Dominicy 1991: 152 (trans. mine, S. N.). 4 See Kuroda 1979a and 1979c. See also Georgopoulos and Ishihara (eds.) 1991.

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pragmatics, mathematical linguistics, the philosophy of language, history and the epistemology of linguistics.⁵ The essays collected in this volume represent only a small portion of his publications (although not an insignificant portion: for example, Kuroda was also the first formal linguist to turn his attention to the representation of point of view in fictional narrative). It seems to me, however, that from another angle, interdisciplinarity is contained within the essays themselves: Japanese grammar in “Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese”; semantics in the same essay, “On grammar and narration” and “Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory, from a linguistic point of view”; pragmatics in “Some thoughts on the foundations of the theory of language use” and “The reformulated theory of speech acts: Toward a theory of language use”, and the philosophy of language in “A study of the so-called topic wa in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrence, and Faulkner (of course, in Japanese translation)”. It could even be said that the essays, in the manner of a synecdoche, summarize and synthesize the nature and strength of Kuroda’s complete works. They include ideas and principles that Kuroda had in common with his community of university and research colleagues: autonomy and the primacy of syntax, recourse to speakers’ judgments, the opposition between linguistic competence and performance, mentalism; they also contain a certain number of characteristics that contributed powerfully to his originality: the primacy of Japanese (Kuroda always used Japanese as a basis for his critique of generalizations based on English; Japanese often helped him clarify fundamental aspects of language which are not necessarily expressed in other languages), his constant interest in semantics and the philosophical inflection of linguistics, drawn notably from European philosophy of language. The stylistic and thematic unity of the essays should also be noted, over and above their differences which I shall discuss later. Throughout the first five, the set of problems dealing with the relations between language and communication can be seen as a common thread. The last essay (in the chronological order of publication) picks up on some of the themes and characteristics of the first, although it does not lead to the same sort of generalization (it stays within the framework of Japanese linguistics and the syntactic and semantic analysis of wa). The essays complete each other and draw on each other; when need be, they return to earlier suggestions to modify, complicate or resituate them in a different theoretical context. Note that the second essay, “On grammar and narration”, is reworked and developed in the third, “Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory”. However, Kuroda treats them as two distinct articles and I felt it advis5 See the bibliography published on the University of California in San Diego website (UCSD): Web. n.d., http://ling.ucsd.edu/kuroda/bibliography.html.

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able to present both to the reader. As far as style, in the broad sense of the term, is concerned, one main characteristic of the essays is Kuroda’s concern with theorization. Kuroda never falls into the trap of the “encyclopaedic enumeration of detail” mentioned in the epigraph by Marc Dominicy, which is so frequent in linguistic and stylistic studies today. He can often be seen ruling out considerations or secondary objections which might have clouded the issue. He shows himself to be constantly concerned with the clarity of his demonstration, following and making readers follow its line of argument, emphasizing the main points and decisive arguments. Kuroda also has favourite words and expressions: “essential”, “essentially”, “relevant”, “be that as it may”. He is fond of employing terms used in mathematics: “the illocutionary effect remains invariant under substitution of hearers”.⁶ That does not stop him demonstrating distance and humour or taking the liberty of making jokes (“linguistic performance is histoire!”⁷) and irreverent remarks, or ones which might be so judged on adopting a diametrically opposed stance with no critical distance (“There is nothing sacred about Searle’s words”⁸). The reader will have understood that this edition is also intended to be an homage to S.-Y. Kuroda, who died on the 25th of February 2009. It grew out of the encounters and discussions which took place at the one-day conference, “Aux quatre coins de la linguistique: journée d’hommage à Yuki Kuroda” [To the four corners of linguistics: a day of homage to Yuki Kuroda]⁹ and has been prepared in collaboration with his widow, Susan Fischer (to whom I am indebted, notably, for the discovery of “A study of the so-called topic wa in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrence, and Faulkner”).

1 The intellectual background to Kuroda’s essays As mentioned above, Kuroda’s essays cannot be properly understood without situating them in the context of their time and their particular intellectual cir-

6 Ch. 5, p. 127. 7 Ch. 3, p. 70. 8 Ch. 5, p. 123. 9 Organized by Jacqueline Guéron and Anne Zribi-Hertz for the “Langues et grammaire” [Languages and Grammar] team of the “Structures formelles du langage” [Formal Structures of Language] Mixed Research Unit (CNRS/University of Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis), Centre Pouchet, 10 September 2009 (with the participation of Ann Banfield, Joseph Emonds, Susan Fischer, Jacqueline Guéron, Christian Leclère, Takuya Nakamura, Sylvie Patron, Mireille Piot, Jean-Roger Vergnaud and Anne Zribi-Hertz).

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cumstances. This perspective will lead me to address the follow points in turn. First, I shall briefly introduce the moment in the history of generative linguistics known as “generative semantics”, which coincides with the period of drafting and publishing the essays (of drafting alone in the case of the sixth, which in any case deals only distantly with these issues). Having presented Kuroda’s position in relation to the theoretical and certain empirical propositions of generative semantics, in the second section I shall recall the terms of the polemic between John R. Searle and Noam Chomsky concerning the essential function of language, which is the starting point for the fourth and fifth essays. Last, I shall mention the early days of (French, “structuralist” in the sense of generalized, not linguistic, structuralism) narratology which Kuroda identified as a communicational theory of narration and opposed to his own view of fictional narrative.

1.1 Generative semantics came into being within the theoretical framework of transformational-generative grammar, many aspects of which it has integrated. It contrasts with the “classical” theory of generative grammar through the position granted to semantics in the model: it aims to integrate semantics into grammar, whereas Chomsky founded the theory of generative grammar on the independence of the concepts of grammar (syntax and phonology) relative to semantics. It also aims to distance itself from the attempt to include a semantic interpretation component in the so-called “Katz-Postal-Chomsky”¹⁰ theory (in general the term “classic” or “standard” theory refers to this second stage). Stemming from a small group of linguists, including Georges Lakoff, James D. McCawley and John R. Ross, generative semantics gave rise to a number of either “active” or “reactive” publications from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. The term “generative semantics” itself seems to have been invented by Georges Lakoff,¹¹ but its use spread from 1970–1971 and the first debate on generative semantics, at the same time as the term “interpretive semantics”.¹² To summarize, Jerrold J. Katz referred thus to two competing semantic theories: one based on syntax (interpretive semantics), the other on semantics (generative semantics). In the first, which he defended, the syntactic component generates structures which function as input both to the semantic component (to produce semantic representations) as well as the transformational component, then to the phonological component (to produce 10 See Katz and Postal 1964; Chomsky 1965. 11 See Lakoff 1976 (written in 1963 and published in 1976). 12 See Katz 1970; McCawley 1971.

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phonetic representations). In the second theory, again according to Katz, the semantic component takes the place of the base component to generate semantic representations functioning as input to the transformational component, then to the phonological component. Nevertheless, this presentation of the difference between the two theories as a simple matter of directionality, in other words of the order of intervention of the different components, masks deeper theoretical differences, notably concerning how the semantic component and the semantic representations are viewed. It was roundly criticized by McCawley, Lakoff and even Chomsky.¹³ Without claiming to be exhaustive in relation to the theoretical or concrete propositions of generative semantics nor to the bibliographic references cited, in essence generative semantics is characterized by the elimination of a number of concepts and distinctions, in particular that between syntax and semantics, represented in the standard theory of generative grammar by the existence of distinct syntactic and semantic components (an important stage in giving up the distinction was McCawley’s challenge of the syntactic treatment of the selection constraints of lexical items put forward by Chomsky in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax: for McCawley, such phenomena are semantic rather than syntactic: they are aspects of more general semantic phenomena of presupposition¹⁴). The concept of deep (syntactic) structure and the distinction between transformations and the rules of semantic interpretation were also abandoned. The general idea is that in generative semantics, deep structures and semantic representations coincide. The single level thus formed constitutes something generative semanticians call an “underlying structure”, which contains detailed semantic information, and its conversion into a surface structure involves only one sort of rule: syntactic transformation. Generative semantics also contain a strong proposition regarding the form of representations: syntactic and semantic representations are objects of the same formal nature, the common representational apparatus being formed using tree diagrams. However, in the place of traditional syntax categories (V, N, Adj, etc.) at the nodes of the tree, there are categories corresponding to symbolic logic (S for propositional function, V for predicate, NP for the different arguments of the function). Kuroda’s position in the theoretical and empirical debates on generative semantics (leaving the non-scientific aspects of the debates to one side for the moment) was, as ever, original. In 1969, before the first controversy therefore, Kuroda defended Chomsky’s views in an article published in response to McCawley, “Remarks on selectional restrictions and presuppositions”. Looking back 13 See McCawley 1971; Lakoff 1971; Chomsky [1969] 1972. 14 See Chomsky 1965; McCawley 1968.

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at his article today, its conclusions seem quite nuanced. They show in any case real attention to the propositions put forward by his adversary. Kuroda states his agreement with McCawley “when he says that selectional restrictions are actually semantic if by this is simply meant that a variety of operations that would be involved in semantic presupposition are automatically involved in description of selectional restrictions”. But he distances himself from McCawley “when he adds ‘rather than syntactic’, and by doing so means that the syntactic component is independent of matters related to selectional restrictions”.¹⁵ Another far more fundamental point of contention concerns the possibility of accounting for presuppositions and semantic representations more generally using a formal structure like the one used for syntactic representations (which Kuroda elsewhere terms the “syntacticization” of semantic representations and associates with a lack of discrimination between the forms of primary data in the case of syntax and semantics¹⁶). The originality of Kuroda’s position appears even more clearly in “Anton Marty and the transformational theory of grammar”, where Kuroda appears in a way to be more Chomskyan than Chomsky himself. The first part of this long article, or essay,¹⁷ successively presents Chomsky’s earlier positions on the relation between semantic representation and deep structure (standard theory), Charles J. Fillmore’s¹⁸ “case grammar”, generative semantics, Chomsky’s position at the time (“extended standard theory”)¹⁹ and innovated theories of transformational-generative grammar.²⁰ It alludes to the possibility that case grammar and generative semantics might simply be “notational variants” of standard theory – a recurrent theme in the debates on generative semantics. But this was not the main topic of the essay, nor the way in which it “touch[ed] on the current issues in transformational linguistics”.²¹ Rather, through a reinterpretation of Anton Marty’s grammatical theory in the conceptual framework of transformationalgenerative grammar, the essay offers an innovation of the standard theory in a direction not represented in the development of Chomsky’s extended standard theory. According to Kuroda, Marty’s theory can be compared to a “non-standard” transformational theory, where the relation between semantic representation and deep structure is very different from the standard theory. In addition 15 Kuroda 1969: 162. 16 See Kuroda [1974b] 1979a: 252. 17 Published in French translation and in an abridged version in 1971, then in English in 1972, and reprinted in Kuroda 1979a. 18 See Fillmore 1968. 19 See Chomsky [1969] 1972; 1972. 20 See Dougherty 1969; Jackendoff 1969; Emonds 1970; Culicover and Jackendoff 1971. 21 Kuroda [1971, 1972a] 1979a: 80.

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to the generation of sentences according to standard theory, reconceptualized in terms of the generation of nucleus sentences, the theory introduces semantic operations which generate semantic representations from the semantic representations of the nucleus sentences and, recursively, from those generated by the semantic operations themselves. Kuroda suggested calling this theory “modified prestandard theory”, since it was similar to yet not exactly the same as the theory held by Chomsky before he formulated his standard theory. Like the standard theory, the modified prestandard theory contained the concepts of deep structure, semantic representation, surface structure and phonetic representation. But unlike the standard theory, it recognized that the meaning of a sentence may not be identical to the meaning of its deep structure. Finally, modified prestandard theory is clearly distinguished from extended standard theory, if only because the latter postulates that meaning is determined by both deep and surface structures. Kuroda also insists on the fact that the nature of the semantic operations brought into play in the second mode of generation of meaning defies any attempt at the syntacticization of their representation. As far as the interweaving of scientific and sociological or psychological aspects is concerned, in the era of generative semantics, it cannot be put better than it was by Kuroda himself in a footnote to “Geach and Katz on presupposition”: To entertain a formal theory of grammar in which the semantic representations are not recognized as authentic formal entities in the theory and according to which semantics is viewed as an organized set of statements ultimately based on syntactic formal representations of sentences (or lexical items) should by no means be taken as recommending one to ignore semantic investigations nor discouraging them. If such an implication is read into it, it is not a problem of a linguistic theory but of psychology or sociology of linguists.

Kuroda adds that “[i]t should also be clear that to hold such a theory does not mean to discountenance any use of formal means or formal representations in semantic studies”.²² The few indications above should enable us to gain a fuller understanding of certain characteristics of Kuroda’s essays regarding the domain of semantics. They include: maintaining a clear distinction between syntax and semantics (“The spurious status of the omniscient narrator can also be demonstrated by a semantic consideration”, “I shall, however, raise semantic, rather than syntactic, objections to the direct discourse analysis”, etc.²³); semantic descriptions conforming to the “interpretive” understanding of semantics associated with 22 Kuroda [1974b] 1979a: 255, n. 22. 23 Ch. 1, p. 55; Ch. 2, p. 65.

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the standard theory (“organized set of statements ultimately based on syntactic formal representations of sentences (or lexical items)”); constant concern with semantic issues (the theme of presuppositions which are or are not attached to the use of such and such a sentence or lexical item, for example, is recurrent); using formal means or formal representations in semantic studies (this is the case in the fourth and fifth essays with the development of a form of illocutionary logic, which predates and differs from the one put forward by John R. Searle and Daniel Vanderveken²⁴). The last point to be addressed in this section is the performative hypothesis, one of the leading hypotheses of generative semantics.²⁵ It is present, either by way of allusion or directly, as a hypothesis requiring testing against the data in question, in four of the six essays in this volume. Keeping in mind that in generative semantics, the semantic components of sentences need to be represented in their underlying structures, then sentences where the illocutionary force is not apparent in the surface structure must be considered to be embedded in a sentence or performative “preface” containing a performative verb, a first-person subject pronoun and a second-person indirect-object pronoun (I Vp you S). The performative preface, deleted by transformation, is responsible for the illocutionary force of the statement. Ross and his followers justify this analysis using a number of syntactic and semantic arguments, the most convincing of which is the presence of adverbs modifying a verb, like “frankly” or “honestly”, in sentences where the surface structure contains no performative verb. In “The reformulated theory of speech acts: Toward a theory of language use”, Kuroda mentions the performative hypothesis in terms close to those he used above: “Proposals have been made as to how the underlying structures of sentences represent correctly various illocutionary forces of surface sentences”.²⁶ He sees it as a syntacticization of speech acts theory comparable to that of semantic representations and open to the same criticisms. By contrast, in “On grammar and narration” and “Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory”, which focus specifically on the problem of fictional narration, Kuroda presents the performative hypothesis or analysis quite differently, emphasizing its “communicational” nature: “Recently a theory of linguistic competence has been proposed which, so to speak, incorporates a communicational theory of linguistic performance. This is the performative analysis proposed by Ross (1970) and others”.²⁷ The main point to note here is not that the

24 See Searle and Vanderveken 1985. 25 See Ross 1970 (written in 1968 and published in 1970); Sadock 1969; Lakoff 1972: 559–569; Sadock 1974: 21–50. 26 Ch. 5, p. 120. 27 Ch. 3, p. 60.

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performative hypothesis introduces a representation of the illocutionary force of the surface sentence into its underlying structure, but rather that it introduces a representation of the speaker and addressee of the communication. This presentation makes it possible to establish structural homologies between: (1) the communicational theory of linguistic performance; (2) the theory of linguistic competence which incorporates a communicational theory of linguistic performance (the performative analysis); (3) the communicational theory of narration (considered as part of the communicational theory of linguistic performance); (4) the linguistic bases of the communicational theory of narration (which can be assimilated into a non-formal variant of performative analysis or are likely to be represented formally by the performative analysis). Kuroda goes on to show the various sorts of difficulties confronting performative analysis (strictly, performative analysis combined with the direct discourse analysis of personal and reflective pronouns proposed by Susumu Kuno²⁸) in the case of sentences in “point-ofview narrative”. By the end of the demonstration, it can be said that for Kuroda, such sentences or some of them at least, notably Japanese sentences containing a psychological adjective with a third-person subject, or those which in some way infringe the conditions of use of the reflexive pronoun zibun, constitute particular cases for observation which falsify performative analysis (and Kuno’s direct discourse analysis, which Kuroda had already refuted in an article just previous to the essay²⁹).

1.2 En 1972, John R. Searle published a long, half-scholarly, half-polemical article in the New York Review of Books entitled “Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics”. The main criticism levelled at Chomskyan linguistics related to its under-estimation of the role of communication. “Most sympathetic commentators”, wrote Searle, “have been so dazzled by the results in syntax that they have not noted how much of the theory runs counter to quite ordinary, plausible, and common-sense assumptions about language”. He continued, explaining that: The commonsense picture of human language runs something like this. The purpose of language is communication in much the same sense that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood. In both cases it is possible to study the structure independently of function but pointless and perverse to do so, since structure and function so obviously interact. We communicate primarily with other people, but also with ourselves, as when we talk or think in words 28 See Kuno 1972. 29 See Kuroda 1973c.

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to ourselves. Human languages are among several systems of human communication (some others are gestures, symbol systems, and representational art) but language has immeasurably greater communicative power than the others.³⁰

Searle introduces the understanding that Chomsky opposes to this view of common sense in the following terms: Chomsky’s picture, on the other hand, seems to be something like this: except for having such general purposes as the expression of human thoughts, language doesn’t have any essential purpose, or if it does there is no interesting connection between its purpose and its structure. The syntactical structures of human languages are the products of innate features of the human mind, and they have no significant connection with communication, though, of course, people do use them for, among other purposes, communication. The essential thing about languages, their defining trait, is their structure. The so-called “bee language”, for example, is not a language at all because it doesn’t have the right structure, and the fact that bees apparently use it to communicate is irrelevant.³¹

Searle also reproaches Chomsky and his colleagues for only having achieved insignificant results in the domain of semantics (on several occasions he notes his interest for, even his solidarity with the endeavours of generative semanticians) and for opposing incorporating the study of speech acts into grammar in the name of an erroneous understanding of the distinction between linguistic competence and performance. (Chomsky “seems to think that a theory of speech acts must be a theory of performance rather than of competence, because he fails to see that competence is ultimately the competence to perform, and that for this reason a study of the linguistic aspects of the ability to perform speech acts is a study of linguistic competence”³²). Chomsky replied to Searle in “The object of inquiry”, the second Whidden lecture which was reprinted in Reflections on Language, and later, indirectly, in “Empiricism and rationalism” in Language and Responsibility: Based on Conversations with Mitsou Ronat (where he does not mention Searle’s name but repeats his analogy between the workings of language and the heart).³³ In the first text, Chomsky replies to Searle’s criticisms one by one. He begins by making it clear that he has always rejected some of the positions that Searle attributes to him: “Thus, I have never suggested that ‘there is no interesting connection’ between the structure of language and ‘its purpose’, including communicative function.

30 Searle [1972] 1974: 16. 31 Searle [1972] 1974: 16–17. 32 Searle [1972] 1974: 31. 33 See Chomsky 1975: 36–77; [1977] 1977: 85–88. The second text is not cited by Kuroda.

The intellectual background to Kuroda’s essays   

   11

[…] Furthermore I do not hold that ‘the essential thing about languages […] is their structure’. I have frequently described what I have called ‘the creative use of language’ as an essential feature, no less than the distinctive structural properties of language”.³⁴ Chomsky then distinguishes between the two most obvious points of disagreement: the essential connection posited by Searle between language and communication and the essential connection also posited between meaning and speech acts (or the possibility of accounting for meaning using speech acts theory). Chomsky states he is ready to “agree with Searle that there is an interesting connection between language and communication in his broader sense”, that is, if one includes communication with oneself or thinking in words, which he views at the same time as an unfortunate move, “since the notion ‘communication’ is now deprived of its essential and interesting character”.³⁵ By contrast, he states that he remains sceptical when Searle claims there is an essential link between meaning and speech acts. In his view, speech acts theory, which analyses meaning in terms of the speaker’s intentions with regard to the hearer, is deficient in a number of ways; in particular, it does not account for the many cases when language is not used to communicate (in the narrow sense) and when the speaker’s intentions with regard to the hearer may shed no light at all on the meaning of what he says. The polemic between Searle and Chomsky provides the starting point for the fourth and fifth essays in this volume, “Some thoughts on the foundations of the theory of language use” (1979) and “The reformulated theory of speech acts” (1980). They contain several explicit or hidden quotes from Searle and Chomsky, examples taken from Searle (like the language of bees) or Searle and Chomsky (like communication with oneself or thinking in words), and the whole vocabulary common to both authors: “purpose”, “use”, “function”, the opposition between “structure” and “use”, or between “structure” and “function”. The terminological discussion which opens the fourth essay can be interpreted as containing an implicit critique of the imprecise use, by both Searle and Chomsky, of the idea of the essential function of language. In reaction, Kuroda suggests clearly distinguishing between the functions assigned to language from the outside, so to speak, or established by observation of the activity of users (the function of language in a military context, for a comedian, for an intelligence officer, etc.) and the functions relating to an internal study of language established on the basis of properly linguistic observations. In the first sense, the term “function” is interchangeable with “purpose” or “use”; in the second, it is not: it is understood as a technical term. 34 Chomsky 1975: 56. 35 Chomsky 1975: 57.

12   

   Introduction

If the sense of the term “function of language” is specified in this way, the phrase “essential function” could be, or would in fact have to be, understood without appeal to value judgments concerning human faculties or institutions other than language. In fact, I will later propose that we use the phrase “essential function” in such a way that a function of language is said to be more essential than another if the latter presupposes the former, that is, if the former is a necessary component of the latter. Thus, we agree to understand “essential” simply in terms of logical precedence, on the basis of an analysis of the functions of language.³⁶

Therefore, the issue of knowing whether the essential function (purpose, use) of language is communication, which forms one of the points of disagreement between Searle and Chomsky, seems to be moved aside by a more intellectually engaging issue, in Kuroda’s view, which is that of the relation between the communicative function and the other (internal) functions that can and indeed must be assigned to language seen, as it is by Searle, from the angle of speech acts. In the fifth essay, Kuroda takes an unambiguous stand at first in favour of generative grammar (and more particularly the standard theory), against the functionalist reductionism of speech acts theory. But he quickly levels criticism, directly this time, at Searle as well as Chomsky: We cannot be sure how Searle’s claim that thinking in words can be justified as communication in the conceptual framework of the theory of speech acts, nor can we be sure how Chomsky can agree with Searle that there is an essential connection between language and communication once we take “communication” in Searle’s broad sense, at the same time thinking that this broadening of the sense deprives the notion of its essential and interesting character. What character of thinking justifies thinking to be conceived under the notion of communication? What essential and interesting character is deprived of the notion of communication if we so broaden the notion as to include thinking in it?³⁷

The rest of the chapter contains a reformulation of speech acts theory, dealing specifically with the definition of illocutionary effect and thereby of the illocutionary act (Kuroda bases his argument on the terms of another theoretical discussion: the polemic Searle began with H. Paul Grice at the start of Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language³⁸), along with other innovative proposals with regard to the idea of communication, the distinction between speech acts that are acts of communication and those that are not and the position granted to the act of thinking verbally within the model. The conclusion returns to the insufficiency or non-radicality of Chomsky’s position:

36 Ch. 4, p. 103. 37 Ch. 5, p. 121. 38 See Searle 1969: 42–50. See also Ch. 4, p. 105; Ch. 5, p. 122.

The intellectual background to Kuroda’s essays   

   13

Thus, contra Chomsky, I cannot “agree with Searle that there is an essential connection between language and communication” even if “we take ‘communication’ in [the] broader sense” (including thinking as communication with oneself). We must stress that language is not communication in a more radical sense than Chomsky’s.³⁹

1.3 French narratology is implied without being mentioned directly in the second and third essays in this volume, “On grammar and narration” (1974) and “Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory” (published in French translation in a volume commemorating Émile Benveniste, in 1975). Quotes from Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov, a presentation of Gérard Genette’s revision of the opposition between histoire and discours put forward by Benveniste: it is clear that Kuroda’s main reference, the basis upon which the debate on our understanding of fictional narration can be built with clarity, is the celebrated 8th issue of the journal Communications, entitled “Recherches sémiologiques. L’analyse structurale du récit” [Semiological research: Structural analysis of narrative], published in 1966 (another theoretical reference can be added which is present in the third essay only: Todorov’s Littérature et signification [Literature and Meaning], published in 1967).⁴⁰ Probably because he was not aware of it, Kuroda does not mention “Discours du récit. Essai de méthode” [Narrative discourse: An essay in method] de Genette, published in Figures III in 1972 and considered today as the founding work of narratology as the study of temps (“time”), mode (“mood”) and voix (“voice”) in narrative. This influences the vocabulary used in the essays. Kuroda is clearly unaware of the terminological clarification introduced by Genette (although the seeds are already present in the articles by Barthes and Todorov mentioned above) between récit, histoire and narration (“narrative”, “story” and “narrating” or “narration”).⁴¹ He frequently uses “narrative” and “story” interchangeably, speaking for example of “first-person stories”, which we would be 39 Ch. 5, p. 131. 40 He probably heard of the texts from Ann Banfield (source: Ann Banfield, “Aux quatre coins de la linguistique: journée d’hommage à Yuki Kuroda”, 10 September 2009). Another possible intermediary for publications of (Anglo-Saxon) narrative theory is Kristin Hanson, currently a Professor at the University of California in Berkeley specializing in the theory of verse, who is a friend of one of Kuroda’s former students (source: Ann Banfield, personal communication, 9 May 2011). 41 “I propose, without insisting on the obvious reasons for my choice of terms, to use the word story for the signified or narrative content […], to use the word narrative for the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text itself, and to use the word narrating for the producing narrative

14   

   Introduction

more likely today to term “narratives”. By contrast, he uses “narration” more systematically to refer to the linguistic performance involved in producing a narrative, with an opposition between “narration” and “narrative” close to Genette’s opposition between “narration” and “récit”, even if their understanding of narration is very different. Furthermore, it is interesting to notice that Kuroda uses the term “narration” for the first time (including in the title) in 1974; it does not appear in “Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet”, written in 1971⁴² and published in 1973  – except in the German, Erzählen (or more precisely, fiktionalen Erzählens), in the long passage from Hamburger cited in the Addendum.⁴³ Kuroda went on to state that he was not in a position to offer a critical evaluation of Hamburger’s text (Die Logik der Dichtung, 1957, 2nd ed. 1968), which suggests he had only just become aware of it.⁴⁴ By contrast, the subsequent essays rely on a closer reading of Hamburger’s text. It can be noted in passing that the latter was not translated into French until 1986 (with the title Logique des genres littéraires) and that the texts by Barthes, Todorov and Genette mentioned above display complete or near complete (in the case of “Discours du récit”) ignorance of the theoretical propositions it contains. Kuroda is familiar neither with the terminology peculiar to narratology, nor with the models for classification proposed by “Discours du récit”: the opposition between mood (involving phenomena of interest to Kuroda under the name of “point of view”) and voice (narration or the narrator); the classification of narrators (as homodiegetic, heterodiegetic, intra- and extradiegetic) and of points of view, renamed “focalizations” (internal, external, zero). Kuroda’s essays are situated within an earlier stage of the field than these models, when there was no opposition between issues relating to the narrator or to point of view, but rather a problem, which was described as “complex”, of narrator and point of view.⁴⁵ Nor was there any opposition, for example, between omniscience (Genette’s zero focalization) and point of view (internal focalization): as soon as the framework is one of a communicational theory of narration, according to which each sentence of a narrative is a message communicated by the narrator, then the expression of point of view by one or several characters logically implies the omniscience of the narrator. action and, by extension, the whole of the real or fictional situation in which that action takes place” (Genette [1972] 1980: 27). 42 Source: Ann Banfield, personal communication, 9 May 2011. See also Kuno 1972: 194 (References). 43 See Ch. 1, p. 58. 44 Possibly via Ann Banfield (source: Ann Banfield, personal communication, 9 May 2011). It should be noted however that Kuroda read and cites Hamburger’s text in German, while Banfield only refers to the American translation, published in 1973. 45 See Ch. 1, p. 48, n. 21.

The intellectual background to Kuroda’s essays   

   15

As far as the narrator is concerned, Kuroda provides an adequate description of narratology as “a theory of narration based on the notion of narrator” or as a “narrator theory of narration”, or again, in both a more general and a more linguistic description, as a “communicational theory of narrative” or “of narration”.⁴⁶ It needs to be stressed that, at the time Kuroda was writing, narratology had no conception of itself as such: it was not aware, for example, that other theories of the narrator and fictional narration existed (as we have seen in the case of Hamburger); nor was it aware of alternatives to its understanding, which was a spontaneous understanding (or one vaguely borne out by a reading of several linguists: Roman Jakobson, Benveniste selectively) of linguistic performance as communication. Kuroda emphasizes this state of affairs; quoting Barthes: […] le récit, comme objet, est l’enjeu d’une communication: il y a un donateur du récit, il y a un destinataire du récit. On le sait, dans la communication linguistique, je et tu sont absolument présupposés l’un par l’autre; de la même façon, il ne peut y avoir de récit sans narrateur et sans auditeur (ou lecteur).⁴⁷

he comments that: This quotation represents an example of the most explicit, and frank, statements which recognize that a theory of narration having recourse to the notion of narrator must have its theoretical basis in the communicational theory of linguistic performance. Such recognition may not necessarily be made explicitly. However, so long as no alternative to the communicational theory of linguistic performance is proposed, it seems unavoidable to interpret the notion of narrator current in narrative theory within the communicational framework as Barthes does.⁴⁸

It can also be considered that the classification of narrators as homodiegetic and heterodiegetic (i.e. present or absent as characters in the story they tell) constitutes a notational variant of the theory according to which first and third-person fictional narratives do not differ with regard to narration, considered as communication. This theory is summarized by Kuroda in “Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet”, in the following terms: “The narrator is the ‘speaker’ with 46 Ch. 2, pp. 61, 68; Ch. 3, pp. 71, 73 and n. 9, 74–76, n. 13, 77, 78, 81, 87, 89–91; Ch. 5, p. 112; Ch. 6, p. 142. 47 Barthes [1966] 1981: 24. “[…] the narrative, viewed as object, is the basis of a communication: there is a giver of narrative and a recipient of narrative. In linguistic communication, I and you are presupposed by each other; similarly, a narrative cannot take place without a narrator and a listener (or reader).” (Barthes [1966] 1975: 260). 48 Ch. 3, p. 73.

16   

   Introduction

respect to such a non-first-person story, just as ‘I’ is the ‘speaker’ of a first-person story. As a result, non-first-person stories are viewed in the same light as firstperson stories”.⁴⁹ All his effort in this essay and the following two consists precisely in proposing a non-reductionist theory of third-person fictional narration: a theory which refuses to consider that third-person fictional narratives can be reduced to the model of first-person fictional narrative by means of a few auxiliary hypotheses (Kuroda is so far from reductionism that he avoids using the expression “third-person stories”, even though it was well accepted at the time he was writing and appeared in that form or others equivalent to it in the volumes and articles he quotes⁵⁰). Finally, it should be noted that Kuroda does not have the prejudices of narratology and French, “structuralist” theory more generally regarding the author. In his view, the “writer” (the term used in the first essay) or the “author” (used in the subsequent essays), defined as the physical producer of the narrative, must obviously be taken into account in the linguistic description and stylistic study of fictional narratives. At the same time, Kuroda’s essays could be cited as an example of the fact that narrative theories which focus on the task carried out by the author do not necessarily succumb to the biographical illusion or psychology (speculations on authorial intention). This can be seen quite clearly, for example, in “Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory”, when Kuroda wonders about the pertinent meaning of the phrase “a fictitious reality is created by narration”. The important point, in his view, is not who creates it, but where and how the fictitious reality of the story is created: “[…] the author’s wilful act does not have direct significance with respect to the meaning of ‘create’. What (and not the one who) creates the fictitious reality in the reader’s mind is the words and sentences that the reader reads, i.e. the story itself, not the author”.⁵¹ Later, he also discounts “the question, which is a psychological one, as to how the image of the imaginary event has come into existence in the author’s consciousness”.⁵² There are other examples of his theoretical attitude in “A study of the so-called topic wa in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrence, and Faulkner”.⁵³ In Kuroda’s essays, we are in a sense dealing with innovation in narrative theory (considered as “proto-narratological”, in other words appropriated by Genette and his followers) in a direction not represented in the development of narratology.

49 Ch. 1, p. 46. 50 See Booth 1961; Cohn 1966. 51 Ch. 3, p. 92. 52 Ch. 3, p. 97. 53 See Ch. 6, pp. 139, 143, 144, 149.

His interest in this area (I): Problems in Japanese syntax   

   17

2 His interest in this area (I): Problems in Japanese syntax 2.1 The first essay in this volume, “Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese”, investigates the problem of psychological predicates in Japanese. Kuroda explains that certain words referring to sensations or feelings are presented in pairs: one of the pair is morphologically an adjective while the other is a verb (for example atui/atugatte iru, “hot”; kanasii/kanasigaru, “sad”; sabisii/sabisigaru, “lonely”). The use of either one in the pair is restricted by the grammatical person of the subject of the sentence. Thus, the adjectival form atui is found in declarative sentences such as Watasi wa atui (“I am hot”), which has a first-person subject. The verbal form atugatte iru is found in sentences such as Anata wa atugatte iru (“You are hot”) or John wa atugatte iru (“John is hot”), which have a second and third-person subject respectively.⁵⁴ Atui cannot be used in sentences with a second or third-person subject (*Anata wa atui, *John wa atui) except when the sentences are not independent or when the ending no da is included in the sentence. According to Kuroda, morphological differentiation between atui and atugatte iru, kanasii and kanasigaru, or sabisii and sabisigaru corresponds exactly to the epistemological dichotomy established by Bertrand Russell between “I am hot” (the fact indicated is a state of myself, and the very state that I express: the problem of truth or falsehood does not arise) and “you are hot” or “John is hot” (I am expressing my state and, at the same time, indicating yours or John’s, an “indication” which might be either true or false). In the second part of his analysis, Kuroda notes that the restriction on the person of the subject of the adjective can be lifted not only when sentences are embedded in other sentences or end in no da, but also in the case of sentences of a certain style which he terms “nonreportive” style, in contrast to “reportive” style. This style forms a particular discursive context where the adjectival form atui can be used with a third-person subject: John wa atui (“John is hot”) or John wa atukatta (“John was hot”). It should be understood that John wa atugatte iru and John wa atui/atukatta do not have the same semantic effect, even though

54 Certain native speakers challenge if not the grammaticality, at least the spoken acceptability of Anata wa atugatte iru. In their view, at least a final interrogative tag would be needed to indicate a request for confirmation (equivalent to “aren’t you?”). On the other hand, the pronoun anata is rarely used in everyday Japanese (source: Cécile Sakai, personal communication, 3 April 2012).

18   

   Introduction

the translation is the same in the two cases. In the second case, the heat felt by John is not a “reported” fact or, in Russell’s terms, one “indicated” by a speaker. Rather, it should be considered as “represented” in an idiosyncratic manner (a possible paraphrase would be: “John is experiencing/experienced directly the fact that he is/was cold”). Kuroda goes on to draw an analogy between the opposition between reportive and nonreportive styles and the opposition between fictional narratives in the first and the third person – or, more precisely, between first-person fictional narratives as well as those which “are not in the first person” but could be brought back to the first-person model by including the hypothesis of an effaced narrator, and “non-first-person” fictional narratives, concerning which there is a debate involving theoretical stakes which deal precisely with the validity of the hypothesis of the effaced narrator. Kuroda asserts that the second opposition apparently belongs to the universal theory of literary art. It should be noted however that his definition of first-person narrative, which “has only one point of view” (“It is a description of a series of events inside or reflected in one subject of consciousness  – real, if autobiographical, or imaginary, otherwise”) and especially of third-person fictional narrative, which “may involve more than one point of view” (“It may shift from one subject of consciousness to another, representing what is inside or reflected in a different consciousness”),⁵⁵ – these definitions are very much linked to the context of post-Jamesian literary criticism and theory which, in the United States at least, forms the traditional starting point for any study of the concept of point of view. Kuroda then presents the debate on third-person narratives with “point of view” or “multiple points of view”, reconsidered in terms of nonreportive narratives. On one side, a theory which he presents as current or familiar, which brings an omniscient narrator, who is effaced from the surface of the narrative, into play (“The omniscient narrator is an imaginary omnipresent subject of consciousness who is assumed to be able to enter each character’s mind. The whole story is then assumed to be told by this narrator as a series of events perceived by him. The narrator is the ‘speaker’ with respect to such a non-first-person story, just as ‘I’ is the ‘speaker’ of a first-person story. As a result, non-first-person stories are viewed in the same light as first-person stories”⁵⁶). On the other side, his own, de-familiarizing theory, in which nonreportive narrative is understood as “a structured collection of information from various subjects of consciousness”. Kuroda adds that “[t]he role of the writer of non-first-person story is to assemble (in fact, create) such information and set it in order. This is in no way identifiable with the role of the ‘speaker’ in the paradigm of linguistic performance, as is the ‘I’ in the 55 Ch. 1, p. 46 and n. 15, 17. 56 Ch. 1, p. 46.

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case of a first-person story or the omniscient narrator in the case of a non-firstperson story”.⁵⁷ In the third part of his analysis, Kuroda notes that sentences like John wa atukatta, which would be agrammatical in nonreportive style, but are grammatical in reportive style, become agrammatical if the conversational particle yo is added at the end of the sentence: *John wa atukatta yo (according to Kuroda, yo can be translated by “I am telling you”). By contrast, the following sentence, in which the adjective is replaced by the corresponding verbal form, is perfectly grammatical: John wa atugatta yo. Kuroda also shows that there are links between contexts in which the restriction on the subject person is removed and contexts in which one of the conditions commanding the coreference of the reflexive pronoun zibun is also removed. Kuroda gives a fabricated example, of which I shall cite the first sentence only: Johni wa Bill ga zibuni o utta toki Mary no soba ni tatte ita, “John was standing by Mary when Bill hit him” (in the Japanese sentence, the identity of the subscripts shows their co-reference). It needs to be understood that the sentence would be agrammatical as a sentence in reportive style, yet is grammatical in nonreportive style: the case is therefore exactly comparable to that of psychological adjectives with a third-person subject.⁵⁸ “In the English version”, writes Kuroda, “this sentence may be taken as representing either the narrator’s or John’s point of view; other interpretations are also possible. […] But the reader of Japanese version would immediately adopt John’s point of view […]. In particular, he would understand that when John was hit he must have been conscious of the fact – spontaneously if not reflectively – that he was standing by Mary”.⁵⁹ Kuroda goes onto consider rewriting the sentence in reportive style (“from the narrator’s point of view, as a witness to the incident”⁶⁰): its syntax would need modifying either by effacing zibun or replacing it by kare (a non-reflexive thirdperson pronoun); the modification would lead to the disappearance of any implication that John was conscious, reflectively or not, of standing by Mary.

57 Ch. 1, p. 46. “Omniscient narrator” is understood to mean “the omniscient narrator according to the theory of the same name”. 58 See Kuno 1972: 180 and n. 17: “[…] Kuroda observes that (90) [sentence presenting the same characteristics as the sentence quoted above] is ungrammatical as a sentence in the reportive style, but grammatical as one in the nonreportive style”; “More specifically, Kuroda notes that Condition II(b) given in footnote 16 [‘When the subject of the constituent sentence is coreferential with the matrix sentence subject, (a) it is reflexivized if it is dominated by the node Verb Phrase of the matrix sentence, and (b) pronominalized otherwise’] can be violated, in favor of reflexivization, in the nonreportive style”. 59 Ch. 1, p. 52. 60 Ch. 1, p. 52.

20   

   Introduction

In sum, Kuroda’s treatment of the problem of predicates in Japanese and of the co-reference of zibun enables him to show: 1. the homogeneity of sentences used in the context of typical linguistic performance, described in terms of speaker and addressee, and sentences in reportive narratives (first-person fictional narratives as well as those which can be viewed as representing the point of view of an effaced, but non-omniscient narrator); 2. the absolute heterogeneity, by contrast, between sentences used in the context of typical linguistic performance and sentences, or certain sentences of nonreportive fictional narratives (those which directly represent the point of view, feelings or interior states of one or more characters referred to in the third person. These results speak in favour of multi-consciousness theory rather than the theory of an effaced omniscient narrator. The conclusion of another article by Kuroda, published in 1973 in reply to Kuno, can be cited here: As I understand it, the most salient and intriguing feature of the nonreportive style is that sentences in this style can defy interpretation as assertions by some “speaker” or “narrator”, however abstract or however supernatural he might be assumed. The stylistic problem of point of view interests me, not so much because of apparent omniscience that might seem to be necessitated for an account of narrative structure, as it might have intrigued or worried some modern writers and critics, but because of the potentiality of language use which enables us to transcend the canonical communicative setting of language use and the readiness and intricacy with which grammar realizes that potentiality.⁶¹

2.2 The two problems in Japanese syntax presented above are revisited in “On grammar and narration” and “Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory”, where they are added to Hamburger’s “symptoms of fictionality” with at least equal, if not more probative value. According to Kuroda: Let us note that Hamburger points to positive indices that separate fiktionales Erzählen from Aussage in contrast to the negative indications Benveniste employs to oppose histoire to discours. That is, she indicates certain linguistic features that can be found in sentences of narration but not in discourse. These features make it impossible to interpret sentences in narration as assertions by the narrator, i.e. representations of judgments by the narrator,

61 Kuroda 1973c: 146.

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unless one not only accedes to the theoretical existence of the omniscient narrator, but also assumes that the omniscient narrator talks by means of a peculiar syntax of his own.⁶²

Amongst Hamburger’s symptoms, Kuroda distinguishes between: (1) those which lead to a rejection of the narrator theory of narrative for epistemological, metaphysical or ontological reasons, but do not provide linguistic arguments against the idea of an omniscient narrator (verbs of inner processes in the third person, erlebte Rede [free indirect discourse] with a tag of the type “he thought”); (2) those which also provide linguistic arguments against the idea of an omniscient narrator, which can only be refuted by supposing that the omniscient narrator uses personal syntax (a combination of the preterit with present and future deictic adverbs, or free indirect discourse without tags). Kuroda adds the information taken from Japanese syntax to this second series of symptoms: [...] there are certain types of words of mental process that can constitute evidence against the omniscient narrator, or the communicational theory of narration. I refer, for example, to certain Japanese predicate words of inner feelings that I have mentioned in previous work (Kuroda 1973). For a certain semantic unit of inner feeling (e.g. sad), a pair comprised of an adjective and a verb (e.g. kanasii and kanasigaru) exists; the adjectival form with a third person subject may be used only in narration. In the communicational theory of narration, one would be led to conclude that the omniscient narrator uses a special grammar of his own.⁶³

The problem of zibun receives more detailed treatment. The fabricated example from the first essay (Johni wa Bill ga zibuni o utta toki Mary no soba ni tatte ita, “John was standing by Mary when Bill hit him”) is revisited and completed by an attested example: “Sono sora ga zibun no neteiru engawa no, kyuukutuna sunpoo ni kuraberu to, hizyoo ni koodai de aru” (“Viewed from the tiny veranda, it [the sky] seemed extremely vast”), from Mon [The Gate] by Natsume Sôseki. In the analyses which follow, the accent shifts, relative to the first essay, from the issue of the pertinence of the communicational model for accounting for such sentences, to the possibility reflected by such sentences to linguistically represent states of which the subject of consciousness is not reflectively aware. “What concerns us, however, writes Kuroda, is whether the sentence with zibun in question must be taken as representing exactly the content of a reflective act of Sosuke’s consciousness so that the sentence could be semantically analysed by means of direct discourse as follows: Sosuke thought, or was conscious: ‘the

62 Ch. 3, p. 80. On the translation of “Aussage”, see Ch. 2, p. 67, n. 20. 63 Ch. 3, p. 81.

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   Introduction

sky is extremely vast compared with the veranda where I am lying’”.⁶⁴ Naturally, his inquiry arrives at the issue of the pertinence of the communicational model through challenging the pertinence of direct discourse analysis in accounting for such sentences. But a new concept is introduced in narrative theory, that of levels of consciousness (reflective and unreflective consciousness). He comes back to it in his study of the use of the particle wa in certain sentences in Japanese translations of novels by Tolstoi and Faulkner, in the sixth essay.⁶⁵ In the rest of his “Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory”, Kuroda explicitly presents sentences using zibun as “sentences in narration which have a linguistic characteristic that makes them non-assertions” and suggests analysis within the framework of a poetic theory of narration: Take, for example, the Japanese sentence with zibun. Reading this sentence we obtain an image or knowledge of an event, but we do not assume the existence of any consciousness which has judged the occurrence of this event and communicated it to someone. Simply the sentence creates in us the image or knowledge of the event. This and this much is the function of the sentence vis-à-vis the reader.⁶⁶

The image or knowledge can be expressed in the form of a sentence, for example: “The sky was extremely vast, compared with the veranda where he was lying, and Sôsuke was aware of that, either reflectively or non-reflectively,” although this sentence clearly differs from the original which created the image or knowledge of the event in our minds. The same type of analysis can be found in the case of the wa-sentences analysed in the sixth essay.⁶⁷

3 His interest in this area (II): General problems As Kuroda writes in his preface to The (W)hole of the Doughnut: Syntax and its Boundaries, the problems studied in the first three essays are of a general character. The two following essays, which were written and/or published at the same time as The (W)hole of the Doughnut, generalize Kuroda’s work on fictional narrative, taking it to the next level, so to speak.

64 Ch. 3, p. 86. 65 See Ch. 6, pp. 142, 149. See also Banfield 1981; 1982: 183–223. 66 Ch. 3, pp. 96–97. 67 See Ch. 6, pp. 143, 144.

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3.1 The first essay explicitly links (starting with the title) a problem of epistemology, in the sense of the theory of knowledge (the distinction between subjective knowledge, which is close to Russell’s “direct knowledge” or “knowledge by acquaintance”, and objective knowledge), a problem of grammar (the problem of psychological predicates in Japanese) and a problem of style, or literary art, or literary theory (problem of style: the distinction between reportive and nonreportive styles; problem of literary art: the problem of the omniscient narrator, or the empirical adequation of the theory of the omniscient narrator). The end of the essay contains a prediction which is confirmed by a number of later works: I started this article with a problem in epistemology and ended with a problem in literary art. Both of those problems have been found to be directly reflected in Japanese grammar. They both represent such fundamental features in the basic aspects of human mental life relating to language, that is, knowledge and literary art, that one might expect that they cannot fail to imprint their shadow on the grammar of any language. The distinction between the reportive and nonreportive style might also be found to exist in English grammar, perhaps in a more concealed way.⁶⁸

The second and third essays exploit all the consequences of the grammatical distinction between reportive and nonreportive styles and the facts of homogeneity and heterogeneity explained above. They insist on the fact that communicational theories’ only mode of defence against critiques is excuse (“the omniscient narrator uses syntax differently from us mortals”, “talks by means of a peculiar syntax of his own”, “uses a special grammar of his own”, etc.⁶⁹). They add a fundamental

68 Ch. 1, p. 56. In the introduction to her (1982) book, Banfield quotes this excerpt and offers the following commentary: “This distinction between the reportive and non-reportive styles does exist in the grammar of English, as well as the other European languages; but, as Kuroda suspected, it reveals itself elsewhere than in a morphological distinction between sensation adjectives and verbs. It manifests itself rather in the grammar of reported speech. The English (and French and German) counterpart of Kuroda’s ‘non-reportive’ style in Japanese is a literary style known to modern grammarians under the French term style indirect libre and the German erlebte Rede. Since there is no well-established English term […] I will call it ‘represented speech and thought’ […]. / When Kuroda originally identified the ‘non-reportive style’, represented speech and thought and the literature on it were unknown to him. This makes more striking his prediction that the distinction between a reportive and a non-reportive style which he observed in Japanese might exist in the grammar of other languages” (Banfield 1982: 12). See also Banfield 2012: 29. 69 Ch. 2, p. 62; Ch. 3, pp. 80, 81.

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element, which is the attempt to unify antitheses between sentences used within a communicational framework and those used outside that framework. In “On grammar and narration”, Kuroda develops a line of argument starting with performative analysis considered as a theory of linguistic competence which incorporates a communicational theory of linguistic performance, shows the difficulties confronting this analysis in the case of sentences of point-of-view narrative, then calls upon Benveniste’s work on tense relations in French verbs (or, more exactly, on the “planes of utterance” identified through observation of a redundancy in the French tense system⁷⁰) and Hamburger’s on fictional narration in the guise of critiques of the communicational theory of narration. Having noted the absence of synthesis, in Hamburger’s work, between the categories of fiktionales Erzählen and Aussage, Kuroda endeavours to show that what he calls the “objective function” of language, which he defines as the function of triggering a meaning-realizing act, is the basis on which Hamburger’s and Benveniste’s antitheses can attain their conceptual synthesis. According to Kuroda, it is possible and even usual, in ordinary communication for example, for the objective function of a sentence to be accompanied by the communicative function. But there is no logical necessity for it always to function in this way. On the empirical level, “[t]he existence of stories that are not interpretable in the communication framework (or not as discours in Benveniste’s terms and not as Aussage in Hamburger’s terms) is the evidence that the objective function of the sentence is essentially independent of its communicative function”.⁷¹ “Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory” revisits this line of argument, but introduces new developments, dealing for example with Hamburger’s symptoms of fictionality, with fictional narratives that can be studied within the framework of the communicational theory of narration, with the actualization of the objective function of language and potentially of the communicative function in ordinary communication, in narration with a narrator and in narration without a narrator and, finally, with the role of the author in narration with and without narrator. The vocabulary of evidence and demonstration is even more significant than in “On grammar and narration”: “It is only a matter of presenting straightforward evidence that language can be used without any real or imagined communication setting. Non-narrator narration is such evidence”; “As a consequence even the logical possibility that the objective function of the sentence is essentially independent of its communicative function might not be entertained, until evidence that it is the case is brought forth before us”; “Nor is the evidence 70 Kuroda was not in fact very interested in the French tense system in itself. See Ch. 2, p. 66; Ch. 3, pp. 78–79 and n. 19. 71 Ch. 2, p. 69.

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by any means deeply hidden”; “If linguistic performance is not communication, linguistic competence or grammar cannot be bound up with the communicative function of language, either. This is the lesson for grammatical theory that we learn from the study of narrative theory”.⁷² At the close of this major essay, Kuroda introduces the term “poetic theory of narration” to designate a narrative theory based on his innovated conception of linguistic performance. He employs it again in the fourth and fifth essays.⁷³ It should be noted that the poetic theory of narration is opposed to the communicational theory of narration in that the latter claims to account for all narrative within a communicational framework. But the poetic theory also contains a communicational theory of narration, which enables it to account for narratives which are explicitly situated in a communicational framework (in this sense, it is improperly called a “non-communicational theory of narration”, a term that Kuroda himself does not use⁷⁴).

3.2 “Some thoughts on the foundations of the theory of language use” revisits the question of the functions of language within the conceptual framework of speech acts theory. From now on, Kuroda identifies not two but three functions of language: the communicative function, reconceptualized as a function designating the addressee (in exact terms, the intended hearer) of an illocutionary act; the objectifying function designating the objectification of the speaker’s thoughts; and the objective function, already identified in the second and third essays as the fundamental linguistic function, and presented here as the “most essential” of the three functions. The objective function is presupposed by, in other words contained as a necessary component within, the objectifying function, which is presupposed in turn by the communicative function. While continuing to use a study of narrative theory, notably the opposition between communicational theory and poetic theory of narration, as a basis, Kuroda brings an element of correction or conceptual clarification to the characterization of the communicational theory of narration as “communicational”: In the perspective of the present article, however, the crucial characteristic of this “communicational theory of narration” (the term used in my earlier papers) can, or must, be located in its tie with the objectifying function, rather than with the communicative function of 72 Ch. 3, pp. 95–96. 73 See Ch. 4, p. 112; Ch. 5, pp. 131, 132. 74 See by contrast Banfield 1982: 10, where the common use of this term by critics seems to have originated.

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language. Remaining essentially within this conceptual framework, one does not have to assume that a narrative is necessarily addressed to an intended hearer, in the sense specified earlier. The core of the theory is the assumed existence of a narrating agent. A narrative is assumed to be a product of the objectifying act of the narrator. Opinions concerning the role of the audience or the reader can vary. This view may still be called communicational, a narrative being assumed to be the product of an act of communication, in a broad sense, directed toward hearers in general, either intended or bystanders.⁷⁵

He also replaces point-of-view narratives (understood here from the literary-historical perspective of modern fiction) within the whole range of manifestations of the use of language uniquely in its objective function. Other examples are provided by legislative texts and the “magical” use of language in traditional societies. “The reformulated theory of speech acts: Toward a theory of language use” also refers to the demonstration offered in the preceding essays that pointof-view narratives (narratives written in “the nonreportive style, a prose style quite common in modern fiction”⁷⁶) cannot be accounted for within the framework of the communicational theory of linguistic performance. Kuroda considers resituating the demonstration within the conceptual framework of speech acts theory, to show in particular speech acts theory also fails to account for pointof-view narratives. However, this second demonstration remains implicit. The sets of problems and general issues dealt with by the essay focus on speech acts theory and its basic concepts, notably those of illocutionary acts and effects in their relationship with the concept of communication. Kuroda established that all illocutionary acts are not acts of communication in the strict sense. For example, the illocutionary act of stating, as distinct from informing, is not an act of communication in the strict sense, because it does not imply an intended hearer – to be precise, it does not imply the belief that an intended hearer believes that the speaker believes that the proposition corresponding to the statement holds. Thus, even if there can be a hearer, in the physical sense of the term, the hearer is not the intended hearer of the illocutionary act (the latter being the only pertinent equivalent of the idea of the addressee according to speech acts theory). In the conclusion, Kuroda revisits the issue of narratives, asserting that “[n]arratives cannot necessarily be interpreted as speech acts, or series of speech acts, by some speaker, or narrator, real or imagined. Put another way, narratives may not necessarily be communication, either in the narrow or the broad sense specified above.”⁷⁷ The end of the essay reiterates the synthetic nature of the poetic theory 75 Ch. 4, p. 112. 76 Ch. 5, p. 121. 77 Ch. 5, p. 131.

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of narration (containing a communicational theory of narration) and suggests the opportunity for a new synthesis between the reformulated theory of speech acts and the poetic theory of narration.

4 The importance of Kuroda’s essays in the context of current research The project behind this edition lies within the history of linguistics as it is understood by the so-called “French school”, which is closely linked to epistemology, more than to pure historiography.⁷⁸ It also belongs to a discipline or field of research which does not yet exist in literary disciplines as a whole: the epistemology of literary theory. In this case, it is a matter of writing “recent” history, targeting the recent past of linguistics and literary theory compared to the more surely “completed” past generally targeted by historians.⁷⁹ The two disciplines under consideration share a condition in common, which is that recent theories often fall victim to being overlooked in the same way as very old theories, an oversight which is not necessarily linked to their falsification or inclusion within a more general theory (in Kuroda’s case, to my knowledge, there has been no attempt at empirical falsification worthy of the name; nor can it be said that the poetic theory of narration has been included and replaced by a more general theory). Added to this, in the case of recent theories, are phenomena relating to voluntary ignorance or to “valorization” in the Bachelardian sense of the term – the attribution of values to certain theories or hypotheses on the basis of non-scientific interests. I share with historians of linguistics the idea that a past, overlooked or even voluntarily ignored state of the discipline of linguistics or of literary theory can rediscover lost pertinence within a current context. I shall address three aspects of the current context in order, beginning with the theory today termed by consensus “postclassical narratology” in the United States and Europe, notably Germany, England and Scandinavia. I shall then mention the specifically French debate concerning the relations between linguistics and literature, and the conception of literature in discourse analysis and more broadly in discursive linguistics. I shall close with the reinterpretation of the 1970s that reading (or, for some, rereading) Kuroda’s essays implies, which should lead to a more nuanced and more complex vision of the relations between linguistics and literature during this period.

78 See Colombat, Fournier, and Puech 2010, notably p. 32. 79 See Puech 2008; Colombat, Fournier, and Puech 2010: 25–31, 230–233.

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4.1 Current debates lend great importance to the distinction between “classical” and “postclassical” narratology (the terminology was not put forward by historians, but by the agents of the second movement themselves).⁸⁰ According to David Herman, “[p]ostclassical narratology (which should not be conflated with poststructuralists theories of narrative) contains classical narratology as one of its ‘moments’ but is marked by a profusion of new methodologies and research hypotheses; the result is a host of new perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative itself”.⁸¹ Herman lists several such research methodologies: feminist, Bakhtinian, deconstructive, reader-response, psychoanalytic, historicist, rhetorical, film-theoretical, computational, discourse-analytic, psycholinguistic⁸² – and the list could be extended: pragmatic, in the sense of speech acts theory, semantico-logical in the sense of possible worlds theory, cognitivist, culturalist, ethnicist, postcolonial, etc.. Ansgar Nünning, for his part, opposes “structuralist (‘classical’) narratology” and “new (‘postclassical’) narratologies” point by point: the former is text-centred, the latter context-oriented; the former deals with the narrative langue (an extrapolation of the Saussurian concept of langue to the narrative domain), the latter narrative parole (narratives of all varieties); the former puts the accents on theory, formalist description and taxonomy of narrative techniques, the latter on application, thematic readings, and ideologicallycharged evaluations, etc.⁸³ It should be pointed out that the narratives dealt with by postclassical narratology or narratologies are not restricted to fictional or nonfictional literary narratives, but include filmic, graphic, pictorial and musical narratives as well as non-artistic, conversational, journalistic, historical, scientific, legal and medical narratives among others. In the introduction to the latest collected volume of postclassical narratology, Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik claim that the project has now entered a second stage which they define as one of consolidation and pursuit of diversification (see the titles given to the two parts of their introduction: “Postclassical narratology: phase one. Multiplicities, interdisciplinarities, transmedialities”; “Phase two: consolidation and continued diversification. Essays in this volume”⁸⁴).

80 See Herman 1997, 1999; Nünning and Nünning 2002; Nünning 2003; Fludernik 2005; Herman and Vervaeck 2005; Prince 2008; Meister 2009; Pier and Berthelot 2010; Alber and Fludernik 2010. Gerald Prince can be seen as an agent in both the first and the second movements. 81 Herman 1999: 2–3. 82 See Herman 1999: 1. 83 See Nünning 2003: 243–244. 84 Alber and Fludernik 2010: 5, 15.

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However it seems to me that the retention of the term “narratology” is at least as important as the distinction between classical and postclassical. Postclassical narratology, in common with classical narratology, is a communicational theory of narrative, in Kuroda’s terms (it would in fact be better to say that it is made up, in great part, of communicational theories of narration, which is to say theories of narration based on the communicational theory of linguistic performance, or of language in general, with no distinction between linguistic competence and performance⁸⁵). Kuroda’s analysis of the crucial characteristic of the communicational theory of narration as more closely linked to the objectifying function than the communicative function of language could also be employed: in postclassical narratology, as in classical narratology, the core of the theory is the assumed existence of a narrating agent; opinions concerning the role and the status of his addressee, or “narratee”, can vary.⁸⁶ The categorization of narrators as “homodiegetic” or “heterodiegetic” is still widely used and more or less consciously renews the idea that first- and third-person fictional narratives are indistinguishable from the perspective of narration, considered as communication. Numerous references to an omniscient narrator can still be found. On this point in particular, it seems to me that a consecutive reading of Kuroda’s essays should at least incite discomfort and inquiry – inquiry into the place of such an entity within a theory (or a sum of theoretical contributions) which, although it is clearly subject to centrifugal forces, still aims to put forward a rational, if not scientific, approach to narrative. “The omniscient narrator is an imaginary omnipresent subject of consciousness who is assumed to be able to enter each character’s mind”.⁸⁷ “This blunt admission of the omniscience of the narrator might be distasteful. But leaving the narrator in the dark and marveling at his subtlety and elusiveness in secret would not fare better”.⁸⁸ “Obviously such blunt admission of an omniscient narrator would be distasteful. But leaving the narrator in the dark and marvelling at his subtlety and elusiveness in secret is not better. Either we have to accept the epistemological or metaphysical opaqueness of the

85 Even theorists like Richard Walsh, who formulates strong criticisms of the narrator theory of fictional narration (including the opposition between “homodiegetic” and “heterodiegetic”, and the omniscient narrator), does not critique the communicational theory of linguistic performance backing it up. “My own objections to the narrator”, writes Walsh, “are based upon representational rather than linguistic criteria; hence, I shall be arguing that certain ‘narrators’ are outside representation, not that certain narratives function outside communication” (Walsh 1997: 496, n. 1, reprint. in Walsh 2007: 174, n. 1). See also Fludernik 2010: 123–130; Alber 2010: 169, n. 14. 86 See Herman, Jahn, and Ryan (eds.) 2005: 338 (article “Narratee”). 87 Ch. 1, p. 46. 88 Ch. 2, p. 62.

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narrator theory of narration, or else we have to examine and question the basic assumptions of linguistic thought underlying this theory of narration”.⁸⁹ “It is not surprising that the modern critical mind cannot get along very well with such a mystifying notion as the omniscient narrator”.⁹⁰ “The omniscient narrator has been haunting literary critics for decades. But perhaps to dispel this ghost convincingly once and for all might not appear trivial, until it is recognized that it is not logically necessary to connect linguistic performance and communication”.⁹¹ “I argued against setting up such an enigmatic creature as an omniscient narrator in my earlier papers”.⁹² It seems to me, too, that Kuroda’s syntactic and semantic arguments are apt to convince rational minds. Finally, there is a fact which cannot seriously be contested: Kuroda proposes and thereby exemplifies the possibility of proposing an alternative, “non-omniscient-narrator” theory of the phenomena for which the idea of the omniscient narrator was and still is supposed to account. One of the fields of research currently developing most is the theory of “unnatural narratives”, labelled by metonymy “unnatural narratology”.⁹³ The definition of non-natural narratives varies quite noticeably from one proponent of non-natural narratology to the next; as to what is “natural”, in regard to literary narratives, its definition is not unproblematic – however I shall not develop these points here.⁹⁴ I would simply like to note that the new attention paid to “nonnatural” elements, including in fictional narratives which at first sight seem most distant from narratives considered as non-natural (the “potential unnaturalness of conventional, realistic and mimetic ways of telling”, according to Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze⁹⁵), while very fertile in some respects, is accompanied by an intellectual naivety which no longer seems promising for the current context. I shall cite two examples. In a manifesto article entitled “Unnatural narratives, unnatural narratology: beyond mimetic models”, Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen and Brian Richardson identify three aspects of unnaturalness in fictional narratives: “unnatural storyworlds”, “unnatural minds” and

89 Ch. 3, p. 77. 90 Ch. 3, p. 78. 91 Ch. 3, p. 96. 92 Ch. 4, p. 143. 93 See for example Web. 3 Apr. 2013, http://projects.au.dk/narrativeresearchlab/unnatural. The page contains links to the Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology and a number of conference papers and online publications, as well as an extensive bibliography. See also Alber and Heinze (eds.) 2011; Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson (eds.) 2013. 94 See Alber and Heinze 2011: 1–5; Hansen 2011: 162–168. 95 Alber and Heinze 2011: 3, n. 7.

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“unnatural acts of narration”.⁹⁶ Among the latter, they mention “unnatural acts of narration in fictional third-person narratives, including reflector-mode narratives or narrative ‘omniscience’”.⁹⁷ Of course it is only a matter of a passing remark, but it is significant, for it amounts to confusing, under the category of non-naturalness, a fictional act of narration (for example, by an animal or by a character before birth or after death), which is comparable to that of any other fictional act without a parallel in the real world, and the purely theoretical act of narration, postulated by the theory, of the omniscient narrator. Similarly, in “The diachronic development of unnaturalness: a new view on genre”, Alber writes: “Modernist novels typically provide access to the thoughts and feelings of reflector-characters (like Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Blum, and Clarissa Dalloway)”. He compares this possibility with what we are able to do in the real world, citing Dorrit Cohn: “In The Distinction of Fiction, Dorrit Cohn describes this fact in terms of the ‘unnatural power’ of third-person narrators ‘to see into their characters’ inner lives’”, before adding that: “The (physically impossible) insights into the minds of characters have gradually become naturalized or conventionalized in Modernist fiction”.⁹⁸ Here again, it is a matter of ascribing an ontological status to the theoretical entity that Cohn calls the “third-person narrator”, which is situated as an entity existing in the fictional world and endowed with properties like any other fictional entity. Alber goes on to quote and provide a commentary on a passage from Mrs Dalloway (part of an interior monologue by Septimus Warren Smith): in his view, the passage can be qualified as non-natural, not “because we are confronted with a schizophrenic character (schizophrenics exist in the real world)”, but “because the third-person narrator is somehow able to know and tell us exactly what Septimus thinks and feels”.⁹⁹ It is quite clear in this example that there is continuity between the position held by a proponent of classical narratology (Cohn) and that held by a proponent of postclassical narratology and non-natural narratology (Alber) concerning the issue of the omniscient narrator. The confusion pointed out above, between non-natural or so-called non-natural realities of different origins and nature, is also present.

96 See Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2010: 116 and passim. 97 Alber, Iversen, Nielsen, and Richardson 2010: 124. The term “reflector-mode narratives” comes from Franz K. Stanzel (see Stanzel [1979, 1982] 1984: 5 and passim) and corresponds to what I am calling point-of-view narratives. It seems that the coordinating conjunction “or” in “reflector-mode narratives or narrative ‘omniscience’” is not disjunctive, but rather indicates an alternative expression of the same idea. See Web. http://nordisk.au.dk/forskning/forskningscentre/nrl/undictionary under “Narration, unnatural”. 98 Alber 2011: 56. See also Cohn 1999: 106. Alber reiterates the idea in Alber 2012: 14 and n. 4. 99 Alber 2011: 58.

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It is only fair to note, however, that certain contemporary theoreticians display greater perspicacity. Lars-Åke Skalin writes, for example, in “How strange are the ‘strange voices’ of fiction?”: My approach to the issue [of “narrative strangeness”] is much more radical [than those which have just been mentioned, notably Brian Richardson’s]. It will not only detect “strange voices” but also attempt to silence them. This attempt starts by asking whether the “strangeness” is created by the art of fiction or by a particular theory on that art. It is argued that if we take standard narrative theory for granted, we will find many more “strange voices” in literature than is assumed. Even traditional narrative fiction will appear “unnatural”. This thesis has consequences for core concepts of narratology such as “narrative”, “narrator”, and “story”, as well as for the chosen strategies for theorizing on narrative.¹⁰⁰

Skalin is also one of the few theorists today, if not the only one, who denounces the “narrative fallacy” to which narratology falls victim in its approach to literary narratives, and to explicitly oppose “narratology” and the “poetics” of narrative.¹⁰¹ We should not hide from the fact that there are obstacles to Kuroda’s essays being well received in the context of current narratological research. The major obstacle consists in postclassical narratology as a whole being and revendicating being a transgeneric, transdisciplinary, and transmedial undertaking.¹⁰² Such an undertaking appears contradictory to the essentially linguistic approach, focussed on fictional and literary narrative, put forward by Kuroda. On the other hand, within postclassical narratology, stylistic and, to an even greater degree, linguistic contributions are rare (postclassical narratologists refer more willingly to speech acts theory, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s relevance theory or simplified versions of certain cognitive-linguistic theories than theories or methods of analysis dealing with language forms properly speaking). The linguistic knowledge of a lot of postclassical narratologists appears to be relatively limited.¹⁰³ Some even appear to reject the linguistic approach to literary narrative. All of this needs to be linked to the self-definition of contemporary narratology as “postclassical” and to its fixation with retrospection exclusively on the “classical” past

100 Skalin 2011: 104. The narrative fallacy according to Skalin consists in substituting narrative, defined as the fact of “someone telling someone else that something happened”, for the literary text. 101 See Skalin 2011: 106. 102 See Alber and Fludernik 2010: 21. 103 Excepted from this generalization, which may be thought excessive by narratologists and insufficient by linguists, are some postclassical narratologists like Monika Fludernik (see notably Fludernik 1993) or David Herman. See also Lundholt 2008, although this volume is not widely distributed enough to count as a reference for postclassical narratology.

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of the discipline, frequently qualified as “structuralist” in the sense of linguistic structuralism – as if the structuralism of Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, Gerald Prince, Mieke Bal, Seymour Chatman or Shlomith RimmonKenan were not a generalization and an extra-linguististic extrapolation, but a linguistic theory recognizable as such by linguists. By contrast, it seems to me that the project of understanding fictional narrative (to be precise, the use which can be made of certain language forms in fictional narrative) from the angle of the mental attitudes of the characters and those of the reader such as Kuroda puts into practice in the sixth essay of this volume, “A study of the so-called topic wa in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrence, and Faulkner”, is likely to be of interest to proponents of “cognitive narratology”, another currently very productive branch of postclassical narratology.¹⁰⁴ The prerequisite is that they accept to follow linguistic reasoning dealing with a language very different from their own. Kuroda in fact shows, in this essay, that the Japanese language is capable of representing a “double judgment” (a concept derived from Franz Brentano and Anton Marty)¹⁰⁵ in the mind of one or several characters given or interpreted as the subject of point of view, a possibility which has no equivalent in the English or the French versions of the sentences under consideration.

4.2 I shall brush over the two remaining points and leave the task of completing this introduction, which no doubt leaves a number of gaps, to others. The reading of Kuroda’s essays can take on a particular meaning in the context of the specifically French debate concerning the relations between linguistics and literature, and the conception of literature, in the analysis and, more generally, the linguistics of discourse.¹⁰⁶ This debate can be summarized in the following manner, leaving certain not necessarily secondary aspects aside which would be too long to present here: does recognizing the discursive nature of the literary object represent an undeniable theoretical breakthrough (position held by the proponents 104 Cognitive narratology is primarily associated with the names of Monika Fludernik, David Herman, Patrick Colm Hogan, Manfred Jahn, Alan Palmer and Lisa Zunshine. 105 See Ch. 6, pp. 133–134, 144, 148. 106 See issue 159 of the journal Langages, “Linguistique et poétique du discours. À partir de Saussure” [Linguistics and poetics of discourse: From Saussure onward], notably the presentation by Jean-Louis Chiss and Gérard Dessons (Chiss and Dessons 2005) and the article by JeanLouis Chiss (Chiss 2005). More recently, see also the presentation of the collective volume edited by Claire Badiou-Monferran (Badiou-Monferran 2010, notably pp. 46–60).

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of discourse analysis) or does it occur in such a way that it appears to be more of an epistemological obstacle stopping crucial inquiry into the at least hypothetical specificity of literature (position held by critics of discourse analysis, who might also be termed the followers of the project for a “poetics of discourse”¹⁰⁷)? Both parties concerned share the same retrospective horizon: “literary structuralism” and its tendency to investigate the literary and in particular narrative langue (an extrapolation of the Saussurian concept of langue to narrative) to the detriment of a truly linguistic approach to narrative. The followers of the project for a poetics of discourse go much further in their retrospection, since the starting point for their study consists in the publication of new texts by Saussure, which introduce a conceptualization of discourse into linguistics. According to Jean-Louis Chiss, “the set of problems of loans, transfers and ‘models’ is no longer fuelled by the categories of linguistic structuralism based on the Saussurian dichotomies from his Course as adopted by the Russian formalists and Roland Barthes […]; the conceptual apparatus changed from literary structuralism to the analysis of discourse since the latter stemmed precisely in part from the belief that Saussure excluded discourse from linguistics […]; analytic efficiency prudently ousted the wish for scienticity. The essential point remains, that of the correct assessment of the separation between linguistics and literary theory and the epistemologically impertinent response of the dialogue between constituted disciplines of which one of the influential features remains applicationism […].”¹⁰⁸ It seems to me that the publication of Kuroda’s essays complicates matters in an interesting way. On the one hand, the essays put forward a truly linguistic approach to fictional narration which is almost contemporary, yet radically opposed to the “structuralist” approach to narrative. On the other hand, Kuroda’s linguistic approach is very different from current linguistic and discursive approaches. It is essentially based on syntax, even if it leaves an important place for semantic considerations. In the fourth and fifth essays, Kuroda builds the foundations for an “autonomous” theory of language use, or of pragmatics, which also seems remote from current understanding (in fact he seems to be aware of it, since at the end of the fourth essay he mentions the fact that “what [he] ha[s] been concerned with is intended to serve as a foundation for the study of language use, or of that which results from the use of language, discourse in the broad sense”¹⁰⁹). The question might indeed be asked, following in Kuroda’s steps, of the theoretical bases of current understanding and practices (what stands in lieu of the “foundational” theory 107 See Chiss and Dessons 2005: 4–5 and passim. Badiou-Monferran, for her part, suggests the label “neo-Saussurians” (see Badiou-Monferran 2011: 49 and n. 137). 108 Chiss 2005: 41 (trans. mine, S. N.). 109 Ch. 4, p. 118.

The importance of Kuroda’s essays in the context of current research   

   35

that Kuroda puts forward in the fourth essay?). Finally, if we ignore the type of linguistic approach proposed and concentrate solely on the relations between linguistics and literature and the conception of literature shown in the essays, Kuroda is clearly on the side of the linguist-poeticians, as opposed to the discourse analysts. There is no applicationism in Kuroda’s work; no wish to apply analytical tools to literature that were developed for other bodies of work (a variation on encyclopaedism, or of Dominicy’s “encyclopaedism of detail”). Nor is there any “separation”, in Chiss’s sense, between linguistics and literary theory. Kuroda studies language and literature together (showing Henri Meschonnic’s error when he speaks, for example, in the same issue of Langages, of “their separation into regional and distinct if not radically foreign disciplines, as occurs in generative grammar”¹¹⁰).

4.3 Without doubt, historians of contemporary linguistics and literary theory will find the reading or rereading of Kuroda’s essays of interest. From their viewpoint, the essential elements to note would be the following: a linguist’s approach to problems of narrative theory (and also, as Kuroda himself suggests, of stylistics), contrasting in a number of ways with the globally non-linguistic approach put forward by “structuralist” narratologists, and specifically, in relation to the preceding element, his very rapid denouncement, from as early as 1974, of Genette’s revision or distortion, in a communicational direction, of the opposition between histoire and discours established by Benveniste; a non-taxinomical conception of narrative theory: Kuroda builds a theoretical model on the basis of a limited collection of observations and experiments, which makes it possible to account for fictional narration viewed as a particular type of linguistic performance (he does not aim to observe as much narrative or narrational data as possible to order and classify them according to various criteria); and finally, the move which I believe to be without precedent or equivalent among linguists interested in literature, to broaden his outlook from the narration of fiction, considered as a particular type of linguistic performance, to the theory of linguistic performance or language use in general. It is also clear that the historical epistemology of literary theories can and even must be part of the history of linguistic theories, or at least of some aspects of them which have received little attention until now, in the same way that the

110 Meschonnic 2005: 13 (trans. mine, S. N.).

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   Introduction

history of linguistic theories may shed light on certain aspects of the history of literary theories. I shall base my conclusion on Kuroda’s own words, as a form of envoi: To entertain a theory of narration in which the narration of fiction is not necessarily considered as a form of communication but may or may not be interpreted within a communicational framework should by no means be taken as recommending one to ignore investigations into fictional narration nor discouraging them. If such an implication is read into it, it is not a problem of linguistics or narrative theory but of psychology or sociology of linguists and narrative theorists. Translated by Susan Nicholls

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Origin of the essays “Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese” first appeared in A Festschrift for Morris Halle, Stephen R. Anderson and Paul Kiparsky (eds.), New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, pp. 377–391. It was reprinted in The (W)hole of the Doughnut: Syntax and its Boundaries, Ghent, Story-Scientia, 1979, pp. 185–203, and in French, in the same year, in Aux quatre coins de la linguistique, Paris, Le Seuil, “Travaux linguistiques”, 1979, pp. 235–259. “On grammar and narration” first appeared in Actes du colloque francoallemand de grammaire transformationnelle, Christian Rohrer and Nicolas Ruwet (eds.), vol. II: Études de sémantique et autres, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1974, pp. 165–173. It was reprinted in French in Aux quatre coins de la linguistique, op. cit., pp. 261–271. “Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory, from a linguistic point of view ” first appeared in French in Langue, discours, société: Pour Émile Benveniste, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Claude Milner and Nicolas Ruwet (eds.), Paris, Le Seuil, 1975, pp. 260–293, then in English in Pragmatics of Language and Literature, Teun A. van Djik (ed.), Amsterdam and New York, North-Holland, 1976, pp.  107–140. It was reprinted in The (W)hole of the Doughnut. Syntax and its Boundaries, op. cit., pp. 205–231. “Some thoughts on the foundations of the theory of language use” was originally presented at the Symposium on Discourse and Syntax which took place at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), from November 18 to 20, 1977. It was published in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 1, 1979, pp. 1–17. “The reformulated theory of speech acts: Toward a theory of language use” was written for a special issue of the journal Versus, Quaderni di Studi Semiotici, titled Speech Act Theory: Ten Years Later, Julian Boyd and Alessandro Ferrara, (eds.), no. 26–27, 1980, pp. 67–79. “A study of the so-called topic wa in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrence, and Faulkner (of course, in Japanese translation)” was first published in Perspectives on Topicalization: The Case of Japanese “wa”, John Hinds, Senko K. Maynard, Shoichi Iwasaki (eds.), Amsterdam and Philadelphia, John Benjamins, “Typological Studies in Langage”, vol. 14, 1987, pp. 143–164. The essays follow the chronological order of their first publication.

Chapter 1 Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese 1 Bertrand Russell,¹ discussing language in a philosophical framework, concerns himself with the distinction and relation between two purposes that language serves, namely, (a) indicating facts, and (b) expressing the state of the speaker.² He points out that in some cases the distinction between (a) and (b) seems to be nonexistent. Thus, when I say “I am hot”, “the fact indicated is a state of myself and the very state that I express […]”. And “where, as in such cases, there is no distinction between [a] and [b], the problem of truth or falsehood does not arise […]”. Suppose, on the other hand, I say “You are hot” or “John is hot”. I am now expressing my state and indicating yours or John’s. Such a statement is “in one sense ‘significant’ if it can express a state of me; in what is perhaps another sense, it is ‘significant’ if it is true or false”. We have here one of the basic issues with which epistemology is concerned. From the linguistic point of view, we are not immediately concerned with how the philosopher might develop his theory of knowledge and how the fundamental epistemological issue just noted would be explained in his epistemological system. What draws the linguist’s attention is the fact that adjectives like “hot” which express sensations or emotions of the subject are epistemologically quite different from other adjectives, in spite of the fact they are all alike grammatically.³ Thus, pairs of sentences like “I am tall” and “John is tall” or “I am square” and “John is square” do not reveal the epistemological dichotomy noted in the preceding paragraph. In Japanese certain words of sensation exist in pairs, one member of a pair being morphologically an adjective and the other a verb, and this morphological

1 Russell 1940: 256–267 [AN]. 2 Russell also indicates a third purpose, that is, to alter the state of the hearer. This point in not directly related to our concern here [AN]. 3 The adjective hot, however, is ambiguous in a certain sense. It may indicate either that the one to whom the subject refers feels hot or that that to which the subject refers has a high temperature that would or could cause someone to feel hot. The two readings are, of course, closely related, and many adjectives of this class are ambiguous in the same way: compare “I am sad”, “This picture is sad”. However, it is the first type of reading that will be relevant to our discussion [AN].

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distinction corresponds exactly to the epistemological one indicated here. Thus, we have the adjective form atui in (1) but the verb form atugatte in (2) and (3):⁴ (1)

Watasi wa atui ‘I am hot’

(2)

Anata wa atugatte iru⁵ ‘You are hot’

(3)

John wa atugatte iru ‘John is hot’

And one cannot use atui with second or third person, as indicated in (4) and (5):⁶ (4)

*Anata wa atui

(5)

*John wa atui

On the other hand, the grammatical status of sentence forms such as (6), with a first person subject and the verb form, is somewhat subtle: (6)

Watasi wa atugatte iru

The sentence sounds odd, perhaps because it implies a split ego – one is simultaneously the subject of a sensation and the objective observer of the subject of this sensation. However, the grammatical status of such sentences is not of principal concern in the present paper. To cite some additional examples, parallel data are obtained with respect to kanasii/kanasigaru, ‘sad’, sabisii/sabisigaru, ‘lonely’, and also the past forms 4 Kuroda uses the Kunrei method to transcribe Japanese (source: Cécile Sakai, personal communication, 25 Nov. 2007) [EN]. 5 The underlying phonological form of the verbalizing suffix added to adjective stems is gar. In this example, the verb is accompanied by iru and is in the “present progressive”. The morph gat is the result of assimilation to the following “gerund” suffix te. Note that this morph is no way related to the infix kat that appears in the past forms of adjectives in spite of the phonetic similarity of the past forms of the paired adjectives and verbs: atukatta:atugatta. In what follows, I use sensation adjectives and sensation verbs to refer to those adjectives and verbs that are paired in this way by means of the suffix gar [AN]. 6 We are concerned here only with the first kind of reading mentioned in note 3. Sentences (4) and (5) are acceptable under the second kind of reading [AN].

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   Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese

atukatta/atugatta, ‘was/were hot’. In these cases too, then, the subjects of the sensation adjectives, as opposed to the corresponding sensation verbs, must be first person.⁷

2 These facts from Japanese are well known and are of considerable epistemological significance. A complete grammatical description of the sensation words, however, is by no means so simple a matter of the preceding sketch might imply. The grammatical features of these words are closely interrelated with other intricate features of the language. In particular, there are two kinds of complications that arise in the description of the sensation words. In the first place, the restriction observed in the preceding section, namely, that sensation adjectives like atui may take only first person subjects, does not necessarily apply if the sentence forms occur, not by themselves as independent sentences, but as segments contained in a larger context. Thus, there are cases in which those sentence forms are embedded as constituent sentences. For example, with relativization we have both (7) and (8):⁸ (7)

atui hito ‘hot man’

(8)

atugatte iru hito ‘hot man’

7 This restriction, however, applies to declarative sentences. In interrogative sentences it is reversed. Thus, while anata wa atui desu ka is natural, watasi wa atui desu ka is not [AN]. 8 These two noun phrases do not have the same meaning, however. Example (8) seems to imply that the information one uses to judge that the person in question is hot is available to direct observation by one’s senses, while in example (7) one’s judgment may perhaps be made on a more indirect basis. However, a complete semantic analysis of these two kinds of noun phrases would inevitably involve some other complex factors as well, and such an analysis is not intended here. Similarly, the pairs of Japanese phrases or sentences that contain a sensation adjective and the corresponding sensation verb in the following discussion are not perfectly synonymous although they are given identical English translations here. However, I shall not necessarily comment on their intricate and varying semantic differences [AN].

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And with nominalization there is both (9) and (10): (9)

Mary ga sabisii koto wa dare mo utagawanai ‘No one doubts that Mary is lonely’

(10)

Mary ga sabisigatte iru koto wa dare mo utagawanai ‘No one doubts that Mary is lonely’

But there are also cases in which sentence embedding in the customary sense is not involved, at least not in an immediately obvious way. For example, we have both (11) and (12):⁹ (11)

Mary wa sabisii ni tigainai ‘Mary must be lonely’

(12)

Mary wa sabisigatte iru ni tigainai ‘Mary must be lonely’

Another example of the same sort involves the expression no da, which we now turn to.

3 Syntactically, no da is attached to a sentence at the end and forms another one. Semantic description of no da is not easy. The closest equivalent in one of the more familiar languages would be c’est que in French, though one can still only speculate at to what exactly they have in common. The no da sentence may indicate a reason or cause, as in (13):¹⁰

9 A closer approximation to sentence (12) might be ‘I assert that necessary information according to which one would judge that Mary is lonely would have to be available to those who could directly observe her at the present moment’. The sentence presupposes that Mary is not observable to the speaker at the moment of speaking. Such a presupposition is absent from (11) [AN]. 10 When no da clearly indicates a reason or cause, it can be paraphrased by nazenara… kara da. Kuno (1970: 14) characterizes no da as giving “some explanations for what the speaker has said or done, or the state he is in”. Kuno goes on to say that such an explanation can but need not be the cause of a stated fact. He cites the interesting pair (a) and (b) to illustrate this point (I have made a stylistic change that is of no concern to us here)

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(13)

   Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese

Mary wa kanasigatte iru; Fido ga sinda no da ‘Mary is sad; Fido died’

The second no da sentence explains why Mary is sad and may be translated by means of ‘because’. But reason and cause do not explain all uses of no da. Some no da sentences express effects rather than causes, as in (14): (14)

Fido ga sinda; sore de Mary wa kanasigatte iru no da ‘Fido died, so Mary is sad’

Another semantic effect of no da may be seen from (15) and (16): (15)

Mary wa Fido ga sinda no de kanasigatte iru ‘Mary is sad because Fido died’

(16)

Mary wa Fido ga sinda no de kanasigatte iru no da ‘Mary is sad because Fido died’

Both sentences are given the same English translation, but (16) and not (15) can be used when the fact that Mary is sad is already known, or, in current terminology, when it is a presupposition, and the speaker is asserting that Fido’s death is the cause of this event. Hence (16) (but not [15]) may be translated by (17):¹¹ (a)

Taizyuu ga 10-pondo hetta; byooki na no da ‘I have lost 10 pounds; I am sick’

(b)

Byooki da; taizyuu ga 10-pondo hetta no da ‘I am sick; I have lost 10 pounds’

As Kuno indicates, the no da in (a), but not that in (b), may be replaced by kara da. In (a) “I am sick” expresses the cause of the fact that I have lost ten pounds; on the other hand, “I have lost ten pounds” cannot be a cause of the fact that I am sick; in (b) it is, to use Kuno’s term, an “explanation” for saying that I am sick. Besides kara there is the word nazenara which may also be glossed as ‘because’. This word may be added to the second sentence at its head in both (a) and (b). Furthermore, if it is added then no da may be replaced by kara da in both examples. Thus we have (c) and (d): (c)

Taizyuu ga 10-pondo hetta; nazenara byooki da kara da

(d)

Byooki da; nazenara taizyuu ga 10-pondo hetta kara da

In (c) the second sentence gives the reason why the speaker lost ten pounds, while in (d) the second sentence gives the reason why the speaker judges that he is sick [AN]. 11 But this is not the only possible reading of (16). In my judgment, (16) can be read without taking Mary is sad as a presupposition. For example, it can be read so that Mary is sad is taken to

Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese   

(17)

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It is because Fido died that Mary is sad

Similarly, compare (18) and (19): (18)

Bill wa asoko de John ni atta ‘Bill met John there’

(19)

Bill wa asoko de John ni atta no da ‘Bill met John there’

That Bill met John can be a presupposition when sentence (19) is used. Thus, the semantic effects of no da are difficult to characterize clearly and completely. The only generalization one can make from the preceding examples is that no da somehow serves as a marker to indicate that some “second order” assertion, so to speak, is made with respect to the proposition expressed by the sentence to which no da is attached. That is, it serves to indicate that some assertion is made as to how the proposition in question is related to some other proposition or propositions that are stated (or even understood) in a particular discourse context. However, even such a vague characterization may be too narrow. Whatever the semantic characterization of no da may be, of particular interest to us is the fact that inside the no da sentence the previously mentioned restriction on the subject of a sensation adjective does not apply. Hence, not only is (20) grammatical, but also (21): (20)

Mary wa sabisigatte iru no da ‘Mary is lonely’

(21)

Mary wa sabisii no da ‘Mary is lonely’

Sentences like these may be used with the various semantic effects of no da sentences we have described. However, sentences like (21), with the sensation adjective require a further comment. Sentence (21) seems to have these semantic effects. The speaker asserts that he knows that Mary is lonely but his knowledge

be an effect of the fact that Fido died. Such a reading is in fact obtained (though not necessarily so) when no da in (16) makes the whole sentence a reason sentence for another that precedes it: Mary wa nani mo iwanai; Mary wa Fido ga sinda node, kanasigatte iru no da ‘Mary would not talk; for she is sad, as Fido died’ [AN].

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is not solely or perhaps even not at all based on what he perceives of Mary. The sentence does not tell how he knows what he knows, and it can sound just like an a priori declaration – “Mary must be lonely”. He might perhaps be able to judge from past experience that Mary is lonely, using circumstantial evidence of a kind that would not allow a neutral party to draw such a conclusion. Or he might even have been told by Mary that she was lonely.

4 We have observed that the restriction on the subject of a sensation adjective need not be applicable when a sentence form with such an adjective is contained within a larger sentence. Another qualification to be made about the same restriction relates to style. Consider (22) and (23): (22)

Mary wa sabisii ‘Mary is lonely’

(23)

Mary wa atukatta ‘Mary was hot’

Contrary to what was said earlier, forms like these and like (5) are actually permitted as independent sentences, provided that they are used in a particular style, which, for the lack of a better name, I shall call the nonreportive style, to contrast with the reportive style. To describe the nonreportive style,¹² it is necessary first to refer to what are generally taken as basic components of linguistic performance. A linguistic act is assumed to take place between a speaker and a hearer: a sentence is uttered by the speaker, who has the intention of being heard by the hearer. There are, however, cases of linguistic performances which do not directly comply with this paradigmatic schema. Monolog is one such unparadigmatic type, and story writing and story telling represent another. One may try to account for such cases while still holding to the paradigmatic schema. The notions of “speaker”, “hearer” can be extended in diverse ways and, if necessary, made somewhat abstract. For example, monolog might be viewed

12 We shall offer an actual definition in Section 7 [AN].

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as somewhat displaced linguistic performance in which the hearer is the speaker himself.¹³ Literary works submit to such explanations with varying degrees of plausibility. Consider, to begin with, a story in the first person.¹⁴ In this case “I” appears as the narrator. The “I” need not be the writer of the story, that is, physically the producer of the sentences in this linguistic performance. However one can conceive of a performance in which the writer assumes the role of the speaker “I”, and the reader that of the hearer. A first-person story in the strict sense has only one point of view. It is a description of a series of events inside or reflected in one subject of consciousness – real, if autobiographical, or imaginary, otherwise. The reading of a first-person story can be understood as an act relating this real or imaginary subject of consciousness to the reader. In this way first-person stories can be fit into the paradigmatic schema of linguistic performance. But stories are often not written in the first person, and analysis of their structure as linguistic performance inevitably needs a subtler device. A story may involve more than one point of view. It may shift¹⁵ from one subject of consciousness to another, representing what is inside or reflected in a different consciousness. Sometimes distinct points of view may overlap; or the point of view may even be left indistinct.

5 Consider, for example, the following quote from D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers: Paul looked into Miriam’s eyes. She was pale and expectant with wonder, her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him. His look seemed to travel down into her. Her soul quivered. It was the communion she wanted. He turned aside, as if pained. He turned to the bush.¹⁶

Involved here are Paul’s and Miriam’s consciousness and perhaps also the narrator’s point of view. The three points of view are not always clearly separated but rather subtly intermingled. Yet this short passage exhibits a gradual and intricate

13 For a further analysis of monologue, see Ch. 4, p. 111, and especially Ch. 5, pp. 128–129 [EN]. 14 On the use of story, narrative, and narration, see Introduction, pp. 13–14 [EN]. 15 See infra n. 17 [EN]. 16 See Ch. 3, pp. 75–76; Ch. 4, pp. 146–148 [EN].

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shifting of the point of view,¹⁷ from Paul’s to Miriam’s. The starting sentence may be taken as representing the narrator’s point of view, but it may also represent Paul’s consciousness directed toward Miriam’s through his sight. It prepares the reader for the next sentence, which represents Miriam’s image as it is reflected in Paul’s mind. And then Miriam’s eyes in Paul’s consciousness and Paul’s look in Miriam’s are where the two could seem to meet. But the third to fifth sentences represent Miriam’s consciousness directed toward herself. In the next to last sentence Miriam’s consciousness is returning outward and the narrator’s point of view may be coming back. The last sentence can be interpreted as the narrator’s indifferent point of view.

6 There seem to be two possible ways to view non-first person stories: one can assume that they fit the basic paradigm of linguistic performance in terms of speaker and hearer, and one can assume that they do not. The theory of the omniscient narrator is a familiar solution along the former lines. The omniscient narrator is an imaginary omnipresent subject of consciousness who is assumed to be able to enter each character’s mind. The whole story is then assumed to be told by this narrator as a series of events perceived by him. The narrator is the “speaker” with respect to such a non-first-person story, just as “I” is the “speaker” of a first-person story. As a result, non-first-person stories are viewed in the same light as first-person stories. Along the other line of approach, a story may be assumed to be just a structured collection of information from various subjects of consciousness. One of these can be the narrator, who is not referred to in the story (the omniscient narrator is assumed not to be referred to, either); the others are characters in the story. The role of the writer of non-first-person story is to assemble (in fact, create) such information and set it in order. This is in no way identifiable with the role of the “speaker” in the paradigm of linguistic performance, as is the “I” in the case of a first-person story or the omniscient narrator in the case of a non-first-person story. Let us call this latter theory the multi-consciousness theory. I have been contrasting first-person stories and non-first-person stories, but this dichotomy may be somewhat misleading with respect to the essential point to be made here. Some clarification of the term omniscient is also in order.

17 The expression stems from post-Jamesian literary criticism and theory: see, for example, Beach [1918] 2008; Beach [1932] 1960; Lubbock [1921] 1972; Friedman [1955] 1967; Booth [1961] 1983 [EN].

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In a first-person story, “I” is, by definition, the narrator; in addition, he may or may not be a character in the story.¹⁸ If he is, he cannot be allowed any superhuman faculty without destroying the naturalness of the story.¹⁹ On the other hand, when “I” does not participate in the story, he can be accorded somewhat more privileged powers while allowing the story to remain natural, but he may not have any non-human kind of perception faculty. If this technique is extended to the extreme, we have a non-first-person story with a neutral or effaced narrator. Such a narrator not only does not participate in the story, but also is never referred to. Given his absence from the story, he can be omnipresent. But his faculties are still human: he is not omniscient and cannot enter into character’s minds. The story is told from one point of view, the narrator’s. In this sense a non-first-person story with a neutral or effaced narrator can be considered as an extreme form of a first-person story. One could even conceive of an approach that turns such a story into the first-person type by assuming that all sentences of the story are “reports” by an “I” never mentioned in the story.²⁰ Let us group together first-person stories and non-first-person stories with a neutral or effaced narrator and call them reportive. A story is reportive if it is told by a narrator who may be omnipresent but not omniscient; otherwise, a story is nonreportive. This is the dichotomy that is relevant to us here. The opposing two theories mentioned previously – the omniscient narrator theory and the multi-consciousness theory  – deal with nonreportive stories.²¹

18 The expression is slightly strange. Historically, the expression “first-person novel” indicates a novel in which a protagonist, generally the main protagonist, recounts his or her own story (or when the character is a minor one, a story in which he or she participated as a witness), and refers to him or herself using a first-person pronoun. Here Kuroda seems to be confusing “first-person narrative” and “narrative including first-person pronouns”. On the genealogy of the concept of the narrator, see Patron 2009 [EN]. 19 Fairy tales, fantasy stories, and science fiction are, of course, not pertinent here [AN]. – EN: Kuroda bases his argument on an idealized model of first-person fictional narration. Obviously, passages can be found in first-person fictional narratives which seem to attribute superhuman abilities to the narrator and thus upset if not verisimilitude (or naturalness), at least the coherence of the narrative. 20 The description given by Kuroda here is exemplified in some of Hemingway’s short stories (see infra n. 21, Friedman’s “dramatic mode”) [EN]. 21 My use of the term omniscient may be found to be more restricted than the usual use in literary criticism. It does seem congruent with what N. Friedman (1955) call Multiple Selective Omniscience (and, as a limiting case, Selective Omniscience); however, what he calls Editorial Omniscience and Neutral Omniscience do not appear to involve essentially my usage of the term. These latter, together with his Dramatic Mode, seem rather to characterize modes of reportive story, in my terms, with a first-person, neutral, or effaced narrator, perhaps omnipresent but not omniscient.

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Is there any empirical evidence that favors one or the other of these theories? Do they have any different empirically relevant consequences? If not, they are empirically equivalent and provide only two different frameworks of terminology; the choice between the two would be a matter of convenience, not a matter of theoretical adequacy. Be that as it may, we have two categories of stories, reportive and nonreportive. This categorization, it must be noted, does not refer to the theory of grammar nor to the grammar of a particular language. It presumably belongs to the universal theory of literary art. However, two different grammatical styles exist in Japanese which, it is claimed, parallel this categorization of stories. I shall discuss these in the next section.

7 We are now in a position to return to our discussion of the grammar of Japanese sensation words. As already mentioned, sentence forms like (22) and (23), with a third-person subject and a sensation adjective, which we originally said to be ungrammatical, are in fact permitted in certain non-first-person stories. Such a sentence can be used when the omniscient narrator (if we employ this notion) adopts the point of view of its third person subject. For example, one might have a line like (24) in a story: (24)

Yamadera no kane o kiite, Mary wa kanasikatta ‘Hearing the bell of the mountain temple, Mary was sad’

On the other hand, if “I” am narrating the story from “my” point of view, then “I” must say (25), using the sensation verb kanasigaru, or perhaps (26), using no da: (25)

Yamadera no kane o kiite, Mary wa kanasigatta

(26)

Yamadera no kane o kiite, Mary wa kanasikatta no da

Thus, we must differentiate two grammatical styles in Japanese. The one in which sentences like (22), (23), and (24) are not permitted is employed both in the para-

The problem of the narrator and the point of view is a complex one which obviously requires and deserves more extensive treatment. Here, however, I have tried only to give a brief, self-contained sketch of that aspect of the problem which is of immediate concern to us [AN].

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digmatic setting of linguistic performance and in first-person stories where the imaginary “I” narrates. Sentences like (25) and (26) may also be used in a nonfirst-person story, but then they are understood as a report from a narrator’s point of view, a narrator who is not referred to in the story and perhaps omnipresent but not omniscient. Using only sentences like (25) and (26) and avoiding those like (22), (23), and (24), one can write a reportive story without necessarily introducing the first-person narrator “I”. The style in which sentences like (22), (23), and (24) are not used will be called reportive. On the other hand, sentences like (22), (23), and (24) may be used only in non-first-person stories. Such sentences, it is claimed, represent the point of view of a character, the referent of the subject of the sentence. In no way can they be interpreted as reports by an “effaced” narrator. One cannot apply a stylistic variation to a story in which such sentences occur to turn it into a first-person story; the story is not reportive. The style which allows sentences like (22), (23), and (24) will be called nonreportive. In brief, the reportive style is the style in which one writes reportive stories and the nonreportive style is the one in which one writes nonreportive stories. Note, however, that the reportive and nonreportive styles are here defined as notions belonging to the theory of Japanese grammar, based on grammatical fact in Japanese. The sentence-final particle yo will aid the Japanese speaker to see the difference between these two styles. One function of this particle is to give the connotation “I am telling you”. In consequence, sentences with yo are inevitably understood to be in the reportive style. A native speaker of Japanese may not be able to respond immediately as to whether forms like (22) and (23) are grammatical and if so in what contexts. But he would be able to judge more readily forms like those in (27)–(30): (27)

*Mary wa sabisii yo

(28)

Mary wa sabisigatte iru yo

(29)

*Mary wa atukatta yo

(30)

Mary wa atugatta yo

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8 The grammatical difference between the reportive and nonreportive styles does not end with the use of the sensation words that we have been discussing. It also manifests itself in the “reflexive” use of the word zibun. This word may be compared with the reflexive pronouns in English, as the examples (31) and (32) suggest: (31)

John wa kare o hometa ‘John praised him’

(32)

John wa zibun o hometa ‘John praised himself’

It is not a simple matter to formulate an infallible condition as to when zibun and other means of anaphora are used. The Klima-Lees rule²² gives a good first approximation for English reflexives pronouns: to state the condition informally, a reflexive pronoun is used to express a coreferential relation within a simple sentence while a personal pronoun is used for such a relation across sentence boundaries. However, occurrences of English reflexive pronouns inside complex noun phrases are controlled by rules much harder to discover.²³ The Japanese reflexive zibun has wider applicability than the English reflexive pronouns, even if we restrict ourselves to cases in which zibun is itself a noun phrase constituent of a sentence, without any intermediary larger noun phrase. In an earlier work²⁴ I gave some conditions for such occurrences of zibun (which now no doubt would have to be supplemented and refined). I shall not restate these conditions fully here, for it is not necessary for our present purposes. However, some discussion of this topic is relevant. One condition on zibun is that in the object position of a constituent sentence it may be anaphorically coreferential with the matrix subject if the constituent sentence is inside the matrix verb phrase. Thus, zibun can be anaphorically coreferential with the matrix subject if it is the object of a verb phrase complement or of a noun phrase complement which is the matrix object. On the other hand, if it is the object in an adverbial clause, whether or not it can be coreferential with the matrix subject seems to be dependent on additional syntactic and/or semantic factors in intricate ways which I am not at present in a position to describe. For our present purposes let us simply say that 22 Lees and Klima 1963 [AN]. 23 See Lees and Klima 1963; Warshawsky 1965; Jackendoff 1969 [AN]. 24 Kuroda 1965 [AN].

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zibun contained in a certain class of adverbial clauses as the object cannot be coreferential with the matrix subject. In what follows only this negative condition concerns us. Consider (33): (33)

John wa Bill ga zibun o hometa toki Mary no soba ni ita ‘John was by Mary when Bill praised him’

Here zibun cannot be coreferential with John. Now compare (33) with (34): (34)

John wa Bill ga zibun o hometa koto o kiite yorokonda ‘John was glad to hear that Bill had praised him/himself’

Here zibun is inside the object noun phrase of the verb kiku, ‘hear’, and it can be coreferential with the subject of this verb, which in turn is coreferential with John, the subject of yorokonda, ‘was glad’, and is deleted – hence the ambiguous English translation. But the condition in question is only applicable in the reportive style. In the nonreportive style the zibun in (33) may also be coreferential with John, making this sentence ambiguous also. To check this point, the native speaker of Japanese is advised first, without worrying about the stylistic value of the sentence, to confirm that the sentence can be read with zibun taken as coreferential with John, and then to observe from (35) that the same reading is impossible if yo is attached at the end of the sentence: (35)

John wa Bill ga zibun o hometa toki Mary no soba ni ita yo ‘John was by Mary when Bill praised himself’

Sentence (35), used only in the reportive style, has the unique reading indicated by the English translation.

9 To see the subtle stylistic effects which reflexivization may have in Japanese stories, let us consider the following passage: John wa Bill ga zibun o utta toki Mary no soba ni tatte ita. Yuka ni taorete, Mary no hosoi kakato ga me ni ututta. Bill wa subayaku Mary no ude o tukamu to, hikizuru yoo ni site soto e deta. Huyu no yozora wa sumikitte, musuu no hosi ga tumetaku hikatte ita.

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John was standing by Mary when Bill hit him. Falling to the floor, he saw her slender ankle. Instantly, Bill grabbed her arm and dragged her out. The night sky of winter was clear and innumerable stars were coldly shining.

Reading this story in English, one would conclude that it involves at least two points of view: the second sentence represent John’s viewpoint while the last does not. All the sentences except for the second could be interpreted as representing the narrator’s point of view. Various other interpretations are also possible, and ambiguities of points of view might even be intended. The last sentence could be interpreted as representing Bill’s and/or Mary’s point of view, since the stars might have looked cold to one or both of them. But for us the essential difference between the Japanese and the English versions lies in the interpretation of the first sentence. In the English version this sentence may be taken as representing either the narrator’s or John’s point of view; other interpretations are also possible. Additional information from other parts of the story or from more indirect sources might decide which interpretation is more natural. But the reader of Japanese version would immediately adopt John’s point of view in the first sentence. In particular, he would understand that when John was hit he must have been conscious of the fact – spontaneously if not reflectively – that he was standing by Mary. Note that the whole story could be written from the narrator’s point of view, as a witness to the incident. But then some stylistic change should be necessary. In the English version the minimum change required would be to read the second sentence as: “Falling to the floor, he must have seen her slender ankle”. In the Japanese version, in addition to a corresponding change in the second sentence, the first sentences would need some stylistic modification. One might delete zibun or replace it by kare, ‘he’. But then in this story, retold in the reportive style, we lose the original implication that John was conscious (not necessarily reflectively) of standing by Mary.

10 To repeat, zibun as the object of an adverbial clause of a certain kind may refer to the matrix subject in the nonreportive style but not in the reportive style. Actually, the whole story of this constraint is much more complicated and cannot be told fully here, partly because of lack of space but also because the grammatical clarity of the relevant facts deteriorates rapidly with a slight increase in grammatical complexity.

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Recall that in the reportive style, sentence forms with a sensation adjective such as (22) and (23) are ungrammatical by themselves but become grammatical if followed by no da. Now, if no da is added to (33) it seems that zibun can refer to John even in the reportive style (and even when yo is added after no da), at least in some contexts.²⁵ Consider also (36) and (37): (36)

John wa Bill ga zibun o hometa no de okotta ‘John got angry because Bill praised him/himself’

(37)

John wa Bill ga zibun o hometa no de okotta no da ‘John got angry because Bill praised him/himself’

This pair parallels the pair (15), (16) and the same remark about the semantic effect of no da can be made here. The point that interests us in the present context, however, is that the zibun in (37) can be coreferential with John in the reportive style, while the potential coreferentiality of zibun with John in (36) is less clear.²⁶ This seems to be related to the fact that (38) seems acceptable in the reportive style, although its grammaticality appears to me to be less clear that that of (39): (38)

Mary wa kanasii no de naita ‘Mary wept because she was sad’

(39)

Mary wa kanasii no de naita no da ‘Mary wept because she was sad’

The facts discussed here seem to indicate that there are some relations between the contexts in which a sensation adjective can occur with a third person subject and the contexts in which zibun in the object of an adverbial clause can be coreferential with the matrix subject. But to characterize these contexts in the reportive style and to uncover any generalization that holds between them seems to be an intricate matter. One might also hope to arrive at some semantic characteriza25 Consider, for example, a discourse context where John ga Mary no soba ni tatte ita, ‘John was standing by Mary’, is presupposed. Or, assume that the sentence in question is preceded by John wa taihen uresi soo data, ‘John was very happy’, and gives a reason for John’s happiness due to some understood relationship between John and Mary [AN]. 26 If zibun in (36) can in fact be coreferential with John in the reportive style, then the node clauses are to be assumed to be adverbial clauses to which the condition we are concerned with does not apply. The reason for the nonapplication of the condition may have something to do with the fact that node may be related syntactically to no da [AN].

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tion of the contexts that relates them in some way to the semantic characteristics of nonreportive style.

11 We have seen that the dichotomy between reportive and nonreportive stories is accompanied in Japanese by the distinction between reportive and nonreportive style. The grammars of these two styles differ in their treatment of sensation words, as one would expect from the epistemological characteristics of such words. But the styles differ also in their treatment of the process of reflexivization. I introduced in Section 6 two opposing theories for nonreportive stories, namely, the omniscient narrator theory and the multi-consciousness theory. Let us consider the possible implications, with respect to these theories, of the fact that nonreportive stories have their own grammar. Assume a writer writes a first-person story. The narrator “I” of the story must generally be distinguished from the writer. The narrator “I” is an imaginary subject of consciousness. But through the intermediary of this imaginary subject of consciousness, the “speaker-hearer” relationship must be assumed to be established between the writer and the reader. The writer thus “talks” to the reader. Needless to say, we understand terms like “speaker”, “hearer”, and “talk” in a extended theoretical sense. In particular, the writer may use a style which he could not possibly use in speech. But in this case he might “write” to the reader in the form of a letter, or a report. The point is that he can address himself to the reader in a certain form of linguistic performance in the way the narrator expresses himself in a first-person story. With a non-first-person story one may also assume that the writer and the reader are related to each other basically in the same way. The writer “talks” to the reader through the intermediary of the narrator, the imaginary subject of consciousness, who is not referred to in the story and who, according to the omniscient narrator theory, may be omniscient. But here the empirical fact intervenes that there exist two distinct styles, reportive and nonreportive. Empirically, there could or could not exist such a distinction of styles. If there were no such distinction, the writer would “talk” to the reader in the same language whether he assumed the role of a natural, an omnipresent, or an omniscient narrator. The differences would lie simply in the writer’s assumed personality and faculties, physical and mental, and except for that, the way the writer and the reader are related to each other would remain the same. But the fact is that a different grammar is used for the nonreportive style. This means that if a story is nonreportive, that

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is, if and only if the narrator is omniscient, the writer will “talk” to the reader in a different language, which can never be used in an actual linguistic performance. This situation makes it impossible for us to establish a uniform relationship, except for the writer’s assumed mental and physical faculties, between the writer and the reader of a story through the intermediary of the narrator and, it seems to me, deprives the omniscient narrator of much of his charm. Indeed, the omniscient narrator would serve only as a cover-up for the fact that the writer can, thanks to the existence of a distinct grammar for nonreportive style, communicate with the reader directly and in a way which is essentially different from the paradigmatic linguistic performance. One might say that the secret of the writer’s artistic creation lies partially here. The multi-consciousness theory seems to reflect the empirical fact directly.²⁷ The spurious status of the omniscient narrator can also be demonstrated by a semantic consideration. Let us compare sentences like (24) with those like (25) and (26). A sentence like (25) and (26) points semantically to the existence of a subject of consciousness whose judgment the sentence is understood to represent. This is a semantic effect of gatta and no da. Then if the sentence in question is used in the paradigmatic linguistic performance, that subject of consciousness, the one who judges, is of course the speaker. If the sentence appears in a first-person story, the “judger” is “I”, the narrator. If some individual, say, John, is explicitly established as a narrator in the story, then the “judger” is John, the narrator. Now, a story in the reportive style could be subtly structured so that no one inside or outside the world the story describes can be definitely identifiable as a narrator. Yet a sentence like (25) or (26), if it appears in a story, has definite referential force directed toward the “judger”. Thus, however the narrator might be effaced in a story in the reportive style, a sentence like (25) or (26) points to him. To put it differently, the narrator in the reportive style, however successfully he might otherwise transcend the world the story describes, can be pointed to by a mechanism of reference in grammar which exists independently of any assumption we might make concerning the ontological status of the narrator. In the case of a sentence like (24), on the other hand, which can appear only in the nonreportive style, there is no such referential force directed toward a subject of consciousness whose judgment the sentence is to be taken as representing. One might argue on some nonlinguistics grounds that a sentence like (24), as a sentence (or, perhaps more exactly, as an occurrence of a sentence), must nonetheless represent someone’s judgment, and in that sense this type of sentence also 27 The multi-consciousness theory is incompatible with the performative analysis proposed by J. R. Ross (1970), according to which “all types of sentences have exactly one performative as their highest clause in deep structure” [AN]. – EN: On performative analysis, see Ch. 1 and 3.

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directs us toward this “someone”, who might be taken as the “omniscient narrator”. But then the referential force thus assumed for a sentence like (24) would only be applicable to the “omniscient narrator”, that is, the “omniscient narrator” would be the only one who can be so referred to; conversely, the omniscient narrator could presumably be referred to only in this way. Such an assumed referential device is thus totally ad hoc. The omniscient narrator cannot be identified by a linguistic mechanism whose existence we can establish independently of the assumption of his existence in the way the narrator in the reportive style can. The omniscient narrator has no linguistic basis in the way that the narrator in the reportive style does.

12 I started this article with a problem in epistemology and ended with a problem in literary art. Both of those problems have been found to be directly reflected in Japanese grammar. They both represent such fundamental features in the basic aspects of human mental life relating to language, that is, knowledge and literary art, that one might expect that they cannot fail to imprint their shadow on the grammar of any language. The distinction between the reportive and nonreportive style might also be found to exist in English grammar, perhaps in a more concealed way. Be that as it may, as language relates to various aspects of our mental life, it reveals its features in different ways to those who study it. These features need not have similar grammatical expressions in all languages. A feature, fundamental from some point of view, may have little overt manifestation in some languages but an obvious representation in others. Conversely, linguistic investigation of a grammatical feature in some language may help the student of another discipline to clarify an aspect of language which is fundamental in that discipline but which has tended to escape him due to his limited knowledge of languages. Language may be approached from many aspects, and different languages look different from different aspects. The present study has reaffirmed that therein lies our fascination with the study of language.

ADDENDUM It might be well to add here some remarks on erlebte Rede or style indirect libre, a notion widely discussed in the European tradition of literary criticism in connection with what I have called the nonreportive style. This notion seems generally

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taken as one to be compared with direct and indirect discourse and is considered as yet another stylistic technique of “quotation”, in an extended sense. To quote S. Ullmann, for example: The essence of free indirect speech [Ullmann’s translation of style indirect libre] can best be defined in stylistic terms. It is a classical example of the possibility of choice between quasi-synonymous modes of expression. According to traditional grammar two alternatives are open to the narrator when reporting the speech of other people: direct and indirect style, “oratio recta” and “oratio oblique” […]. The great change brought about by the advent of free indirect speech is that we can now choose between three, not two, forms of reporting. The new construction stands half-way between the two orthodox types.²⁸

The English term “narrated monolog” coined by Cohn for this notion seems to indicate the same approach. In fact, Cohn states: […] erlebte Rede is somewhere between direct and indirect discourse, more oblique than the former, less oblique than the latter. In searching for a better English label, I hesitate between “narrated consciousness” and “narrated monolog”; the second term in both these phrases expresses the immediacy of the inner voice we hear, whereas the first term expresses the essential fact that the narrator, not a character in the novel, relays this voice to us […]²⁹

The distinction I intend to make in terms of nonreportive style, however, seems to be of a more general character than that made by erlebte Rede. Basically, it is not to be characterized with reference to direct and indirect speech nor in terms of “inner voice”. In the example given in Section 9, the first sentence is not necessarily to be understood as rendering John’s “inner voice”; it simply presents his Erlebnis, and that possibly even spontaneous or unreflected.³⁰ Thus, it seems to me that the problem of the nonreportive style should rather be compared with the general problem area raised by the omniscient narrator theory (although I am arguing against it) than the more restricted issue of the different modes of “quotation”. In this respect K. Hamburger’s concern for constructing die Logik der Dichtung [the logic of literature] seems to be more relevant to the intended distinction of the reportive and the nonreportive styles than the notion of erlebte Rede itself. She wishes to claim that literary fiction must be

28 Ullmann 1964: 95 [AN]. – EN: The term style indirect libre is borrowed from Bally 1912. 29 I am indebted to C. Fillmore for drawing my attention to this article, which is a succinct introduction in English to the notion of erlebte Rede [AN]. – EN: Charles J. Fillmore (born in 1929), linguist, specialist in syntax, semantics (author of semantic “case” theory), one of the founders of cognitive linguistics. On Erlebte rede (lit. “lived discourse”), see Lorck 1921. 30 Cohn 1966: 104. I use the term “unreflected Erlebnis” here in the sense described in Husserl [1913b] 1950: 104–106, 177–185, for example [AN].

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characterized as not conforming to the Aussagesystem der Sprache [the statement system of language]. She in fact forcefully argues against the omniscient narrator conception when she states: Die Rede von der “Rolle des Erzählers” ist denn auch in der Tat ebensowenig sinnvoll wie es die von der Rolle des Dramatikers oder Malers wäre. [...] K. Friedemann hat gewiss den “Erzähler” als “organisch mit der Dichtung selbst verwachsenes Medium” richtig bestimmt. Aber weil sie die funktionale Art dieses Mediums naturgemäss nicht durchschaut hat, ist es nur scheinbar richtig, wenn sie sagt: “Er ist der Bewertende, der Fühlende, der Schauende […]”. […] Wenn dann dreissig Jahre später J. Petersen diesen Aspekt so ausmalt, dass er den Erzähler mit einem “Spielleiter” vergleicht, “der zwischen den Personen auf der Bühne steht und ihnen Stellung, Bewegung und Betonung anweist”, ihn aber zugleich “praktisch in die Rolle des Psychologen versetzt und mit seinen Aufgaben belastet” sein lässt und zwar dadurch dass ihm die Beschreibung und Schilderung seelischer Vorgänge verantwortlich zufällt” – wird es noch deutlicher, dass es sich hier um mehr oder weniger adäquate metaphorische Scheindeskriptionen handelt, die sich im literarischen Sprachgebrauch zu gängigen Schlagworten wie “Autorität” oder “Allwissenheit des Erzählers” verdichtet und abgenützt haben oder sogar zum Vergleich mit Gottes Allwissenheit mythisiert werden und eben deshalb Kritik hervorgerufen haben. Dieser weitverbreiteten, ja, soweit ich sehe, nahezu alleinherrschenden Auffassung liegt die Verkennung des Charakters des fiktionalen Erzählens und seine kategorialen Unterschiedes von der Aussage zugrunde.³¹

At present I am not in a position to be able to critically evaluate Hamburger’s Logik der Dichtung and to see whether the intended distinction between the

31 Hamburger 1968: 116–117 [AN]. – EN: “To talk of the ‘role of the narrator’, then, has just as little significance as to talk of the role of the dramatist or the painter. […] Certainly, Friedemann was correct in defining the ‘narrator’ as a ‘medium organically inherent within the work of literature itself’. But since she did not grasp the nature of this medium as function, she merely appears to be correct when she states: ‘He is the one who evaluates, who is sensitively aware, who observes […]’. […] Then thirty years later, when Julius Petersen expands upon this aspect by comparing the narrator with ‘a director who stands between the persons on the stage and assigns them their places, movements, and intonations’, and, what is more, places this narrator ‘in the role of the psychologist’ and has him ‘assume the tasks of the latter, so that responsibility for describing and portraying psychic processes falls on him’ – it becomes all the more clear that we are dealing here with sometimes more, sometimes less adequate metaphorical pseudo-definitions which in literary jargon have become condensed and overused slogans, like the ‘authority’ or the ‘omniscience of the narrator’, or which have even become mythologized in their comparison with God’s omniscience and precisely for this reason have provided criticism. At the base of this widespread view – which indeed, as far as I can see, is almost the sole dominant one – lies the mistaking of the character of fictional narration and its categorical difference from statement” (Hamburger [1968] 1993: 140–141). Hamburger’s text contains two note identifiers (after “criticism” and “the sole dominant one”) with the notes referring to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s narrative theory and practice.

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reportive and the nonreportive styles can fit into her conceptual framework. But the direction opened by her phenomenological investigation into the “Logik der Dichtung” seem to me most promising.

Chapter 2 On grammar and narration¹ 1 According to a widely spread view, language is a phenomenon of communication. An occurrence of a sentence in speech (parole²) represents a unit message to be communicated by the addresser to the addressee by means of this code. This message is assumed to correspond to the content of a mental act of judging, simple or modified (wishing, etc.). A theory of linguistic performance³ which assumes that linguistic performance is communication will be called a communicational theory of linguistic performance. Recently, a theory of linguistic competence (or of grammar) has been proposed which incorporates a communicational theory of linguistic performance. What I have in mind is the performative analysis proposed by J. R. Ross.⁴ According to the performative analysis, each sentence has an underlying representation of a form like I assert to you that S, where I and you may be interpreted as the addresser and addressee.

2 Narration is a type of linguistic performance; narrative theory must then be a part of a theory of linguistic performance. It is no surprise that modern theories of narration are influenced by the communicational theory of linguistic performance. Barthes states: […] le récit, comme objet, est l’enjeu d’une communication: il y a un donateur du récit, il y a un destinataire du récit. On le sait, dans la communication linguistique, je et tu sont

1 On the use of story, narrative, and narration, see Introduction, pp. 13–14 [EN]. 2 The term should be understood in the Saussurian sense (as opposed to langue). See also Ch. 3, p. 71 [EN]. 3 In the generative-grammatical sense, as opposed to competence. The distinction between competence and performance deals with the difference between the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language and the realization of his knowledge in the production of utterances (see Chomsky 1965: 4) [EN]. 4 Ross 1970 [AN].

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absolument présupposés l’un par l’autre; de la même façon, il ne peut y avoir de récit sans narrateur et sans auditeur (ou lecteur).⁵

This quote represents an example of the most explicit and frank statements that connect narrative theory directly to the communicational theory of linguistic performance. Taken seriously, then, narrative theory based on the notion of narrator must assume that each sentence of a story is a message communicated by the narrator, and represents the content of a mental act of judging by the narrator. This assumption appears to be comfortably compatible with the performative analysis. The underlying performative I of each sentence of a story may be interpreted to refer to the narrator.

3 The student of narrative theory is obviously aware of difficulties that would be caused by a direct application of the performative analysis to narrative theory. T. Todorov, for example, states: Il n’est pas nécessaire […] que celui-ci [le narrateur] nous adresse “directement” la parole: dans ce cas, il s’assimilerait, par la force de la convention littéraire, aux personnages.⁶

Each sentence S of a story may not be assumed to have the underlying representation of the form: I (the narrator) assert to you (the reader) that S. The performative analysis must accommodate la force de la convention littéraire somehow or other.

5 Barthes 1966: 18 [AN]. – EN: Barthes [1966] 1981: 24. “[…] the narrative, viewed as object, is the basis of a communication: there is a giver of narrative and a recipient of narrative. In linguistic communication, I and you are presupposed by each other; similarly, a narrative cannot take place without a narrator and a listener (or reader)” (Barthes [1966] 1975: 260). 6 Todorov 1966: 147 [AN]. – EN: Todorov [1966] 1981: 153. “It is not necessary that he [the narrator] address his utterance ‘directly’ to us: in this case, he would be compared, by the force of literary convention, to the characters” (Todorov [1966] 1980: 31). The context refers to the “image of the narrator” which, according to Todorov, is not constructed by the explicit discourse between narrator and reader alone. Proof is Les Liaisons dangereuses [Dangerous Liaisons] by Laclos, in which there is no discourse of the type. I think “characters” needs to be understood as the characters in Dangerous Liaisons.

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4 A natural way to accomplish this would be to interpret a sentence S of a story as a quotation by the narrator of the content of thought or feeling, of a character, whenever the narrator assimilates himself with a character.⁷ The underlying representation of a sentence S would have the “point-of-view part” in addition to the “performative part”. There are two possible approaches depending on whether one assumes direct discourse or indirect discourse as underlying such point-ofview sentences. The indirect-discourse performative analysis would have underlying representations of the form: I (the narrator) assert to you (the reader) that John (a character) thought or felt that S. The direct discourse performative analysis (which is a combination of the direct discourse analysis recently proposed by S. Kuno⁸ with the performative analysis) would have the underlying representation of the form: I (the narrator) assert to you (the reader) that John (a character) thought, felt: “S”. In either case, the propositional part S would be supposed to represent the content of a mental act of a character. How can the narrator make an assertion on the content of a mental act of a character? Grammatically speaking, it does not matter on what grounds the narrator makes his assertion. A mental act may be considered as an event taking place inside the mind. If the narrator must be assumed to directly perceive such events, then this would perhaps be a problem about the epistemological or metaphysical character of the narrator, and not a problem for the grammarian. Thus, one might say, the interpretation of narrative theory by means of performative analysis gives an explicit formal expression to the enigmatic omniscient narrator. This blunt admission of the omniscience of the narrator might be distasteful. But leaving the narrator in the dark and marveling at his subtlety and elusiveness in secret would not fare better.

5 But the problem of omniscient narrator is a grammatical problem. In brief, this is because if we apply the performative analysis to narration, we are led to assume that the omniscient narrator uses syntax differently from us mortals. Style indirect 7 This proposition echoes the last sentence of the quote from Todorov. However, the examples Kuroda is thinking of (“point-of-view narratives”, considered by communicational narrative theory as narratives in which the narrator adopts the viewpoint of one or more characters) have nothing to do with Todorov’s main example. See also Ch. 3, p. 74 and n. 11 [EN]. 8 Kuno 1972 [AN].

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libre⁹ represents an aspect of this problem. Style indirect libre has its own syntactic characteristics that differentiate it from direct and indirect discourse. If one wishes to derive style indirect libre from the underlying structure of direct or indirect quotation, it amounts to admitting rules whose application would depend on the fact that the performative subject I refers to the omniscient narrator. I am not going to discuss style indirect libre; I would like to refer you to a recent work by A. Banfield on this topic.¹⁰ Here I would rather like to take up a somewhat different type of grammatical fact from Japanese which points to the difficulties one must confront if one wishes to solve the problem of point of view in narration by means of direct or indirect discourse, or in other words, if one wishes to interpret narration in terms of the performative analysis.

6 My example from Japanese is concerned with the word zibun, which might be called a reflexive pronoun. The exact condition for the use of this word is not yet clear.¹¹ But consider the following sentence: (1)

John wa Bill ga zibun o utta toki Mary no soba ni tatte ita.

This sentence contains the word zibun as the object of a time adverbial clause. It can be coreferential with the subject of the adverbial clause Bill. But we are here interested in another possibility, i.e., the reading in which zibun is coreferential with the matrix subject John. This reading would be translated as: (2)

When Bill hit him, John was standing by Mary.

where him is intended to be coreferential with John. According to my intuition, however, this reading is possible only in narration, and then the sentence represents John’s point of view. More specifically, this sentence implies that when he was hit John was conscious, reflectively or spontaneously, of the fact that he 9 See Ch. 1, p. 57, n. 28 [EN]. 10 “The grammar of quotation, free indirect style, and implications for a theory of narration ”, to appear in Foundations of Language [AN]. – EN: See Banfield 1973. It is interesting to note that Kuroda quotes an article by Banfield which had not yet been published, just as Banfield in the same article quotes “Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese”, which had not yet been published either. 11 See Ch. 1, pp. 50–51 [EN].

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was standing by Mary. In contrast, if I, as a witness of the same incident, want to report it as what I perceived,¹² I would have to say: (3)

John wa Bill ga kare o utta toki Mary no soba ni tatte ita.

or (4)

John wa Bill ga utta toki, Mary no soba ni tatte ita.

The difference between these and the one cited before is that instead of the reflexive pronoun zibun, which refers to John, we have now either the personal pronoun kare (‘he’) or zero anaphora.

7 According to the perfomative analysis the first sentence (1) in narration might have the underlying representation of the following form: (5)

I (the narrator) assert to you (the reader) that John was conscious of the fact that…

A syntactic problem with this analysis is that the deletion of the point-of-view part John was conscious of the fact depends on the condition that the performative subject (I) refers to the omniscient narrator, thus guaranteeing that the surface sentence form in question is obtained only in narration.¹³

8 Kuno proposed the direct discourse analysis in order to account, among other things, for the occurrence of zibun in sentences like the one under discussion.¹⁴ Combined with performative analysis, his proposal would assign to (1) the underlying form like:

12 See Ch. 1, pp. 44–45, on the reportive style [EN]. 13 Kuroda is criticising the completely ad hoc character of the argument [EN]. 14 Kuroda presented a detailed critique of this analysis in Kuroda (1973c) [EN].

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I (the narrator) assert to you (the reader) that John was conscious: “I was standing by Mary when Bill hit me”.

This analysis might also be considered as containing some syntactic ad hoc features, perhaps in some concealed form. It might, however, be admitted that the existence of a different style is a fact, and hence anyway a special underlying form is needed for this style. Perhaps this “direct discourse” is supposed to represent such a special form, not the usual type of direct discourse. Thus, perhaps, one might use different quotation marks for “direct discourse analysis” in Kuno’s sense, in order to differentiate it from a usual, straightforward type of direct discourse. The proposed representation that appears to contain direct discourse might only be supposed to suggest the semantic nature of the analysis.

9 I shall, however, raise semantic, rather than syntactic objections to the direct discourse analysis. It was remarked earlier that the occurrence of zibun in question indicates that John was, if not reflectively, at least spontaneously, conscious that he was standing by Mary. This distinction between reflective and spontaneous consciousness relates to the difficult problem of different levels of consciousness. If John consciously knew that he was by Mary when he was hit, John was conscious of the fact, on one sense of the term “conscious”. But it could be that the knowledge that he was by Mary was not present in John’s mind at the moment, yet he might have remembered at a later time that he had been by Mary when he was hit. Then, John must have been conscious of the fact in question in another sense of the term “conscious”. John was reflectively conscious in the former case, and he was spontaneously, or unreflectively conscious, in the latter case. To my mind, sentence (1) does not necessarily imply that John was reflectively conscious of the incident at the moment of its occurrence. But if we analyze the sentence according to the direct discourse analysis, the propositional part: I was standing by Mary when Bill hit me, represents the content of John’s consciousness, and John himself is referred to by I. But, this means that John’s consciousness is conscious of itself as itself, as I. This fact, i.e., that a mental act of consciousness is directed towards itself as itself, must characterize it as a reflective consciousness¹⁵.

15 In Kuroda 1973c: 147, n. 3, Kuroda offers the following clarification: “For the use of the terms reflectively and spontaneously conscious, see Lalande 1968: 173–176” (Lalande [1902–1923] 1993: 174) [EN].

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This example with zibun is a very special problem. But it serves here as an indication of the general difficulty with the direct discourse analysis with respect to the general problem of different levels of consciousness.

10 Examples like style indirect libre or the one discussed just now concerning the Japanese world zibun show that it is difficult to account for narration in the framework of the performative analysis or, more generally, in the communication-theoretic conception of language. The claim that narration must be treated separately from discourse is not new. Benveniste claims that there are “deux plans d’énonciation différents, que nous distinguerons comme celui de l’histoire et celui du discours”. “L’énonciation historique”, Benveniste says, “caractérise le récit des événements passés”, and “nous définirons le récit historique comme le mode d’énonciation qui exclut toute forme linguistique ‘autobiographique’”. “La forme linguistique ‘autobiographique’” is a form like je, tu, ici, maintenant. Benveniste then states that “à vrai dire il n’y a même plus alors de narrateur”. In contrast, “il faut entendre discours dans sa plus large extension: toute énonciation supposant un locuteur et un auditeur, et chez le premier l’intention d’influencer l’autre en quelque manière”.¹⁶ The conclusion of Benveniste, however, does not seem to have exerted the impact on narrative theory that it should have. This situation, it seems to me, is due to the fact that Benveniste characterizes histoire essentially in the “negative terms”: “le mode d’énonciation qui exclut toute forme linguistique ‘autobiographique’”.¹⁷ This led Genette to conclude that “[le discours] est le mode ‘naturel’ du langage, le plus large et le plus universel, accueillant par définition à toutes les formes; le récit, au contraire est un mode particulier, défini par un

16 Benveniste 1966: 238–242 [AN]. – EN: “These two systems show two different planes of utterance, which we shall distinguish as that of history and that of discourse. / The historical utterance […] characterizes the narration of past events”; “We shall define historical narration as the mode of utterance that excludes every ‘autobiographical’ linguistic form”; “As a matter of fact, there is then no longer even a narrator”; “Discourse must be understood in its widest sense: every utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in the speaker, the intention of influencing the other in some way” (Benveniste [1966] 1971: 206, 208, 208–209). 17 See supra n. 16. This remark does not do justice to Benveniste’s analysis of historical utterance. On this point, see Patron 2009: 188–190 [EN].

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certain nombre d’exclusions et de conditions restrictives […]”.¹⁸ Thus, it seems that Genette first recognizes Benveniste’s antitheses histoire and discours, but achieves a synthesis out of them in favor of discours. Histoire is a subcategory of discours characterized by certain restrictive characteristics. Histoire is thus one again thrown back into the communicational conception of narration.

11 In contrast, Hamburger’s criticism against the communicational conception of narration is more elaborate and convincing that Benveniste’s.¹⁹ She claims that narration is categorically different from statement.²⁰ She bases her claim on certain linguistic peculiarities of sentences used in narration, the most prominent of which is erlebte Rede or style indirect libre. Thus, she refers to positive characteristics that separate the narrative style from discourse grammatically. She concludes that narration is categorically different from the Aussagesystem [the statement system], or we might say, from discours.²¹ Then what is narration? Hamburger states that narration is a function by means of which what is narrated is generated, i.e., the narrative function which the narrating artist avails himself of just as the painter uses brush and color. Discourse talks about a reality which exists independently, i.e., which exists only because it exists; in contrast, narration creates a false reality which exists only because it is narrated.²² This is Hamburger’s characterization of her antitheses Aussage and Erzählung [narrative] or discours and histoire.

18 Genette 1966: 162 [AN]. – EN: Genette [1966] 1981: 168. “[Discourse] is the broadest and most universal ‘natural’ mode of language, welcoming by definition all other forms; narrative, on the other hand, is a particular mode, marked, defined by a number of exclusions and restrictive conditions […]” (Genette [1966] 1982: 141). Genette substitutes récit (in English, narrative) for Benveniste’s histoire. See Patron 2011: 103–104. 19 Hamburger 1968 [AN]. – EN: Hamburger [1968] 1993. 20 Kuroda uses the translation of Aussage recommended by Hamburger here; see Hamburger [1968] 1993: 363, n. 148: “The German concept Aussage as it occurs in grammar and in the logic of judgment is to be rendered in English by ‘statement’, which has a general meaning beyond that of ‘assertion’ (Behauptung)” [EN]. 21 The assimilation is a little rushed. I have tried to summarize the similarities and difference between Benveniste’s and Hamburger’s conceptions in Patron 2011: 110–113 [EN]. 22 For the exact quote of Hamburger’s sentences, see Ch. 3, pp. 87–88 [EN].

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12 I believe with Hamburger that the communicational theory of narration cannot be sustained. Narration is different from discourse and cannot be subordinated to it. Hamburger characterizes these antithetic categories of sentence use thus: in discourse one talks about reality (Wirklichkeit), which exists independently, while narration is a function by which what is narrated is created. But can we leave narration and discourse simply as antitheses of each other? Do they not form a conceptual totality? Correlatively, we must ask: is there not a conceptual unity in the notion of a sentence in discourse and that of a sentence in narration? If we are to attain synthesis from these antitheses, what are the principles on which such conceptual unification is to be based? The communicational theory of language tries to answer this question by assuming that the communicative function of language is the basic characteristic of linguistic performance; it tries to justify narration as a special type of linguistic performance. In contrast, I assume, following Husserl, that the essence of linguistic performance consists in meaning-assigning acts and meaning-fulfilling acts.²³ But since we are not here concerned with this distinction of the two acts, we simply combine them and talk meaning-realizing acts. And as a transcendent correlate of the meaning-realizing act, I introduce the notion “objective” function of language in contrast with the communicative function of language.

13 If a sentence is put in a material form, either as a sequence of sounds or letters, in front of an attentive consciousness, it automatically exerts an effect on the consciousness and causes in it a meaning-realizing act. This function of language is referred to as the objective function. On a certain level of comparison, then, language is like any objects of perception. For example, an apple, put in front of an attentive consciousness, automatically causes a perceptual image of an apple in that consciousness. In the ordinary, successful communication, the speaker materializes a sentence with the intention of having the objective function of language evoke in the hearer’s consciousness the same mental image as the content of his (the speak-

23 De. bedeutungsverleihende Akte and bedeutungserfüllende Akte. See Husserl [1913a] 1970, Vol. I, Ch. 1, § 9 [EN].

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er’s) mental act (judging, etc.). The communicative function of language is superposed on the objective function of language. Next, consider a story which can be interpreted in the communicational framework, a story with a narrator, e.g., a first-person story. Sentences in such a story play a double role. These sentences exist in this world as printed letters. As such they exert their objective function on the reader’s consciousness. And it is due to this objective function that the story creates a false reality in the reader’s mind. On the other hand, these sentences are assumed to represent sentences materialized in a fictitious communication setting. The reader knows, with the help of his faculty of imagination, that the effects the objective function exerts on his consciousness parallel those imagined to take place in the addressee in the fictitious world.²⁴ This shows that the function of a sentence can be separated from the communicative function of a sentence. The sentence on a printed page, as a real entity in this world, has the objective function with respect to consciousness in this world, the reader. But this objective function in this world is not accompanied by the communicative function. Otherwise the reader would have to take the story as a personal message addressed to him. The objective function of a sentence in a narrator story, however, is still dependent in a certain sense on the potential communicative function of the sentence. The reader’s knowledge of the possibility of its communicative function allows him to imagine an imaginary communicational setting in which the objective function of the sentence is activated within its communicative function. However, there is no logical necessity that materialization of sentences is uniquely combined with the communicative act. Whether such a necessity is imposed on human language or not is an empirical question. The existence of stories that are not interpretable in the communication framework (or not as discours in Benveniste’s terms and not as Aussage in Hamburger’s terms) is the evidence that the objective function of the sentence is essentially independent of its communicative function.

14 To summarize, we recognize the conceptual essence of linguistic performance in the meaning-realizing act and its material correlate, the objective function of sentence. Language (in the sense of linguistic performance) is conceptually inde-

24 Kuroda uses the phrase “imaginary addressee” in Kuroda 1976: 132; see Ch. 3, p. 95 and n. 42 [EN].

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pendent of its communicative function. It may not even be said that language involves mental acts in the sense that a sentence is an expression of the content of a mental act in consciousness, real or imagined. In the communicative function of language a sentence is assertive. As Hamburger points out, some sentences are grammatically characterized as nonassertive, i.e., not usable in the communicative function. Those sentences phenomenally represent the antithesis of assertion, hence Hamburger’s opposition Erzählen vs. Aussage has been introduced. This antithetic opposition is essentially identical with Benveniste’s histoire vs. discours.²⁵ To recall, Genette synthesized Benveniste’s antitheses by assuming that histoire is a special subcategory of discours. This amounts to conceptualization of language on the basis of it communicative function. In this conceptualization the concept of discours develops dialectically from itself to its synthesis with its negation; linguistic performance is thus discours. In our view, on the contrary, the communicative function of language only characterizes Aussage or discours. The objective function (and its transcendental correlate, meaning-realizing act) is the basis on which the antitheses Erzählen and Aussage, or histoire and discours, attain their conceptual synthesis. Thus, in this view, the concept of histoire develops dialectically from itself to its synthesis with its negation; in this sense one might say: linguistic performance is histoire! One consequence which emerges from the difference in these conceptualizations is this. If linguistic performance is discours, so far as possible, a linguistic product should be accounted for as the result of discours, not as histoire. Thus, although Hamburger does not seem to attempt any conceptual unification of her antitheses, Erzählen and Aussage, it is remarkable that she wishes to count mathematical, scientific or logical propositions in Aussage, and tries to account for them by means of das theoretische Aussagesubjekt [the theoretical statementsubject]²⁶. But if linguistic performance is conceived as histoire in the sense specified earlier, then so far as possible, a linguistic work should be considered as histoire, not as discours. Unless the sentences, say, in a mathematical treatise grammatically force us to assume that they are set out in a communicational setting, the treatise can (in fact, should) be considered as a histoire, not as a discours. We do not need the theoretical Aussagesubjekt any more than the omniscient narrator.

25 See supra n. 21 [EN]. 26 Hamburger 1968: 40 [AN]. – EN: See Hamburger [1968] 1993: 36.

Chapter 3 Reflections on the foundations of narrative theory, from a linguistic point of view¹ 1 The communicational theory of narration 1.1 It is a widely held view that language (langage) is a phenomenon of communication. A specific language as a system of knowledge (langue) would then be a system of code; each sentence would be a code for a minimum unit of message. An occurrence of a sentence in speech (parole²) would represent a unit message to be communicated by the addressor to the addressee by means of this communication system. A unit message to be represented by a sentence, in this conception of language, is the content of a mental act of judging, wishing, etc. We are not concerned with a systematic taxonomy of the mental acts that underlie such sentence uses in linguistic performance. It suffices for our present purposes to characterize the mental act underlying the use of a sentence as an act of judging or a modification of it in some sense or other. The substantive content of such an act of judging, genuine or modified, is an event, or a state of affairs, real, imagined, wished, etc. For the sake of simplicity of exposition, in what follows I shall in general write as if a sentence used in speech performance in communication is an expression for the content of an act of judging, leaving possible modifications of such acts to be understood implicitly. A theory of language must include both a theory of linguistic performance and a theory of linguistic competence.³ A theory of linguistic performance which assumes that an act of linguistic performance, and in particular the use of a sentence, is an act of communication, will be called a communicational theory of linguistic performance. A theory of language which contains a communicational theory of linguistic performance and which consequently considers a language (a system of knowledge) as a system of code to be used in linguistic performance as communication will be called a communicational theory of language. 1 A French version of this paper has been published in Kristeva, Milner, and Ruwet (eds.) 1975. I am grateful to A. Banfield for conversations we have had on the problems of narrative [AN]. 2 See Ch. 2, p. 60, n. 2 [EN]. 3 See Ch. 2, p. 60, n. 3 [EN].

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Recently a theory of linguistic competence has been proposed which, so to speak, incorporates a communicational theory of linguistic performance. This is the performative analysis proposed by J. R. Ross and others.⁴ According to the performative analysis, the underlying form of a sentence is assumed to be something like the following: I Vp you S where Vp is a performative verb, e.g., assert, tell, etc; I is the first person pronoun, the subject of Vp; you is the second person pronoun, the indirect object of Vp; S is the sentence complement of Vp. The sequence I Vp you S, which is referred to as the performative part, may be (and in fact usually is) deleted; after appropriate transformations are applied, S is realized as a surface form of the sentence. In an actual use of the sentence, I and you in the above representation are assumed to denote the addressor and the addressee, respectively; S is the content of the message; Vp indicates the type of performative act with which the message is communicated.

1.2 A narrative (a fiction, a story) is a product of linguistic performance. A theory of narration, then, must be a part of a theory of linguistic performance. It is not surprise that many modern theories of narration are, either explicitly or implicitly, under the influence of the communicational theory of linguistic performance. R. Jakobson’s famous and, to be sure, valuable contribution, a closing remark at the symposium on style in Indiana, sets forth a program for stylistics and poetics in the framework of the communicational theory of linguistic performance.⁵ More specifically, with respect to narrative theory, Barthes states: [...] le récit, comme objet, est l’enjeu d’une communication: il y a un donateur du récit, il y a un destinataire du récit. On le sait, dans la communication linguistique, je et tu sont absolument présupposés l’un par l’autre; de la même façon, il ne peut y avoir de récit sans narrateur et sans auditeur (ou lecteur).⁶

4 See Ross 1970 [AN]. – EN: See also Sadock 1969; Lakoff 1970: 165–175; Sadock 1974: 21–50. 5 Jakobson 1960 [AN]. 6 Barthes 1966: 18 [AN]. – EN: Barthes [1966] 1981: 24. “[…] the narrative, viewed as object, is the basis of a communication: there is a giver of narrative and a recipient of narrative. In linguis-

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This quotation represents an example of the most explicit, and frank, statements which recognize that a theory of narration having recourse to the notion of narrator must have its theoretical basis in the communicational theory of linguistic performance. Such recognition may not necessarily be made explicitly. However, so long as no alternative to the communicational theory of linguistic performance is proposed, it seems unavoidable to interpret the notion of narrator current in narrative theory within the communicational framework as Barthes does. Taken seriously, or literally, then, a theory of narration based on the notion of narrator (the narrator theory of narration) must claim that each sentence of a story – for the time being let us exclude direct quotations – is a message communicated by the narrator; each sentence is the product of an act of judging in the narrator’s consciousness. This claim appears to be comfortably compatible with the performative analysis. According to the latter, each sentence of a story has the deep structure of the form: I assert, tell, etc. to you that S. One can interpret I and you referentially to be the narrator and the reader of the story, respectively. The student of narration, however, is obviously aware of the difficulties caused by this “serious” interpretation of the notion of narrator. Hence the flavor of subtleties to be added to the notion of narrator. T. Todorov, for example, states: Il n’est pas nécessaire […] que celui-ci [le narrateur] nous adresse “directement” la parole: dans ce cas, il s’assimilerait, par la force de la convention littéraire, aux personnages.⁷

and also: Nous avons donc une quantité de renseignements sur lui [le narrateur], qui devraient nous permettre de le saisir, de le situer avec précision; mais cette image fugitive ne se laisse pas approcher et elle revêt constamment des masques contradictoires, allant de celle d’un auteur en chair et en os à celle d’un personnage quelconque.⁸–⁹

tic communication, I and you are presupposed by each other; similarly, a narrative cannot take place without a narrator and a listener (or reader)” (Barthes [1966] 1975: 260). 7 Todorov 1967: 88 [AN]. – EN: “It is not necessary that he [the narrator] address his utterance ‘directly’ to us: in this case, he would be compared, by the force of literary convention, to the characters” (Todorov [1966] 1980: 31). See Ch. 2, p. 61, n. 6. 8 Todorov 1967: 87 [AN].  – EN: “Thus, we have a quantity of information about him, which should allow one to know him, to place him precisely, but this fugitive image cannot allow itself to draw near, and it constantly assumes contradictory masks, dashing from that of an author in flesh and bone to that of some character” (Todorov [1966] 1980: 30). 9 The theory of narration based on the notion of narrator – and on the communicational theory of linguistic performance – may further be indicated by some quotes from Anglo-American sources: “Since the problem of the narrator is adequate transmission of his story to the reader, the questions must be something like the following: (1) Who talks to the reader? […] (2) From

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1.3 The character of the narrator thus makes it difficult to relate narrative theory and the performative analysis directly in the way suggested above. It seems then that not all sentences of a story can be assumed to have the underlying structure: I assert, tell, etc. to you S, where I is assumed to refer to the narrator. We will therefore need to modify or extend the performative analysis, a theory of linguistic competence giving a basis for a communicational theory of linguistic performance, if we are to be able to interpret linguistically the narrator theory of narration within a communicational theory of linguistic performance. But we must first clarify in the communication-theoretical framework the significance of an expression like “[le narrateur] s’assimilerait, par la force de la convention littéraire, aux personnages” or “the most important unacknowledged narrators in modern fiction are the third-person ‘centers of consciousness’ through whom authors have filtered their narratives”.¹⁰ Expressions like these seem to invite the interpretation of narration in terms of the performative analysis, according to which each sentence is assumed to be addressed either by the narrator or by a character whose point of view the narrator takes (i.e., into whose consciousness the narrator has penetrated). The underlying form of each sentence of a story would then be I assert, tell, etc. to you S, where I is referentially either the narrator or a character. This interpretation might at first glance appear to reconcile successfully the theory of narration with the performative analysis at least on the grammatical level. But this apparent success is based on a failure to consider, at the grammatical level, the question as to the role of the narrator, who is assumed to tell the entire story, with respect to those sentences that are assumed to be addressed by characters of the story. What is the narrator presumed to be doing when a character is addressing the reader?¹¹ The mysterious “force de la convention littéraire” does not seem to be clarified a bit by linguistic assumptions such as these.

what position (angle) regarding the story does he tell it? […] (3) What channels of information does the narrator use to convey the story to the reader? […] (4) At what distance does he place the reader from the story?” (Friedman 1955: 1168–1169). “The narrator may be more or less distant from the implied author […]. The narrator also may be more or less distant from the characters in the story he tells. The narrator may be more or less distant from the reader’s own norms” (Booth 1961: 156) [AN]. – EN: Friedman [1955] 1967: 118; Booth [1961] 1983: 156. Booth 1961: the handbook for a whole generation of literature students (source: Ann Banfield, personal communication, 9 May 2011). 10 Booth 1961: 153 [AN]. 11 The expression here is incorrect. It is used in reference to the quote from Todorov cited above [EN].

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In fact, even formally the performative analysis in its original form is, obviously, not appropriate for the interpretation of narration in the indicated way. A situation where the narrator is said to take a character’s point of view is generally one in which an inner thought, feeling, or perception of the character is in question. The canonical formula of a deep structure assumed by the performative analysis, with the first person agent and the second person indirect object of a performative verb assert, tell, etc. does not fit such a situation, if the first person agent is to be referentially interpreted as the subject of consciousness in which the inner thought, feeling or perception takes place. A representation such as I (referentially a character of the story, say, John) thought, felt, perceived, etc. to you (the reader) that S is obviously inadequate.

1.4 Thus, if we want to use the performative analysis to interpret grammatically the narrator theory of narration we must, it seems, accept the natural conclusion that each sentence of a story is addressed by the narrator; i.e., the narrator is the performative subject of the sentence. There seem to be two ways to implement this conclusion, however. Namely, one can introduce the content of a character’s inner thought, feeling, etc. either as direct or as indirect discourse. The one that might come to one’s mind immediately is the representation with indirect discourse. A sentence which represents a character’s point of view, say, John’s, would be derived from a structure like: I (the narrator) assert, tell, etc, to you (the reader) that John thought, felt, etc. that S

This apparently direct application of the performative analysis will be referred to as the performative-indirect discourse analysis. Another possible approach is obtained by combining the “direct discourse analysis”, proposed by S. Kuno,¹² with the performative analysis. This approach would require some explanation. For this purpose it would be appropriate to start with the question as to how the theory of narration should deal with direct discourse in narration. Consider as an example the following fragment of narration:

12 Kuno 1972 [AN].

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When they turned the corner of the path she stood still. […] Then she saw her bush. […] The dusk came like smoke around, and still did not put out the roses. […] “They seem as if they walk like butterflies, and shake themseIves”, he said. She looked at her roses.¹³

One might assume that all of these sentences are addressed by the narrator. According to the performative analysis, all of them might be assumed to have the underlying form I (the narrator) assert, tell, etc. to you (the reader) that S. In particular, the sentence which contains a direct discourse quotation might have the deep structure: I assert, tell (or quote?) to you that he said “I assert, tell, etc. to you that they seem as if…”. Now, assume that for some reason it is clear from the context that the quoted speech is “his”, not “hers”. Then, the author might not add the quotative phrase, he said, after the quotation. But even without this phrase on the surface it would be semantically permissible, if not syntactically necessary, to assume that the direct discourse has essentially the same underlying form as before. A sentence which is assumed to represent a character’s point of view in general can, one might suggest, be treated along similar lines by the performative analysis. Consider, for example, a fragment of narration that precedes the one quoted earlier: She wanted to show him a certain wild-rose bush she had discovered. She knew it was wonderful. And yet, till he had seen it, she felt it had not come into her soul. Only he could make it her own, immortal.¹⁴

This passage might be assumed to represent “her” point of view. We might assume that according to the performative analysis the sentences in the passage have underlying structures like the following: “I (the narrator) assert to you (the reader): she wanted ‘I will show him a certain wild-rose I have discovered’. I (the narrator) assert to you (the reader): she knew ‘it is wonderful.’ I (the narrator) assert to you (the reader): and yet she felt: ‘till he has seen it it has not come into my soul. Only he can make it my own, immortal’”. The performative analysis along the lines suggested in this example, referred to as the performative-direct discourse analysis, decomposes a sentence in a story in general into the performative part: I (the narrator) assert, tell, etc. to you (the 13 D. H. Lawrence, Sons and lovers, Ch. 7. The point-of-view analysis given here of this quotation and the following one is only for the purpose of exemplifying the direct-discourse performative analysis; adequacy of an analysis of passages from Lawrence’s novel is not claimed. The second sentence of this quotation, for example, should perhaps be considered partially from “her” point of view. In fact, Lawrence’s style reveals exquisite subtlety with respect to points of view; it is a style the performative analysis (and hence the communicational theory of narration) will find most difficult to deal with [AN]. 14 D. H. Lawrence, Sons and lovers [AN].

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reader), the point-of-view part: he/she said, thought, felt, etc., and the main propositional part S. The point-of-view part might be assumed to be nonexistent if the sentence is from the narrator’s point of view; or we might assume that even then this part exists in the form: I judge. For the uniformity of treatment let us adopt the latter assumption. The point of view verb is either an outer or inner act of the subject of consciousness whose point of view it represents. The propositional part is the propositional content of the act by the subject of the point of view (and he is the subject of the performative act by the narrator if the point of view part is I judge). The first person pronoun in the propositional part S refers to the subject of the point-of-view verb (and the subject of the performative verb, if the point of view is the narrator’s), thus to the subject of an act of consciousness. The formal shape of the underlying representation of a sentence in narration according to either the performative-direct or the performative-indirect discourse analysis should now be clear. But how can the narrator assert, tell, etc. about the subject of the point of view’s act and its propositional content? If the act is an “outer” act, i.e., one perceivable from the outside by the outer senses, e.g., say, the narrator presumably perceives the act and reports it to the reader. If the act is an “inner” act of character, the narrator, if he is assumed to be equipped only with human faculties, cannot directly perceive the act and report it to the reader. Grammatically speaking, we do not know the grounds on which the narrator makes his assertions about the inner acts of characters. But we must, so long as we follow the performative analysis, accept that he does make such assertions. One could just assume that he directly perceives the mental states of his characters. Thus we are led to the notion of an omniscient narrator. The omniscient narrator has of course been familiar, though perhaps not much liked, in literary criticism. The interpretation of narrative theory by the performative analysis simply gives explicit formal expression to this enigmatic personage. Thus the performative analysis supplemented with the direct or indirect discourse analysis as a theory of linguistic competence appears to help clarify the significance of the “force de la convention littéraire”, which allows for the fugitive existence of the narrator. Obviously such blunt admission of an omniscient narrator would be distasteful. But leaving the narrator in the dark and marveling at his subtlety and elusiveness in secret is not better. Either we have to accept the epistemological or metaphysical opaqueness of the narrator theory of narration, or else we have to examine and question the basic assumptions of linguistic thought underlying this theory of narration. To recall, the basic assumption of the performative analysis is that each linguistic performance is an act of communication. More specifically, a sentence (after the deletion of its performative part) is assumed to be an expression of the content of a mental act of judging, etc.

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2 Criticism of the communicational theory of narration 2.1 It is not surprising that the modern critical mind cannot get along very well with such a mystifying notion as the omniscient narrator. Hence there have arisen in recent times literary theories or practices, explicitly formulated or not, which restrict, so to speak, the extent of the narrator’s omniscience.¹⁵ We are not concerned here with different views and tastes about what is permitted in narration. Suffice it to remark that those theories or views in effect do not challenge the basic assumptions of the communicational theory of linguistic performance and rather on this basis have tried to restrict and define the role of the narrator in conformity with one’s epistemological, metaphysical or ontological tastes. But there is another type of objection against the narrator, which questions the communicational foundation of narrative theory. This type of objection is more directly relevant to linguists, because it is based on consideration of certain linguistic forms used in narration. I have in mind in particular the works of É. Benveniste and K. Hamburger. In essence, both Benveniste and Hamburger challenge the attempt to interpret a story as a message in the framework of the communicational theory of linguistic performance. The contents and significance of their works, however, are not quite the same. Benveniste claims that there are “deux plans d’énonciation différents, que nous distinguerons comme celui de l’histoire et celui du discours”. “L’énonciation historique”, Benveniste says, “caractérise le récit des événements passés”, and “nous définirons le récit historique comme le mode d’énonciation qui exclut toute forme linguistique ‘autobiographique’” like je, tu, ici, maintenant. Benveniste, then, states that “à vrai dire, il n’y a même plus alors de narrateur. Les événements sont posés comme ils se sont produits à mesure qu’ils apparaissent à l’horizon de l’histoire”. In contrast, with respect to discours, Benveniste says, “Il faut entendre discours dans sa plus large extension: toute énonciation supposant un locuteur et un auditeur, et chez le premier l’intention d’influencer l’autre en quelque manière”. It is clear that l’énonciation in discours is a sentence used in

15 See Ch. 1, p. 58, n. 31 [EN].

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a communicational setting, and Benveniste proposes to recognize in historical and literary¹⁶ writings sentences used outside the communicational framework.¹⁷ This conclusion of Benveniste’s, however, does not seem to have exerted a meaningful impact on narrative theory. This situation, it seems to me, is due to the fact that Benveniste characterizes histoire essentially in “negative” terms. As quoted above, histoire is the mode of énonciation which excludes “les formes linguistiques ‘autobiographiques’”, while “le discours emploie librement toutes les formes personnelles du verbe, aussi bien je/tu que il” and “tous les temps sont possibles, sauf un, l’aoriste, banni aujourd’hui de ce plan d’énonciation alors qu’il est la forme typique de l’histoire”.¹⁸ And even from this exclusion of aoriste from discours, no positive implication for the sake of histoire can be drawn. One might perhaps assume that the passé simple and the passé composé complement each other in histoire and discours.¹⁹ From Benveniste’s exposition it is not obvious how the mode of énonciation is different in histoire from that in discours, once the notion of an omniscient narrator is accepted. It is not surprising, then, that in the framework of narrative theory, the contrast between histoire and discours which Benveniste sets up is, perhaps contrary to Benveniste’s intention, reduced to an opposition of a particular to a general. Thus, G. Genette states: “[…] en vérité, le discours n’a aucune pureté à préserver, car il est le mode ‘naturel’ du langage, le plus large et le plus universel, accueillant par définition à toutes les formes; le récit [Genette’s term for Benveniste’s histoire]

16 Today we tend to use “fictional” [EN]. 17 Benveniste 1966: 238–242 [AN].  – EN: “These two systems show two different planes of utterance, which we shall distinguish as that of history and that of discourse. / The historical utterance […] characterizes the narration of past events”; “We shall define historical narration as the mode of utterance that excludes every ‘autobiographical’ linguistic form”; “As a matter of fact, there is then no longer even a narrator. The events are set forth chronologically, as they occurred”; “Discourse must be understood in its widest sense: every utterance assuming a speaker and a hearer, and in the speaker, the intention of influencing the other in some way” (Benveniste [1966] 1971: 206, 208, 208–209). 18 Benveniste 1966: 242–243 [AN]. – EN: “Discourse freely employs all the personal forms of the verb, je/tu as well as il”; “[…] in fact, all the tenses are possible except one, the aorist, which is today banished from this plane of utterance although it is the typical form for history” (Benveniste [1966] 1971: 208–209). See Ch. 2, p. 66, n. 17. 19 This suggestion is almost absurd, given the starting point of Benveniste’s article (the existence of two “perfect tenses” in French, traditionally known as the passé simple and the passé composé). See Patron 2009: 20–21 and 20, n. 5, 188–189. See also Banfield’s entire study of the French passé simple (Banfield 1982: 142–143, 146–167 and passim, and Patron 2011: 115–118) [EN].

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au contraire, est un mode particulier, défini par un certain nombre d’exclusions et de conditions restrictives […]”.²⁰

2.2 In contrast, Hamburger’s criticism of the communicational concept of narration is more elaborate and convincing than Benveniste’s. She claims that narration is categorically different from statements:²¹ “[...] das fiktionale Erzählen von kategorial anderer Art und Struktur ist als die Aussage [...]”.²² She bases her claim on certain linguistic peculiarities of sentences used in narration: die Anwendung der Verben innerer Vorgänge auf dritte Personen, die davon ableitbare erlebte Rede, das Verschwinden der Vergangenheitsbedeutung des erzählenden Präteriums mit der dadurch bewirkten Möglichkeit (nicht Notwendigkeit) seiner Verbindung mit deiktischen Zeit insonderheit Zukunftsadverbien – Symptome, die als solche nicht isoliert sind, sondern sich gegenseitig bedingen.²³

Let us note that Hamburger points to positive indices that separate fiktionales Erzählen from Aussage in contrast to the negative indications Benveniste employs to oppose histoire to discours. That is, she indicates certain linguistic features that can be found in sentences of narration but not in discourse. These features make it impossible to interpret sentences in narration as assertions by the narrator, i.e., representations of judgments by the narrator, unless one not only accedes to the theoretical existence of the omniscient narrator, but also assumes that the omniscient narrator talks by means of a peculiar syntax of his own.

20 Genette 1966: 162 [AN]. – EN: Genette [1966] 1981: 168. “[Discourse] is the broadest and most universal ‘natural’ mode of language, welcoming by definition all other forms; narrative, on the other hand, is a particular mode, marked, defined by a number of exclusions and restrictive conditions […]” (Genette [1966] 1982: 141). On the substitution of récit (in English, narrative) for histoire, see Ch. 2, p. 67, n. 18. 21 See Ch. 2, p. 67, n. 20. 22 Hamburger 1968: 111; [AN]. – EN: “[…] fictional narration is of categorically different nature and structure from statement […]” (Hamburger [1968] 1993: 134.) 23 Hamburger 1968: 111; [AN]. – EN: “[…] the use of verbs of inner action with reference to the third-person, and derivable from this the narrated monologue [erlebte Rede], the disappearance of the narrative preterit’s significance of designating past-ness, and the possibility (not the necessity) created by this of its combination with deictic temporal, particularly future, adverbs. These are not symptoms which as such are isolated; they mutually condition one another” (Hamburger [1968] 1993: 134.)

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We shall comment briefly on the linguistic features Hamburger refers to as those separating narration from discourse, and re-examine their significance with respect to the refutation of the communicational theory of narration, or more generally of the communicational theory of linguistic performance. The first feature she mentions is the use of verbs of inner processes in the third person. But the use of any verb of inner process in the third person in narration does not necessarily prove by itself that narration is linguistically different from discourse. Hamburger herself remarks that in historical writings, which she assumes to belong to the Aussagesystem [the statement system], “ich z.B. sagen kann: Napoleon hoffte oder glaubte, dass er Russland unterwerfen würde”. She assumes that in historical writings such uses of glauben is “nur abgeleitet und kann denn auch in einem solchen Zusammenhang nur als Richtverb einer indirekten Angabe dienen”. That is, “es wird aus den überlieferten Dokumenten abgeleitet, geschlossen, dass Napoleon des Glaubens war, er würde Russland unterwerfen”.²⁴ But from the grammatical point of view the question as to on what grounds a statement such as “Napoleon hoffte oder glaubte, dass er Russland unterwerfen würd” was made would not matter. In historical writing a historian could derive a conclusion from documentary evidence; in narration the omniscient narrator could directly perceive an inner act of Napoleon’s. Use of a verb like believe in narration would prove the need of omniscience for the narrator, and might be considered to lead to the rejection of the narrator theory of narration on epistemological, metaphysical, or ontological grounds. But it does not by itself give evidence against the omniscient narrator on linguistic grounds. However, there are certain types of words of mental process that can constitute evidence against the omniscient narrator, or the communication al theory of narration. I refer, for example, to certain Japanese predicate words of inner feelings that I have mentioned in previous work. ²⁵ For a certain semantic unit of inner feeling (e.g., sad), a pair comprised of an adjective and a verb (e.g., kanasii and kanasigaru) exists; the adjectival form with a third person subject may be used only in narration. In the communicational theory of narration, one would be led to conclude that the omniscient narrator uses a special grammar of his own. But verbs of inner process in general may be cited as evidence against the communication theory of narration if they are considered in connection with

24 Hamburger 1968: 73 [AN]. – EN: “For example, I can say that Napoleon hoped or believed he would conquer Russia”; “The use of ‘believe’ here is only a derived one, however, and in such a context it can function only as a verb which introduces indirect discourse”; “From those documents transmitted to us it is derived, or concluded, that Napoleon was of the belief that he would conquer Russia” (Hamburger [1968] 1993: 82). 25 Kuroda 1973a [AN]. – EN: See Ch. 1.

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certain specific syntactic phenomena that would characterize narration as narration. Erlebte Rede (style indirect libre), the second item in Hamburger’s list, is such a phenomenon, one widely discussed in stylistics. Critical evaluation of previous works on this topic, in connection with our concern with the foundations of narrative theory, would require separate treatment. For the moment, however, suffice it to mention that erlebte Rede is used as a device to present directly a character’s inner thought or feeling, not necessarily, but quite often, accompanied with parenthetical inserts like he/she thought, felt, etc. Erlebte Rede does not conform to the syntax of either direct or indirect discourse, and may not be derived either from the underlying structures for direct or indirect discourse, unless of course some ad hoc rules are provided which are, for example, set to work only when the subject of the highest performative refers to the omniscient narrator. These points are discussed excellently in a recent work by Banfield, a treatment of erlebte Rede in the framework of modern linguistic theory.²⁶ A third of the characteristics Hamburger mentions as separating narration from discourse is the loss of the meaning of past in past tense verbs in narration, which is grammatically evidenced by the fact that those verb forms can be used with present and future time deictics. This characteristic is not unrelated to erlebte Rede; the present and future time deictics can remain in erlebte Rede, even though verbs are put in the past tense. But it is not obvious that any cases of present and future deictics used with past verbs can, conversely, be accounted for in terms of erlebte Rede. Hence it is advisable to refer to this fact separately from erlebte Rede as Hamburger does. First of all, what we should mean by erlebte Rede is not totally clear. If we decide that a sentence represents erlebte Rede only if there exists a verb of inner process, like he/she thought, the meaning of erlebte Rede becomes unambiguous, but perhaps semantically or interpretationally artificially restricted. But if we decide to rely on the semantic or literary interpretation of texts, the boundary of erlebte Rede becomes difficult to draw. What levels of a character’s consciousness is erlebte Rede supposed to represent? I do not try to answer such questions here.²⁷ For the moment, suffice it to give the following two examples that contain the present and future time deictics. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon

26 Banfield 1973 [AN]. – EN: “Modern linguistic theory” is a synonym here for transformationalgenerative theory (to be precise, the theory in Chomsky’s time, called “extended standard theory”). 27 See by contrast Banfield 1982 : 65–108 [EN].

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his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgment. “But it may be fine – I expect it will be fine”, said Mrs. Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed, whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows, who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them.²⁸

2.3 I shall add one more example of a different sort from Japanese which shows that fictional narration has a different grammar from discourse, an example which has been discussed in my previous work. John wa Bill ga zibun o utta toki Mary no soba ni tatte ita. Yuka ni taorete, Mary no hosoi kakato ga me ni ututta. Bill wa subayaku Mary no ude o tukamu to, hikizuru yoo ni site soto e deta. Huyu no yozora wa sumikitte, musuu no hosi ga tumetaku hikatte ita.²⁹

This may be rendered into English as follows: John was standing by Mary when Bill hit him. Falling to the floor, he saw her slender ankle. Instantly, Bill grabbed her arm and dragged her out. The night sky of winter was clear and innumerable stars were coldly shining.

What is relevant to us here is the word zibun (‘self’) in the first sentence of this story. Zibun in the function exemplified here might be called a reflexive pronoun, although the context in which it can occur is quite different from the one for English or French reflexives. In fact, the exact condition for the occurrence of the reflexive zibun is hard to determine and has not yet been made clear. But what concerns us here is only this fact: in the given sentence frame the occurrence of zibun indicates that the sentence represents John’s point of view. In particular, the reader would understand that when John was hit he must have been conscious, if not reflectively, at least spontaneously (or unreflectively), that he was standing by Mary. In contrast, if we replace this occurrence of zibun by the pronoun kare

28 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Part I: “The Window” (my emphasis) [AN]. 29 Kuroda 1973a [AN]. – EN: See Ch. 1, p. 51.

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(‘he’), this implication is lost; John might or might not have been conscious of Mary’s presence. The sentence is then neutral with respect to points of view, and as a sentence in narration, ambiguous in this respect. In the discourse style, one may not take someone else’s point of view. As a consequence, the sentence with zibun in question cannot be used in discourse. The whole incident of the story could have been reported by a witness in the discourse form. In that case, zibun could not have been used in the sentence frame in question. Of course, if the witness narrator wishes, he can express the conviction that John must have been conscious of Mary’s presence, by stating so explicitly. This linguistic fact is quite subtle, but the preceding description seems adequate, at least to my intuition. The implication of this fact is that the grammar of zibun is different in narration and in discourse. Kuno claims that this type of zibun in narration, which relates the sentence containing it to the point of view of the referent of zibun, can be accounted for by the direct discourse analysis. Combined with the performative analysis, this claim would assign to the first sentence of the preceding story an underlying form resembling the following: I (the narrator) assert, tell, etc. to you (the reader): John Vi “when Bill hit me, l was standing by Mary”. (Here Vi is a verb of a mental act like thought, felt, was conscious of, was aware of, etc.)

In order to derive the surface structure form, the first person me which is governed by the verb of a mental act, would be replaced by zibun, and then this verb together with the performative part would be deleted under the condition that the performative subject I refers to the omniscient narrator. The syntactic adequacy of this analysis, to say the least, does not appear to be promising. But that ultimately depends on the general question as to what syntactic mechanisms are needed for the description of human language in general, and would only be determined in a wider context than the present one. But the semantic adequacy of the above description is relevant to our present concern and can be questioned within the limit of our present context. It was remarked earlier that the occurrence of zibun in the first line of our story indicates that John was conscious, if not reflectively, at least spontaneously, that he was standing by Mary. This distinction between reflective and spontaneous consciousness relates to the difficult problem of different levels of consciousness. If John consciously knew that he was by Mary when he was hit by Bill, John was conscious of the fact in one sense of the term “conscious”. But it could be that the knowledge that he was by Mary was not present in John’s mind at that moment, yet he might have remembered at a later time that he had been by Mary when he had been hit by Bill. Then, John must have been conscious of the fact

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in question in another sense of the term “conscious” at the moment Bill hit him. John was reflectively conscious in the former case and spontaneously or unreflectively conscious in the latter. If the consciousness indicated by the use of the zibun in question is restricted to reflective consciousness, the proposed direct discourse analysis of the sentence given earlier might be accepted as a valid semantic analysis. But if the indicated consciousness can be unreflective, caution is required for application of the direct discourse analysis. To say that John was unreflectively conscious is to recognize that John’s mind was in a particular state. If we, or the omniscient narrator, realized that such a state of mind existed in John, we or he might represent this state of John’s mind by saying that John was unreflectively conscious of this or that. Our Japanese sentence with zibun might be assumed to represent such a state of John’s mind, but it does so directly, without an explanatory phrase such as “John was (possibly) unreflectively conscious of”, at least in the surface form we can observe. An expression like the sentence in question relates our understanding mind directly to a state of affairs (event), which happens to be an inner state of affairs in John’s mind, without mention of any active, reflective, or self-consciousness on the part of this third person’s mind, that is, without any mention of an intentional mental act of the other’s mind. Assume we analyze such a sentence by means of the direct discourse analysis with the first person pronoun I referring to the subject of consciousness whose mental state is described in the propositional part of the sentence. But that would mean that this consciousness is conscious of itself, as I, and this very fact, a mental act of consciousness directed towards itself, characterizes it as reflective consciousness.³⁰

30 It would be advisable to draw from the existing works of Japanese literature examples of zibun which support the claim made in this section on the basis of the clumsy example made up by myself. Although my search so far has been very much limited, it seems to me that such examples are by no means abundant; few instances could be found, if any, that would serve for exemplifying the point to be made as unambiguously and as succinctly and with as little preparatory explanation for those who do not know Japanese as the example given in the text. Here, assuming the knowledge of Japanese, I shall add an example from Natsume Soseki, the beginning paragraph of Mon [The Gate]: “Sosuke wa sakki kara engawa e zabuton o motidasite, hiatari no yosasoona tokoro e kirakuni agura o kaite mita ga, yagate te ni motte iru zassi o hori dasu to tomo ni, gorori to yoko ni natta. Akibiyori to na no tuku hodo zyootenki nanode, oorai o iku hito no geta no hibiki ga, sizukana mati dake ni, hogarakani kikoete kuru. Hizimakura o site noki kara ue o miageru to, kireina sora ga itimen ni aoku sunde iru. Sono sora ga zibun no neteiru engawa no, kyuukutuna sunpoo ni kuraberu to, hizyoo ni koodai de aru. Tama no nitiyoo ni koosite yukkuri sora o miageru dake demo, daibu tigau na to omoi nagara, mayu o yosete, giragira suru hi o sibaraku mitumete ita ga, mabusiku natta node, kondo wa gururi to negaeri o site syoozi no hoo o muita. Syoozi no naka de wa saikum ga sigoto o site iru”.

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The problem of levels of consciousness is a general problem, not a problem limited to the particular use of zibun discussed here. The present discussion is

Francis Mathy translates this paragraph as follows: “Sosuke had brought a cushion on to the veranda and plopped himself on it, cross-legged, and was now basking in the midafternoon sun. After a time he tossed aside the magazine he held in his hands and stretched himself out full length on his side. It was a beautiful Indian summer day. The rhythmic clip-clop of geta in the streets of the hushed town fell pleasantly on his ears. Raising himself up on his elbow, he looked out beyond the eaves of the house at the beautiful, clear sky, blue all over. Viewed from the tiny veranda, it seemed extremely vast. It made quite a difference, he reflected, to be able on an occasional Sunday to gaze leisurely at the sky like this. He looked squint-eyed directly into the sun, but only for a moment. The light was too blinding, and so he turned on his other side till he faced the shoji behind which his wife, Oyone, was at work sewing” (Soseki [1910] 1972: 5). The fourth, italicized sentence (in the Japanese text) contains zibun, which is the subject of the clause zibun no neteiru, ‘where he is lying’, modifying the noun engawa, ‘veranda, open corridor’. In the above translation this modifying clause is ignored; the sentence thus is rendered as “Viewed from the tiny veranda, it seemed extremely vast”. From the standpoint of literary interpretation one would agree that the whole passage represents Sosuke’s point of view. But what interests us in particular is that the occurrence of zibun in the sentence in question, in my opinion, characterizes the sentence grammatically as a sentence representing Sosuke’s point of view; it represents an inner state of Sosuke’s mind. If the sentence in question were a description from outside Sosuke’s mind, meaning objectively that the sky is extremely vast compared with the open veranda where Sosuke is lying, zibun would have to be substituted for by kare, ‘he’. This, however, does not imply conversely that if zibun were replaced by kare, the sentence would become unambiguously objective. Kare simply would make it grammatically neutral with respect to point of view. In the given context it could still be taken as representing an inner feeling of Sosuke. What concerns us, however, is whether the sentence with zibun in question must be taken as representing exactly the content of a reflective act of Sosuke’s consciousness so that the sentence could be semantically analyzed by means of direct discourse as follows: Sosuke thought, or was conscious: “the sky is extremely vast compared with the veranda where I am lying”. I would not deny the sentence as a whole is a description, of a sort, of a reflective act of Sosuke’s consciousness. However, it is questionable to claim that the meaning expressed by “the veranda where I am lying” is necessarily in the content of that reflective consciousness of Sosuke’s. Perhaps the content of his thought would be: “the sky is extremely vast compared with this veranda”. The modifying clause “where he is lying” is not necessarily to be taken as originating directly from Sosuke’s consciousness. Incidentally, the passage quoted here could be rewritten in the first-person story, replacing Sosuke and zibun by watasi. Then, the watasi in the modifying clause watasi no neteiru engawa would have to be contained in the content of reflective consciousness of Sosuke. But this does not imply necessarily that it is in the content of the reflective consciousness of Sosuke at the time the described incident took place. Put in the form of the first-person story, the story could now represent recollection by Sosuke. Thus the watasi in question could belong to this reflective act of recollection without being an element of the reflective act which is recalled [AN].

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sufficient to point to the general difficulty which the direct discourse analysis would face on semantic grounds.³¹

3 Towards an alternative conception of narration 3.1 Examples like those discussed by Hamburger, and the one from Japanese discussed in the preceding section, grammatically separate narration from discourse and raise serious difficulties for the communicational theory of narration, according to which each sentence of a story represents the content of an act of judging by the narrator or a character. Erlebte Rede and sentences in a third person point of view, in general, cannot be treated naturally by either the performative-direct, or indirect discourse analysis. In either case, syntactically one would need special rules which are set to work by the omniscient narrator. The performative-direct discourse analysis faces an additional semantic difficulty with the interpretation of the first person pronoun I in the propositional (i.e., quoted) part, as pointed out at the end of the preceding section. But if narration is not communication, if a story is not a discourse by the narrator, what is narration and what is a story? Hamburger states: Wir können erkennen: die epische Fiktion, das Erzählte ist nicht das Objekt des Erzählens. Seine Fiktivität, d.i. seine Nicht-Wirklichkeit bedeutet, dass es nicht unabhängig von dem Erzählen existiert, sondern bloss ist kraft dessen, dass es erzählt, d.i. ein Produkt des Erzählens ist. Das Erzählen, so kann man auch sagen, ist eine Funktion, durch die das Erzählte erzeugt wird, die Erzählfunktion, die der erzählende Dichter handhabt wie etwa der Maler Farbe und Pinsel. Das heisst, der erzählende Dichter ist kein Aussagesubjekt, er erzählt nicht von Personen und Dingen, sondern er erzählt die Personen und Dinge; die Romanpersonen sind erzählte Personen so wie die Figuren eines Gemäldes gemahlte Figuren sind. Zwischen dem Erzählten und dem Erzählen besteht kein Relations – und das heisst Aussageverhältnis, sondern ein Funktionszusammenhang. Dies ist die logische Struktur der epischen Fiktion, die sie kategorial von der logischen Struktur der Wirklichkeitsaussage unterscheidet. Zwischen dem ειπειυ der erzählenden Dichtung und dem der Aussage laüft die Grenze zwischen “Dichtung und Wirklichkeit”, an der es keine Übergangspunkte

31 An excellent analysis of a passage from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary by E. Auerbach (1968) may be mentioned here as an example of works in literary criticism touching on the problem of levels of consciousness [AN].

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von der einen zur anderen Kategorie gibt und die, wie wir sehen werden, ein entscheidendes Kriterium für den Ort der Dichtung im Sprachsystem bedeutet.³²

As she acknowledges, Hamburger here echoes Aristotle’s poetic theory of mimesis. Aristotle, on the other hand, characterizes epic poetry and drama as mimesis: Epic poetry, then, and the poetry of tragic drama, and, moreover comedy and […], these, speaking generally, may all be said to be “representations of life”. […] For just as by the use both of colour and form people represent many objects, making likenesses of them [...] and just as others use the human voice, so is it also in the arts which we have mentioned, they all make their representations in rhythm and language and tune, using these means either separately or in combination.³³

According to Hamburger, Aristotle defines poetry (poiesis) on the basis of mimesis; poiesis and mimesis are identical; epic poetry is poiesis, because it is mimesis. On the other hand, Aristotle excludes “Naturgedicht” [the poem On nature] by Empedocles, for example, from poetry, and proposes to call such poets nature-scientists (physiologos). Hamburger sees here the importance of the contrast poiein and legein. Exclusion of lyric poetry from Aristotle’s Poetics implies, Hamburger suggests, that lyric according to Aristotle also belongs to the category of logos. Thus, Hamburger’s contrast Erzählen vs. Aussage parallels poieien vs. legeien, mimesis vs. logos.³⁴ This distinction of two categories of linguistic products might also remind us of the one, mentioned earlier, between histoire and discours introduced by

32 Hamburger 1968: 113 [AN]. – EN: “We are now in a position to recognize the following fact: epic fiction, the product of narration, is not an object with respect to the narrative act. Its fictivity, that is, its non-reality, signifies that it does not exist independently of the act of narration, but rather that it only is by virtue of its being narrated, i.e., by virtue of its being a product of the narrative act. One may also say that the act of narration is a function, through which the narrated persons, things, events, etc., are created: the narrative function, which the narrative poet manipulates as, for example, the painter wields his colors and brushes. That is, the narrative poet is not a statement-subject. He does not narrate about persons and things, but rather he narrates these persons and things; the persons in a novel are narrated persons, just as the figures of a painting are painted figures. Between the narrating and the narrated there exists not a subject-object relation, i.e., a statement structure, but rather a functional correspondence. This is the logical structure of epic fiction, which categorically distinguishes it from that of the reality statement. Between the ειπειυ of narrative literature and that of statement runs the boundary between ‘literature and reality’, along which there is no point of transition from the one category to the other and which, as we shall see, signifies a decisive criterion for establishing the locus of imaginative literature in the system of language” (Hamburger [1968] 1993: 136). 33 Poetics, 1447a [AN]. 34 Hamburger 1968: 18 [AN]. – EN: See Hamburger [1968] 1993: 10–13.

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Benveniste and elaborated on by Genette in narrative theory. But according to Genette, histoire and discours are not categories opposed to each other, but the former is a subcategory of the latter. Discours, which first serves as an antithesis in setting up the category of histoire, is raised to the status of synthesis; histoire is grounded on discours as a special form of the latter. It follows that insofar as a sentence in discours is considered to represent a judgment of the addressor, a sentence in histoire would also be assumed to represent a judgment, perhaps, of the narrator. In brief, histoire is a type of communication. In contrast, I believe, with Hamburger, that the communicational theory of narration cannot be sustained. Narration is categorically different from discourse and not subordinated to it. Hamburger characterizes these antithetic categories of sentence use thus: in discourse one talks about reality (Wirklichkeit), i.e., the “object” in discourse in relation to the “subject” of discourse act, i.e., the addressor, while narration is a function by which what is narrated is created. But can we leave narration and discourse simply as antithetic of each other? Do they not form a conceptual totality? Correlatively, we must ask: is there not a conceptual unity in the notion of sentence in discourse and that of a sentence in narration? If we are to attain synthesis from these antitheses, what are the principles on which such a conceptual unification is to be based? The communicational theory of language at least answers questions such as these, as has been suggested above. It would not be sufficient for us just to refute the communicational theory of narration and the omniscient narrator. We must have an alternative theory of linguistic performance which replaces the communicational theory of linguistic performance and which restores a conceptually unified understanding of the function of sentence in linguistic performance.

3.2 The answers which we shall discuss to the question posed here are essentially not new. I claim, following Husserl, that the essence of linguistic performance consists in meaning-assigning acts (Bedeutungsverleihende Akt) and meaning-fulfilling acts (Bedeutungerfüllende Akt).³⁵ Since we are not concerned with the distinction of these two acts, we shall conceive of a unified act of realizing meaning in consciousness – a meaning-realizing act. But it might be of some use to reaffirm the Husserlian thesis in connection with our present concern, construction of narrative theory.

35 See Husserl [1913] 1970, Vol. I, Ch. 1, § 9 [EN].

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A meaning-realizing act is an act of creating a meaning representation (or meaning-image, meaning) in one’s consciousness. This expression might seem similar to Hamburger’s formulation that “das Erzählen [...] ist eine Funktion, durch die das Erzählte erzeugt wird”.³⁶ She states: “[...] wenn eine reale Wirklichkeit ist, weil sie ist, so ist eine fiktive Wirklichkeit nun dadurch, dass sie erzählt ist (als dramatische dadurch, dass sie mit den Mitteln dramatischer Gestaltung erzeugt ist)”.³⁷ But Hamburger’s concept of creative function of narration, which creates fictitious realities, and the creative function of meaning-realizing act, which creates meaning representations, are totally different. In fact, although I share with Hamburger the claim of the existence of narration which is categorically different from discourse, I find her characterization of Erzählung in terms of created reality unsatisfactory, both in order to characterize just those narratives that cannot, on linguistic grounds, be accounted for in the communicational framework and in order to attain a unified conceptualization of narratives and discourse in general. Thus, we must begin with a critical evaluation of what apparently is meant by Hamburger in statements like the one cited just above. We have so far been primarily concerned with the existence of narratives that do not fit the communicational theory of narration. But there are also narratives that can be treated within the framework of the communicational theory of narration. Typical cases are first-person stories in which I, the narrator, tell a story as a witness. More complicated examples would be epistolary novels. Such a narrative, unless it is strictly autobiographical, is not concerned with a real Wirklichkeit, “which exists because it exists”, but rather with a fictitious Wirklichkeit, “which exists only because it is narrated”. It would seem then that, according to Hamburger’s analysis, such a narrative also belongs to the category of Erzählen as opposed to Aussage. That is, her category of Erzählen apparently encompasses more than those stories that cannot be accounted for by the communicational theory of narration; in fact, it apparently includes all types of fictional narration.³⁸ Such a categorization of linguistic products would have some value of its own. But let us recall that we, with Hamburger, have been concerned with using linguistic evidence to recognize a category of linguistic performance as different

36 Hamburger 1968: 113 [AN]. – EN: See supra n. 32. 37 Hamburger 1968: 112–113 [AN]. – EN: “[…] whereas a real reality is because it is, a fictive reality ‘is’ only by virtue of its being narrated (and correspondingly a fictive reality is dramatic by virtue of its being created with the media of dramatic formation” (Hamburger [1968] 1993: 136). 38 Kuroda does not take Hamburger’s characterization of first-person fictional narrative as a “feigned” statement (fingierte Aussage) into account. On this point, see Patron (2009: 174–176) [EN].

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from discourse by means of linguistic or grammatical evidence. Assume now, contrary to fact, that no syntactic device is available in human language which generates sentences not usable in discourse. Then Hamburger could not have recourse to positive linguistic evidence in order to establish her category of Erzählen, and yet the category would have to be recognized so long as fictional narratives were at all possible in this hypothetized situation. This consideration clarifies the fact that the linguistic evidence Hamburger gives for her category of Erzählen does not represent features that characterize the category. To be sure, such linguistic features would be heuristically helpful for the recognition of the category of Erzählen by drawing one’s attention to, in some sense, the most conspicuous members of the category. But their logical role, after all, would be to point to the existence of an antithesis of the category of Aussage, not to help understand its essence. Because we seek to establish that the communicational theory of narration can only deal with a subcategory of narration, it is important to characterize in terms of the theory of linguistic performance those narratives that can and those that cannot fit the communicational theory of narration. Hamburger’s characterization of Erzählung apparently does not serve this purpose and fails to establish a conceptual grasp of those narratives which furnish her with the linguistic evidence with which she, in a sense rightly, claims to indicate the existence of the kind of linguistic performance not accounted for as Aussage. A fictitious reality, or to use Todorov’s term, histoire [story], is created by narration.³⁹ This is a characterization of fictional narration which can in fact be determined prior to any foundational considerations of narrative theory. It is a characterization applicable to any kind of narration.

3.3 But in a story told by a narrator, a communicational setting is also created in which the histoire (in Todorov’s sense) of narration is developed as the content of the message. To use Todorov’s term again, not only l’histoire dans le roman [the story in the novel] but also l’histoire du roman [the story of the novel] are created. A story with a narrator creates a fictitious reality and also an addressor who communicates the information in it to the reader. This expression, however, may be somewhat misleading; the histoire dans le roman and the histoire du roman may seem to be created side by side. To be sure from a certain point of view this statement might be accepted. When one says a fictitious reality is created, one 39 Todorov 1967 [AN]. – EN: Todorov 1967: 47–49 and Todorov [1966] 1981: 132. On Todorov’s and Benveniste’s histoire as homonyms, see Patron 2011: 98–102.

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might interpret this verb create as meaning a willful action by an agent. Understood in this sense, “create” means “the author creates”. And in fact the author creates both the histoire dans le roman and the histoire du roman. These creations are in a sense independent; he can first create the histoire dans le roman in his mind and then can decide how to tell it, i.e., to create a communicational setting in which the histoire is told. Correspondingly, a critic, having read the story, can analyze it in terms of the histoire dans le roman and the histoire du roman, for he can analyze the story with the interest, for example, of how it is created by the author. But if we put the question of where (rather than by whom) the fictitious reality of the story is created, we see the other sense in which the fictitious reality can be said to be created in the story. The fictitious reality is also created in the reader’s mind as he reads the story. And it is created in the reader’s mind through the message received in the fictitious communicational setting in which the reader sets himself up in the addressee’s position. When we say the story creates the false reality in this sense, the author’s willful act does not have direct significance with respect to the meaning of “create”. What (and not the one who) creates the fictitious reality in the reader’s mind is the words and sentences that the reader reads, i.e., the story itself, not the author. And these words and sentences are assumed to be entities in the fictitious communicational setting in which the reader puts himself. It might be added in passing that there is some essential similarity between lying and communicational narration.⁴⁰ By lying one creates (or tries to create) a false reality. But one also creates at the same time a false communicational setting in which the addressor is one’s alter-ego. One who lies pretends to be the alter-ego he creates. This alter-ego is the addressor in the created communicational setting. The lie is discovered when this pretense breaks down. After the preceding comments on Hamburger’s conception of Erzählung as an antithesis of Aussage and on the nature of the narratives in the communicational setting, we are now prepared to proceed for re-examination of the fundamental features of linguistic performance and the foundations of narrative theory. The function of words and sentences that creates the fictitious reality in the reader’s mind in a fictitious communicational setting of a narrator narration must now be related to the function of words and sentences in a real communicational setting, in order to abstract the essential characteristic of linguistic performance from the communicative function of language. 40 The comparison between fictional discourse or text and lies is a common theme in studies in the philosophy of language on fiction: see, for example, Macdonald [1954] 1992: 208, 210; Gale 1971: 336; Searle [1975] 1979: 67. Kuroda does not cite any of these texts [EN].

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4 A poetic theory of narration 4.1 An act of linguistic performance in the communicative function might be described as follows: the addressor expresses the content of a mental act of judging, wishing, etc. in a linguistic form, say, sentence; the addressee perceives the linguistic form either by hearing it or reading it, and understands its meaning and the content of the addressor’s mental act. Thus communication succeeds. So far as successful communication is concerned, this description of linguistic performance would be valid and there would be no need to try any further to separate out what is more essential and what is incidental in this. But for our present purposes, we must pay special attention to the following aspects as the most fundamental in the chain of the processes that constitute linguistic communication. This is the fact that a sentence that is made to exist as a real entity in this world evokes a meaning, or to use a more general phenomenological term, an intentional abject, in the consciousness that is attentively conscious of the actualized sentence. Let us call this function of a sentence vis-à-vis consciousness the objective function of a sentence. The objective function of a sentence may in fact be considered as a special case of the similar function to be attributed to any objects of perception. On a certain level of comparison, then, language is like any objects of perception. A red apple placed before attentive consciousness, for example, necessarily evokes a perceptive image of a red apple in the consciousness. In the communicative use of a sentence, the speaker uses a sentence exactly because he knows that the sentence evokes a meaning in the hearer’s consciousness, just as he knows that if he puts a red apple in front of someone, it evokes a perceptual image of a red apple in that person’s consciousness. In an act of communication the objective function of a sentence is accompanied by the speaker’s intention that he transmit the content of an act of judging on his part, i.e., the intention of evoking the same mental object in the hearer’s consciousness as he has. But from the point of view of analyzing the function of a sentence in use, this aspect of “good” intention on the part of the speaker is merely incidental. The fact that a red apple evokes the perception of a red apple is the fundamental characteristic that determines the functional relationship between a red apple as a real entity and human mind. This relationship is independent of any intention of anyone who might put an apple in front of someone else. Likewise, the objective function of a sentence is the fundamental characteristic that determines the functional relationship between a sentence actualized as a real entity and human

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mind. It is independent of any intention which anyone might have who is responsible for the actualization of this sentence as a real entity.

4.2 Let us now return to narrator stories, stories told by a narrator. A story is set in a false communicational setting, and it creates a false reality in the reader’s mind. The sentences of the story play a double role. They connect the real world in which the reader exists and the imaginary world in which the communication takes place. These sentences exist in this world as printed letters. They are sentences materialized in this world. As such they exert the objective function on the reader’s consciousness. And it is due to this objective function that the story creates a false reality in the reader’s consciousness. On the other hand, they are assumed to represent sentences materialized in the fictitious communication setting. As such they are interpreted as communicating the message from the narrator to the addressee thanks to their objective function. The reader knows, with the help of his faculty of imagination, that the effects the objective function produces in his consciousness parallel those imagined to take place in this fictitious world. This analysis shows that the objective function of the sentence can be separated from the communicative function of the sentence. A sentence considered as materialized in the imaginary world of the story exerts (or is imagined to exert) its objective function on the addressee in the communicative act of the narrator, that is, the objective function is an aspect of the communicative function of the sentence. The sentence on the printed page, as a real entity in this world, has the objective function with respect to consciousness in this world, the reader. But this objective function in this world is not accompanied by the communicative function. Otherwise the reader would have to take the narrative as a personal message addressed to him.⁴¹ This objective function of a sentence of a narrator story with respect to the reader, however, is dependent, in a sense, on the potential communicative function of the sentence. The reader’s knowledge of the possibility of its communicative function allows him to imagine an imaginary communicational setting in which the objective function of the sentence is activated within its communicative 41 See chapters 4 and 5, where Kuroda introduces a distinction between the intended hearer and the bystander, who is able to understand who the intended hearer is. The reader, here, is in the position of bystander [EN].

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function. The function with respect to the reader of the sentence as a sentence of the story is, then, to set the reader’s imagination to work to simulate the effects of the objective function of the sentence on the imaginary addressee⁴² in its communicative function, and create an imaginary event (state of affairs) in the reader’s consciousness. We might simply say that the objective function of the sentences of the narrator story, with the help of the faculty of imagination, which puts them in an imaginary communication setting, creates the fictitious reality of the story. To have a sentence exert its objective function, it must be materialized in this world. In a communicational setting, one materializes a sentence as a representation of the content of one’s mental act (judging, etc.). But a communicational setting is not a necessary condition for materialization of a sentence. Thanks to the faculty of imagination, one can imagine a communicational setting and materialize a sentence which is imagined to be materialized in that imaginary communicational setting. The sentence then represents the content of a mental act in some imaginary consciousness, that of the narrator. If sentences are codes for communication (given the faculty of imagination) these two ways of materialization of sentences would exhaust the possible forms of the human use of language. Then the study of linguistic performance could be reduced to the study of communication, supplemented with that of straightforward imagination based on reality.

4.3 However, there is no logical necessity that the materialization of sentences is uniquely combined with the communicative act. Whether such a necessity is imposed on human language or not is an empirical question. And this is a question that is solved trivially. No elaborate deductive procedures, no involved systems of conceptualization, are necessary for the solution. It is only a matter of presenting straightforward evidence that language can be used without any real or imagined communication setting. Non-narrator narration is such evidence. But this question is perhaps not one that is trivially asked. This is because it might appear that linguistic performance is necessarily an act of communication in the familiar sense of the word. As a consequence even the logical possibility that the objective function of the sentence is essentially independent of its com-

42 See Todorov [1966] 1981: 153 (le lecteur imaginaire: “the imaginary reader”) and Barthes [1966] 1981: 16 (le narrataire: “the narrate”, first use of the term) [EN].

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municative function might not be entertained, until evidence that it is the case is brought forth before us. Nor is the evidence by any means deeply hidden. The omniscient narrator has been haunting literary critics for decades. But perhaps to dispel this ghost convincingly once and for all might not appear trivial, until it is recognized that it is not logically necessary to connect linguistic performance and communication. In order to break up this vicious cycle, then, it would be necessary to scrutinize linguistic performance in the communicative function of language, and abstract from it those factors which are accessory in the characterization of the functional relationship that holds between the sentence and the human mind in linguistic performance. By so doing, we have tried to achieve a conceptual understanding of linguistic performance in connection with narration. We see the unifying characteristic of linguistic performance in meaning-realizing acts and their material correlate, the objective function of materialized sentences. Narration, then, is a materialized linguistic product whose objective function creates an image of reality in the reader’s consciousness. A sentence as a linguistic product exerts the objective function on the reader, evokes a meaningrealizing act in his consciousness, and creates the image of a reality. This created reality is a (fictitious) state of affairs or event. But it is not necessary that this image of a state of affairs be contained in someone else’s mind as the content of a mental act of judging, etc. If linguistic performance is not communication, linguistic competence or grammar cannot be bound up with the communicative function of language, either. This is the lesson for grammatical theory that we learn from the study of narrative theory. More specifically, consider sentences in narration which have a linguistic characteristic that makes them non-assertions, like those in erlebte Rede or the sentence with zibun in Japanese which we discussed earlier. Such a sentence, as a real entity on a printed page, evokes a meaning-realizing act in the reader’s consciousness owing to its objective function. This meaning-realizing act generally creates an image or knowledge of an event in the reader’s consciousness. In this respect, the objective function of a sentence in narration is the same as that of a sentence in discourse or in a narrator story. But there is no real or imagined “addresser” or “narrator” in whose consciousness the same image of an event is the content of a mental act of judging etc. and who represents it by the use of the sentence in question. Take, for example, the Japanese sentence with zibun. Reading this sentence we obtain an image or knowledge of an event, but we do not assume the existence of any consciousness which has judged the occurrence of this event and communicated it to someone. Simply the sentence creates in us the image or know-

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ledge of the event. This and this much is the function of the sentence vis-à-vis the reader. But once such knowledge of an event is created we can reflect on it and make it the object of a mental act, say, of imagination of an event. A mental act of recognizing an event takes the form of a judgment, and its content can be represented in the form of a sentence. Thus, in our example from Japanese, we might express our knowledge of the created event by asserting that when Bill hit him, John was standing by Mary and he was conscious of Mary’s standing by John, either reflectively or unreflectively. But this assertion is not the same as the original sentence that created in our consciousness the knowledge of the imaginary event described in this assertion.

4.4 In this section I shall deal with an objection that might be raised against the preceding analysis of narration. One might object to the claim that a non-assertive sentence in narration does not originate in a mental act (i.e., does not represent the content of a mental act of the addressor) by saying that it represents the content of a mental act of the author. The author must, one might say, have the image or knowledge of the event that is represented by a sentence he writes. This question involves a terminological issue as to what we mean by a mental act. Thus, the real issue is not whether this objection is literally upheld or not, but rather to understand the nature of “a mental act” which this objection refers to. With this in mind we shall compare the role of the author in non-narrator narration with that of the author in narrator narration and of the addressor in communication. It seems advisable to begin with the case of narrator narration. In this case the sentence plays a double role. As an imaginary entity in an imaginary communication setting, it is to represent the knowledge of an event in the narrator’s mind. The author as consciousness in this world relates to this sentence as a real entity, and knows the effect of its objective function in this world. This objective function in this world, with the help of the faculty of imagination, points to the imaginary event which the objective function of the same sentence is imagined to point to in the imaginary world. Thus, it is claimed, the author relates to the sentence essentially in the same way as the reader does. The only difference is that in the reader’s consciousness the imaginary event is created through the objective function of the sentence, while the question, which is a psychological one, as to how the image of the imaginary event has come into existence in the author’s consciousness cannot be answered within our present concern. But once this

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phenomenological relationship between the objective function of the sentence and the imaginary event is established, the knowledge of the latter, either in the reader’s or the author’s consciousness is grounded on the former; the meaningrealizing act corresponding to this knowledge is based on the objective function of the sentence. In fact, it is precisely because the reader can relate to the imaginary event by means of the objective function of the sentence in the same way as the author that the author writes the story and can expect the reader to understand what he intends him to understand. Next, consider the case of communication. In this case, too, the sentence plays a double role, but in a different way from the preceding case. The addressor’s act of judging establishes knowledge of an event. A sentence is formed to express this knowledge. But the sentence as a real entity in this world also exerts its objective function on the addressor’s consciousness and evokes a meaning-realizing act, creating knowledge of an event. These two pieces of knowledge must, however, be identical in a successful communication in which the addressor does not feel his expression infelicitous. Of course, this description is not meant to represent a psychological causal relationship among the various factors mentioned. The question as to how this functional relation among the event, the judging, and the sentence comes into existence as a real psychological event cannot be answered here, but it is not relevant for the phenomenological analysis of this functional relationship itself. Here again, with respect to this functional relationship, the addressor relates to the sentence essentially in the same way as the addressee. The only difference is that in the addressee’s mind the knowledge of the event is created by the objective function of the sentence. The objective function of the sentence evokes the same meaning realizing act in the addressee’s consciousness as in the addressor’s, creating knowledge of an event. So long as the communication is successful, this knowledge of an event is the same as that in the addressor’s mind, i.e., as the content of the addressor’s act of judging. In fact, it is precisely because the addressee can relate to the event by means of the objective function of the sentence in the same way as the addressor that the addressor communicates with the addressee by means of the sentence. Note that in the previous case of narrator narration, the problem of the identity of the knowledge created by the act of judging and that created by the objective function of the sentence in the addressor’s consciousness (i.e., the problem of felicitousness) does not arise, because the act of judging is imagined to take place in the narrator’s imaginary consciousness, not in the author’s real consciousness, and because the objective function of the sentence in this world does not relate to the narrator. After these considerations on the cases of communication and narrator narration, the relevant factors and their relationship in the author’s conscious-

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ness in the case of non-narrator narration should be clear. A sentence exerts the same objective function on the author as it does on the reader. The author knows the effect of this objective function and his knowledge of the imaginary event is grounded on the associated meaning-realizing act. The author relates to the sentence in the same way as the reader does. Only, in the reader’s mind the knowledge of the event is created by the objective function of the sentence, through the associated meaning-realizing act, while the question as to how the knowledge of the event has come to the author’s consciousness cannot and may not be answered within our present concern. It is precise1y because functionally the reader can relate to the imaginary event by means of the objective function of the sentence in the same way the author does that the author can write the story. If there is said to be a mental act of the author the content of which is represented by a sentence in non-narrator narration, such a mental act now appears to be either the meaning-realizing act associated with the objective function of the sentence, or a real psychological process as the result of which the functional relationship among the imaginary event, the sentence that creates it, and the author’s mind is established. The meaning-realizing act, however, takes place in both the author’s and the reader’s consciousness. The sentence might as well be said to represent the content of this act in the reader’s mind if one should say that it does so in the author’s mind. Besides, to say that the sentence represents the content of the meaning-realizing act would be a tautology, simply meaning that the sentence represents its meaning. Furthermore, this tautological statement is valid, if at all, for the cases of communication and narrator narration, too. The presumed real psychological process in which the functional relationship between the imaginary event and the sentence is created is, if at all, an object of psychological study and not of descriptive phenomenology. A corresponding psychological process may also be inquired into with respect to communication or narrator narration; it is the process as the result of which the network of the functional relationship linking the (real or imaginary) event, the sentence and the acts of judging and meaning-realization comes into existence in the addressor’s or in the author’s mind. But such a process is not, I believe, to be considered as a mental act, in the sense of an intentional act. To conclude, one cannot say in general that a sentence in narration represents the content of a mental act, either in real or in imaginary consciousness, in the usual sense of this phrase. If one should stretch the meaning of the phrase to make it applicable to a non-assertive sentence in narration, then the phrase is equally applicable to an assertive sentence in communication or in narrator narration in the same stretched sense, and consequently ambiguously, in the proper sense and in this stretched sense.

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The stretching of the meaning of the phrase does not bring us any significant generalization that would allow us to characterize sentence use in narration in terms of mental acts.

4.5 To summarize, we recognize the conceptual essence of linguistic performance in the meaning-realizing act and its transcendent correlate, the objective function of the sentence. Language (in the sense of linguistic performance) is conceptually independent of its communicative function. It may not even be said in general that language involves mental acts in the sense that a sentence is an expression of the content of a mental act in consciousness, real or imagined. In the communicative function of language a (declarative) sentence is assertive. As Hamburger points out, some (declarative) sentences are grammatically characterized as nonassertive, i.e., not usable in the communicative function. Those sentences phenomenally represent the antithesis of assertion, hence Hamburger’s opposition Erzählen vs. Aussage. This antithetic opposition is essentially identical with Benveniste’s histoire vs. discours.⁴³ To recall, Genette synthesized Benveniste’s antithesis by assuming that histoire is a special subcategory of discours. This amounts to the conceptualization of language on the basis of its communicative function. In this conceptualization the concept of discours develops dialectically from itself to its synthesis with its negation; linguistic performance is thus discours. In our view, on the contrary, the communicative function of language only characterizes Aussage or discours. The objective function (and its transcendental correlate, the meaning-realizing act) is the basis on which the antitheses Erzählen and Aussage, or histoire and discours, attain their conceptual synthesis. Thus, in this view, the concept of histoire develops dialectically from itself to its synthesis with its negation; in this sense one might say: linguistic performance is histoire!⁴⁴ 43 See Ch. 2, p. 67, n. 21 [EN]. 44 One consequence which emerges from the difference in these conceptualizations is this. If linguistic performance is discours, so far as possible, a linguistic product should be accounted for as the result of discours, not as histoire. Thus, although Hamburger does not seem to attempt any conceptual unification of her antitheses, Erzählen and Aussage, it is remarkable that she wishes to count mathematical, scientific or logical propositions in Aussage, and tries to account for them by means of das theoretische Aussagesubjekt [the theoretical statement-subject]. To quote: “Der reinste Fall der theoretischen Aussage ist der mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche oder logische Gesetzesatz. Der Satz etwa ‘Parallelen schneiden sich im Unendlichen’ ist so ‘objektiv’allgemeingültig, dass ein Aussagesubjekt nicht vorhanden zu sein scheint. Denn es kommt bei

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Recalling that the opposition Erzählung vs. Aussage might be compared with the contrast poiein vs. legein, we may call the narrative theory grounded on this conception of linguistic performance a poetic theory of narration.⁴⁵

dem mathematischen Satz weder auf das Aussagesubjekt an, das den Satz jeweilig ausspricht oder schreibt, noch auf das des Mathematikers, der ihn erstmals aufgestellt hat. Dennoch ist es vorhanden, aber nicht als ein individuelles, sondern  – entsprechend der Allgemeingültigkeit des Aussageobjekts – als ein interindividuellallgemeines, d.h. alle denkbaren Aussagesubjekte meinendes, von denen keines vor dem andern ausgezeichnet ist” (Hamburger 1968: 40). This would be a natural account of theoretical propositions if linguistic performance is conceived as discours. But if linguistic performance is conceived as histoire in the sense specified earlier, then so far as possible, a linguistic work should be considered as histoire, not as discours. Unless the sentences, say, in a mathematical treatise grammatically force us to assume that they are set out in a communicational setting, the treatise can (in fact, should) be considered as histoire, not as discours. We do not need the theoretische Aussagesubjekt any more than the omniscient narrator [AN].  – EN: “The purest instance of the theoretical subject is the statement of a law in logic, mathematics or the natural sciences. For example, the statement ‘Parallel lines intersect in infinity’ is so ‘objectively’ universal that no statement-subject seems to be present. For in the mathematical law the prime importance lies neither in the statement-subject who says or writes the proposition, nor in that statement-subject represented by the mathematician who first establishes the law. Nevertheless the statement-subject is present, not as an individual one, but rather – corresponding to the universality of the statement-object – as an inter-individual, general one, i.e., one intending all conceivable statement-subjects, of which then none is distinguished rom the others” (Hamburger [1968] 1993: 37). 45 This theory of narration rejects the notion of omniscient narrator in the sense that it rejects the assumption that a narrative is necessarily a discourse by the narrator. It does not of course contradict the existence of narratives by narrators, even by those who might be qualified as omniscient. Furthermore, a narrative may be partially narrated by a narrator. That is, some sentences of a narrative, or even only some constituents of sentences (e.g., clauses modifying a noun), may be attributed to narrators of various sorts, without, however, the entire narrative being attributed to a narrator or narrators. A non-narrator story in the sense that it contains sentences outside the framework of discours may thus still contain local narrators, who are responsible for some sentences and/or constituents of sentences in the story. The clarification of the notion of narrator and its relation to “point of view” needs separate treatment [AN].

Chapter 4 Some thoughts on the foundations of the theory of language use¹ The terms “use”, “purpose” and “function” can be, and, I believe often are used interchangeably – at least in part. One may talk about the purpose, use and function of language, and one may claim or deny that the essential use, purpose or function of language is communication.² In such a context one might be taken as advocating, or rejecting, the same opinion, whether one used “use”, “purpose”, or “function” in formulating one’s statement. In this paper, however, I would like to draw a clear distinction between the term “function” on the one hand and “use” and “purpose” on the other. I do not intend to sanction any particular uses of the word “function”; nor do I propose to legislate its proper meaning. I believe, however, that we do need to distinguish clearly between the notions of “use” and “purpose” and a concept for which I believe the term “function” is not a misnomer. The conceptual clarification I have in mind becomes necessary, in fact, if we want to talk about the “essential” use, purpose, or function of language. What one takes to be “essential” depends on one’s frame of reference. In general, it would be easier to determine the “essential” use or purpose of language in a more limited frame of reference. For example, the “essential” use and purpose of language in the army might be to transmit orders; the “essential” use and purpose of language for comedians might be to convey jokes and puns, etc. The secret intelligence operator for the state might primarily be interested in the ways speech inadvertently reveals tendencies in individuals’ beliefs and ideologies. Naturally, we would not generally be interested in occupying ourselves with such trivial, uninteresting, or perverted cases. One usually discusses the use or purpose of language without setting up such particular contexts. In this case one is interested in the “essential” use or purpose of language in human society or for the human species.

1 This paper was presented at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) symposium on discourse and syntax, 18–20 Nov. 1977 [AN]. – EN: The theory of language use could also be termed pragmatic. However, Kuroda does not use the term. For a presentation of the relations between linguistics and pragmatics, see Ch. 5, pp. 119–120. 2 An allusion to Searle [1972] 1974: 16: “The purpose of language is communication in much the same sense that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood”. This sentence is quoted with a commentary in Chomsky 1975: 55–59. On the Searle-Chomsky polemic, see Introduction, pp. 9–13, and Ch. 5, pp. 120–122 [EN].

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As human society varies and changes, the use and purpose of language might also vary and change. To understand the use or the purpose of language in society we need to understand society; to determine the “essential” function of language in society, we need to understand society theoretically. If there is anything conceptually interesting to discuss about the use and the purpose of language in the broad context of human society in general, one cannot deal with it without reference to social theory. And if what we are concerned with is the “essential” use and purpose of language in the broadest context, for the human species in general, we will have to make value judgments with respect to the historical development of the human species and human culture; we would ultimately need the philosophy of history as a theoretical framework to make such judgments. The phrase “the essential function of language” might also be employed in the same relatively restricted or broad contexts as those just discussed. But the frame of reference with respect to which I propose to use the phrase “essential function of language” is quite different in nature from those mentioned above. I do not have in mind functions that language serves in various human endeavors in society or in activities of human consciousness. I am interested rather in those functions of language that make it or let it serve its purposes and achieve the effects that it does in its various uses. I am not concerned with the function(s) of language in the sense relative to other juxtaposed or superordinate human faculties or institutions – that is, in the sense of what role language plays in human activities, mental or social, or in human organizations. What concerns me is rather a question internal to language, namely, what are the characteristics of the ways in which language functions; what are the functions of language that make language language, that make language function as language? For the purposes of the present paper I propose to reserve the term function of language for this sense. The term “use” or “purpose” of language can substitute for “function” in the other usage. If the sense of the term “function of language” is specified in this way, the phrase “essential function” could be, or would in fact have to be, understood without appeal to value judgments concerning human faculties or institutions other than language. In fact, I will later propose that we use the phrase “essential function” in such a way that a function of language is said to be more essential than another if the latter presupposes the former, that is, if the former is a necessary component of the latter. Thus, we agree to understand “essential” simply in terms of logical precedence, on the basis of an analysis of the functions of language. What I am proposing may sound like an autonomous theory of language use. That is in fact what is intended in a sense, or, if not a theory for now, then an essay to be written in the spirit of such a theory. The functions of language that underlie

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language use, i.e., that make various uses of language possible, are to be determined, analyzed and put in order according to their logical relationships within the analysis, which is purportedly methodologically independent of our understanding of nonlinguistic matters such as society and history. Such autonomy might well be illusory and deceptive, protected only by hidden presuppositions. But what can be presupposed may not be brought to our understanding unless what presupposes it is first understood. I shall return to this point later, but for the moment I shall take the position that we can study the functions of language while abstracting away from the significance of the various roles that language plays in society and in human activities. Language is most commonly considered to be a means of communication, to be, in fact, the system of communication par excellence. It is commonplace to assume that the essential use and purpose of language is communication.³ I do not intend to examine the validity of this claim in this paper. For present purposes it suffices, and it is necessary, to note that language indeed serves this purpose, and to determine the factors involved in this aspect of the functioning of language. Communication, in the commonly understood sense, involves the addressor and addressee. The addressor sends a message to the addressee. The message is encoded in a common code shared by the addressor and the addressee. In linguistic communication, the code is the common language of the addressor and the addressee, and the message is carried in the form of linguistic text, that is, with obvious idealization, a sequence of sentences in the language. The addressor and the addressee may also be called the speaker and the hearer, respectively, although the message may not be transmitted in oral speech. Linguistic communication can serve different roles depending on the types of message to be communicated. Here one is dealing with the familiar problem of classifying speech acts,⁴ although, as I shall claim shortly not all speech acts involve the communicative function of language in the strict sense of the term. The speech act of stating or asserting might be considered to be the most basic of the ways in which the communicative function of language manifests itself. I will later make a serious qualification to this assessment. But let us accept this initially plausible position for now, and examine the communicative function of language in making a statement or assertion. Assume that the speaker makes a statement by uttering the sentence “the window is open”. Now, we are familiar with the distinction drawn by Austin between illocution and perlocution,

3 See again Searle [1972] 1974: 16; Chomsky 1975: 55–59; Chomsky 1977: 102–103 [EN]. 4 On the taxonomy of speech acts (illocutionary acts), see Searle [1976] 1979: 1–29 [EN].

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between what we do in saying something and what we do by saying something.⁵ I assume that the communicative function of language, in the technical sense in which I want to understand the term in this present context, concerns illocution, not perlocution. Perlocutionary effects are effects of successful linguistic communication, effects of what the communicative function has accomplished. Assume, for example, that upon hearing the sentence “the window is open” the hearer reaches for the window and closes it, and that, in fact, this is what the speaker intended to bring about when he made his statement. Getting the window closed is considered to be a perlocutionary effect. Now, the distinction between illocution and perlocution is familiar, but where to draw the line between them might be a controversial matter. Without concerning myself with justification for the moment, I will draw the line as narrowly as possible on the side of illocution. Thus, with Searle, I assume that “I may make a statement without caring whether my audience believes it or not but simply because I feel it my duty to make it”, and that I achieve the intended illocutionary effect if (or, rather since) the audience understands what is stated. “[The illocutionary effect] consists simply in the hearer understanding the utterance of the speaker.”⁶ Return to our example. Upon hearing the utterance “the window is open”, the hearer might look at the window and confirm that the window is indeed open, that is, that what the speaker believes to be true is indeed true. In contrast, the hearer, when he hears the utterance, may not be in a position to confirm directly whether or not the window is indeed open. He may have some reason to doubt that it is in fact open, and he may not believe that it is open even after he hears and understands what the speaker says. The speaker, then, may not succeed in achieving his aim of getting the hearer to believe that the window is open, if this is indeed, as is most likely, what he hopes to achieve by saying what he says. But what the speaker fails to achieve here is a perlocutionary effect, not the intended illocutionary effect. The hearer understands what he says, or what he intends to mean in saying what he says, and this is the intended illocutionary effect. Abstracting away the possibility of insincerity on the part of the speaker and of suspicion on the part of the hearer, then, successful communication of a statement or assertion takes place as follows. The speaker holds a belief, a proposition that he believes to be true, and utters a sentence that represents it; the hearer, by

5 See Austin 1962 [AN]. – EN: Austin [1962] 1975: 98–101 (distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts; definition of locutionary and illocutionary acts), 109 (definition of perlocutionary act). 6 Searle 1969: 46, 47 [AN]. – EN: The context is a critique of the definition offered by H. Paul Grice of “non-natural meaning”, a definition based, according to Searle, on a confusion between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.

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understanding what is said, now believes that the speaker holds that belief, that is, the belief that the expressed proposition is true. The hearer may or may not be convinced that the speaker’s belief is valid, but inasmuch as the speaker gets the hearer to know that he (the speaker) holds that belief, he succeeds in communicating his belief to the hearer. However, I would like to claim eventually that making a statement or assertion with a declarative sentence is not a canonical example of communication between the speaker and the intended hearer, between the addressor and the addressee. In the line of thought that will gradually be developed, issuing an order will serve as a less ambiguous (though not totally unambiguous) example of communication in the strict sense, in the sense we are now concerned with. Assume, then, that the speaker A issues an order to the hearer B by uttering “close the window”. B, understanding the order, now knows that A wishes the window to be closed. Let us call this optative proposition W. But this is not what the order is all about. By ordering B to do something, A has created an institutional fact, to use Searle’s term.⁷ This implies, we might say, that a certain relation is established between A and B so that if B does not obey the order certain consequences would follow from his disobedience. Let us express the proposition expressing this relation R(S, H, W), or simply R, whatever that might be exactly. Here S and H stand for the speaker and the hearer, in our example, A and B. Thus, in issuing an order, A believes R to hold, as well as W. These are not yet sufficient to characterize the order, though, for an order does not legitimately establish itself as an institutional fact until it is understood as such by the hearer, or at least, until the speaker believes that it is so understood. Thus, when the speaker sincerely believes that he has issued an order, he must hold the belief that the intended hearer believes that the speaker believes W and R. Using the symbols bs and bH for “the speaker believes...” and “the intended hearer believes...”, respectively, we have the following list of propositions that are held in the speaker’s belief system: W, R, bHbSW, bHbSR. Now, the hearer, understanding the speaker’s order, believes that the speaker believes that an order has been issued. This is not the same as the hearer himself believing that an order has been issued. In our example, B may believe, for one reason or another, that A does not have the authority to issue an order to him. In that case, the hearer himself does not believe that R holds. But as long as he understands the speaker’s speech act of ordering, he believes that the speaker believes that an order has been issued. So, the hearer, understanding the speaker’s order, believes that the four propositions listed above are held by the speaker. The relevant necessary content of the hearer’s belief system is: bSW, bSR,

7 See Searle 1969: 50–53 [EN].

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bSbHbSW, bSbHbSR. The issuing of the order, then, has the effect of getting these beliefs produced in the intended hearer’s, i.e., B’s, mind. We might describe this situation in somewhat more general and abstract terms. When A issues the order, A holds a belief, or, let us say, a proposition P. From what has been said, one might take the conjunction of W and R as P. But this conjunction may not be sufficient to adequately characterize the state of affairs corresponding to A’s issuing of the order. In order not to commit ourselves inadvertently to an insufficient analysis, let us simply say that P entails W and R, without further attempting to analyze P. But, now, whatever P might be exactly, P must, we assume, entail bHbSP since when the speaker sincerely believes that he has issued the order he must hold the belief that the intended hearer believes that he holds the belief that the order is issued. By understanding A’s order, the hearer B comes to hold the proposition bSP, which, then, entails bSbHbSP. The communicative function involved in issuing an order, then, might be assumed to consist in getting the belief bSP and hence also bSbHbSP produced in the intended hearer’s mind. But, now, assume that there is a bystander who hears A issuing the order to B and understands the order. What does it mean that the bystander understands that the order is issued? The bystander understands the order in terms of exactly the same belief, bSP and hence also bSbHbSP, produced in his mind, as the intended hearer does! As far as the matter of understanding speech is concerned, issuing an order has the same function with the intended hearer as with the bystander. We must conclude, then, that the communicative function of language involved in issuing an order does not consist simply in getting someone to understand the relevant beliefs of the speaker’s, but rather in getting the intended hearer to understand them. The conclusion sounds trivial, and indeed is trivial as long as one sees in it only the specification of the necessary role of the intended hearer. The crucial feature of this conclusion in the following discussion lies rather in its other aspect, namely that we can abstract from the communicative function involved in issuing an order a subfunction which induces the same effect in the bystander as in the intended hearer.⁸ Let us compare the case of issuing an order with that of making a statement. One might assume, we have noted, that the communicative function involved in making the statement “the window is open” consists of getting the hearer to hold the belief that the speaker believes the proposition that the window is open.

8 The term bystander is used by Erving Goffman; see Goffman 1963: 91: “[…] the term bystander will be used to refer to any individual present who is not a ratified member of the particular encounter in question, whether or not he is currently a member of some other encounter”. However, there is no evidence that Kuroda got the term from Goffman (source: Susan Fischer, personal communication, 6 Oct. 2011) [EN].

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Letting Q now represent this proposition, the communicative function of making this statement would, then, be to produce bSQ is the mind of the hearer. But notice that, as in the case of issuing an order, the same effect is produced in the mind of any bystander who happens to hear the speaker utter the sentence and understands it. Thus, if the communicative function of language, a function that characteristically relates the addressor to the addressee, is involved in making a statement, then the function of getting someone to believe that the speaker believes what he means in saying what he says cannot alone constitute this communicative function. We seem then to find ourselves in the same situation with regard to making a statement as we do in the case of issuing an order. But there is a decisive difference between these two cases, or so I claim. Making a statement in the strict sense does not involve the intended hearer, i.e., the addressee. In this respect, making a statement in this strict sense must be clearly distinguished from the speech act of informing, and the comparison of these two cases would help us understand the nature of statement. The act of informing is necessarily directed toward the intended hearer, or the addressee. This is reflected linguistically in the fact that the verb inform takes two complements, a direct object and an indirect object.⁹ Assume that the speaker says “I inform you that the window is open”. Let Q again stand for the proposition that the window is open. To understand this utterance involves not only coming to believe that the speaker believes Q, i.e., to hold the belief bSQ, but also coming to believe that the speaker believes that the intended hearer believes that he (the speaker) holds the belief Q, i.e., coming to believe bSbHbSQ. We might analyze the speech act of informing in a parallel fashion to that of ordering. We assume that the utterance “I inform you that the window is open” corresponds to a proposition, call it P. Whatever P might be exactly, P entails Q, and, furthermore, we assume, P entails bHbSP. The hearer’s understanding the utterance “I inform you that the window is open”, then, involves his coming to believe bSP, and, consequently, bSbHbSP, too. In contrast, what the speaker does in saying what he states does not involve getting a particular person to believe that he believes what he states. Chomsky’s example of his “making a speech against the Vietnam war to a group of soldiers

9 Rectified sentence. Kuroda asserts that the verb inform must take the indirect object, probably through a false analogy with the verb tell (“I inform you…”, “I tell you…”). On the other hand, in the following example, the subordinate clause “that the window is open” only appears to be direct: there is an underlying proposition which becomes clear when pronominalized (“I informed you of it”) [EN].

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who were advancing in full combat gear” is a case in point.¹⁰ Insofar as any of the soldiers understood what Chomsky stated, and as native speakers of English they should have, we must say that Chomsky’s speech fulfilled the function of getting them to believe that Chomsky believed what he stated. (In reality, there is of course the problem of soldiers possibly doubting Chomsky’s sincerity, but that is beside the point for our present concerns.) But in stating what he stated, Chomsky did not intend to hold any of the soldiers responsible for getting to believe that he believed what he stated. All the soldiers were bystanders. Consider our earlier example “the window is open” in the following context. The master of a mansion is entertaining guests in a room, and some servants are attending them. The master now says, not particularly addressing anyone: “the window is open”, and one of the servants, hearing what the master says, goes to the window and closes it. The master might well have expected that exactly what has happened would happen. He gets the window closed, as he has intended. But we say, with Austin, that he has done so by saying what he has said, rather than in saying what he has said.¹¹ Furthermore, all who hear the master say what he says and understand it come to believe that he believes that the window is open; it would be reasonable to say that for any particular one of these people, the master does not get him to hold this belief in saying what he has said, but he gets them to hold the belief by saying what he has said. Those who have heard him are all, guests or servants, bystanders. There will arise obvious difficulties in applying to actual utterance situations this intended distinction between making a statement in the strict sense, which does not involve the intended hearer, and the act of informing, which necessarily involves the intended hearer. For present purposes, however, I am not particularly concerned with such difficulties. It is enough for us to establish the need for the separate categories corresponding to distinct types of languagefunction; where to draw the line, or whether one can in fact draw a clear line to locate every utterance token¹² on one or the other side does not concern me. But here again I am inclined to maintain that the line must be drawn as narrowly as possible on the side of illocution. Thus, the addressee in the usual sense of the term is to be regarded as the addressee or the intended hearer of a particular 10 Chomsky 1975: 61–62 [AN]. – EN: Chomsky’s goal, in this example, is to show that it is pointless attempting to explain the meaning of an utterance according to the intentions of the speaker in relation to the hearer. See Introduction, p. 11. 11 In other words, it is a matter of a perlocutionary effect and not of the intended illocutionary effect [EN]. 12 The expression designates the phonic or graphic sign (token) corresponding to the type of utterance (type). The type/token opposition stems from Charles S. Peirce and was taken up, at the time Kuroda was writing, notably by John Lyons (see Lyons 1977: 13–18 and passim) [EN].

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utterance in the technical sense intended here only if the speaker makes him the addressee in saying what he says. When one is talking to another, without any obvious bystander listening, one does not necessarily make that other person the intended hearer in saying what one says (i.e., one does not, for example, have to say “I inform you…”) since on the pragmatic level, one can achieve the same effect just by saying what one says. To have a second person pronoun as the direct or indirect object of a performative verb¹³ is not the only way to indicate the addressee in locution.¹⁴ In Japanese, for example, the use of style markers and honorifics¹⁵ would make it almost inevitable for the speaker to encode some information about the addressee in everyday, face-to-face, conversation; consequently, the possible schism between the addressee in the usual sense and the intended hearer in the sense considered here might be quite unlikely in usual conversational situations thanks to the syntax of conversational Japanese. Be that as it may, we recognize a difference between the functions of language involved in the act of stating on the one hand, and that of informing and ordering on the other. The function that is involved in informing and ordering is the communicative function in the proper sense. The function involved in making a statement is contained as a subfunction in the communicative function. Put differently, if we abstract away from the communicative function the function of identifying the intended hearer, we are left with the function that is involved in making a statement. I propose to call this latter function the objectifying function of language, for this is the function of language which gives objective expression to a belief of the speaker, the content of the speaker’s mind. Note that as far as the objectifying function is concerned, the distinction between the intended hearer and the bystander is irrelevant. We must keep in mind that the concept of intended hearer has its basis in the objectifying function of language. A proposition P corresponding to the issuing of an order or an act of informing has the peculiar characteristic that P entails bHbSP. This might be called the characteristic of epistemic reflexivity via the intended hearer. Understanding a proposition, whether it has this characteristic or not, concerns only the objectifying function. The function of identifying the intended 13 Rectified sentence segment; see supra n. 9 [EN]. 14 In Austin’s sense (syn.: locutionary act) [EN]. 15 “Style” should be understood here in the sense of the “discursive style” or “conversational style” proper to the Japanese language. Japanese speakers use different language levels and discursive styles according to the social status, age and sex of the person to whom they are speaking (and potentially the person spoken about). As their name indicates, honorifics (forms of address, affixes applied to verbs or nouns, sentence endings…) are used to honour the person in question. The study of such forms is one of the favoured objects of Japanese sociolinguistics [EN].

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hearer is a separate function based on the understanding of the proposition and its relevant characteristic. Incidentally, the function of language involved in the act of thinking in words¹⁶ can, I claim, be assumed to be the objectifying function, at least at the present level of discussion; for the speaker may be considered to be an indispensable bystander in every locutionary act, and thinking in words is the case where the speaker (i.e., the thinker) is the only hearer, a bystander-hearer.¹⁷ An exception to this is when the thinker addresses himself as “you”, in which case the communicative function is involved; but this is a split-ego situation. I am not going to pursue this topic here. Having isolated the objectifying function of language from the communicative function, I shall now proceed to claim that this function is in turn built on still another function of language, which I have called the objective function of language in earlier works.¹⁸ In these works, I have made claims to the effect that the communicative function of language, alone or combined with the function of the faculty of imagination,¹⁹ does not provide an adequate account for all types of narratives. I have identified the function that makes narratives in non-communicational settings possible as the objective function, and claimed that this function is more basic than the communicational function of language in the sense that the latter presupposes the former; that is, the communicational function consists of the objective function plus whatever additional factors are involved in characterizing it as communicational. But I have not until now been concerned with analyzing the communicative function of language, and have not identified the objectifying function as an independent function which is contained as a necessary component in the communicative function. What I now claim is that the objective function, which can serve as an independent function, is presupposed by, that is, is a necessary component of, the objectifying function. Thus, as far as our analysis goes, the objective function is the most essential function of language (in the sense of “most essential” specified in the introductory section), and underlies the objectifying function, which in turn supports the communicative function.

16 An allusion to the Searle-Chomsky polemic; see Chomsky 1975: 55, 59, 60–62, and Ch.  5, pp. 120–122 [EN]. 17 This point will be elaborated on in Kuroda (in preparation) [AN]. – EN: See Kuroda 1980, and in this volume, Ch. 5. 18 Kuroda 1974a, 1975 or 1976a [AN]. – EN: See, in this volume, Ch. 2, pp. 68–69, and Ch. 3, pp. 93 and passim. 19 See, in particular, Ch. 2, p. 69, and Ch. 3, pp. 94–95, 96 [EN].

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This claim is an automatic consequence of conclusions reached in the earlier works, where the objective function is identified, and the discussion of the preceding pages, where the objectifying function is isolated. I will here give only the most cursory explanation of the objective function of language and refer the reader to the articles cited above for details. The communicational theory of narration, which attempts to account for narratives in terms of the communicative function of language alone, would assume that a narrative is told by a narrator. The character of the narrator may vary. First, the narrator may be a real person, communicating his real experience to the reader. This is the case of an autobiography, and we have a real communicational setting. Second, a narrative can take the form of autobiography and yet be fictional; an imaginary figure narrates his imaginary experience – direct or indirect. In this case the faculty of imagination allows us to put ourselves in a communicational setting. Finally, if one cannot identify any figure inside a narrative as a narrator, one still assumes the existence of a narrator who transcends the world described by the narrative, but whose experience and judgment the narrative is assumed to represent. One could develop various theories about the relationship between such a theoretical narrator and the author of a narrative, relating the former in one way or another to such notions as the implied author or author’s persona.²⁰ In the perspective of the present article, however, the crucial characteristic of this “communicational theory of narration” (the term used in my earlier papers) can, or must, be located in its tie with the objectifying function, rather than with the communicative function of language. Remaining essentially within this conceptual framework, one does not have to assume that a narrative is necessarily addressed to an intended hearer, in the sense specified earlier. The core of the theory is the assumed existence of a narrating agent. A narrative is assumed to be a product of the objectifying act of the narrator. Opinions concerning the role of the audience or the reader can vary. This view may still be called communicational, a narrative being assumed to be the product of an act of communication, in a broad sense, directed toward hearers in general, either intended or bystanders. The position that is opposed to this view of narration, the poetic theory of narration, advocated in my earlier papers quoted above,²¹ assumes that not all narratives may be interpreted in such a communicational framework. The supposition of a narrator who objectifies the content of his consciousness in the form of 20 See Booth [1961] 1983: 70–75, 151, 157–159, and Ch. 3, pp. 74–75, n. 9. For the genealogy of the concept of the implied author, see Kindt and Müller 2006 [EN]. 21 See Ch. 3, pp. 93 and 101.

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a narrative is quite unnatural, especially in certain types of modern fiction where the inner experiences of multiple protagonists are simultaneously depicted. The function of language in such fiction cannot be accounted for in terms of the communicative or the objectifying function. I have thus identified the function that makes such use of language possible as the objective function of language, the function such that an attentive consciousness cannot fail to respond to objectively materialized sentences and make out of them whatever sense can be constructed from them, without any necessity of recognizing or hypothesizing the existence behind those sentences of a consciousness objectifying what it perceives or judges. This position can be plausibly supported, I would suppose, on general epistemological or phenomenological grounds, but my justification for it was more narrowly limited, in that it was based on purely linguistic considerations. I share with earlier scholars like É. Benveniste and K. Hamburger the conviction that there exist certain grammatical features that put some uses of sentences, mostly in writing, outside the realm of speech discourse in the usual sense.²² However, I have, I believe, introduced a conceptualization of the functions of language that is different from either Benveniste’s or Hamburger’s. To recapitulate, then, we have the following system of the functions of language: (the adressing function) the communicative function

(the judging function) the objectifying function the objective function

The broken lines indicate whatever factors are needed to complement a subordinated function (e.g., the objective function) so that a superordinate function (the objectifying function) might be formed. These factors are not independent functions or language. The objective function is the most essential function, in the sense specified earlier; language may be used simply for the sake of this function, while the other functions of language presuppose this function. Let us at this point return to the issue, mentioned earlier, of whether the logical precedence relation obtained by analysis alone in fact justifies the term “essential”. Let us consider this question by way of an analogical example.²³ 22 Benveniste 1966; Hamburger 1968 [AN]. – EN: Benveniste [1966] 1971; Hamburger [1968] 1993. See Ch. 2, pp. 66–68, and Ch. 3, pp. 78–83. 23 I owe the idea of the following analogical argument to Patrick Murray. I am grateful to him for the discussions we have had on the topic treated here and related ones, which have greatly helped clarify my thoughts. Needless to say, he is not responsible for any inadequacy in the opinions expressed in this paper, nor do I imply that he agrees with me in everything discussed

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Consider the automobile. An obvious function of the automobile is to transport people (and material; but for the sake of simplicity, let us restrict only to people.) Call this function the transportative function of the automobile. But for the transportative function to be effective, it is necessary that people to be transported be confined and cut off from the outer environment. Let us call this the habitative function of the automobile. In fact, some of the design features of automobiles are intended solely to ensure habitability. Now, the transportative function presupposes the habitative function. Moreover, the automobile is used occasionally for the habitative function alone. Many of us must have had the experience of trying to get a few hours sleep in a Volkswagen or Renault. But there are also automobiles which are specifically designed for camping and there are even people who simply live in such vehicles all the time. And yet would we characterize the habitative function as the essential function of the automobile? We can imagine a society in which each individual is assigned a van in which he is supposed to live and transport himself. Furthermore, it may happen that most of the members of this society use their vans for the most part only as living facilities. With respect to such a society the habitative function of the automobile might reasonably be said to be more essential than the transportative function. But simply because such a society is a logical possibility, would we say that the essential function of the automobile is habitative? Wouldn’t we rather say that the habitative use of the automobile is marginal and aberrant in our society, and that a society in which automobiles function as living-quarters is idiosyncratic as a human society? The function of the automobile which we have identified as the habitative function should not count as an independent function of the automobile, only as a functional constituent abstracted by analysis. Thus, in order to determine whether an apparently independent function of a structure or a system is in fact an independent function or not, it is not enough merely to find instances in which the structure or system actually does perform that function or could conceivably perform it; one has to assess whether such use is aberrant or not, and that assessment requires judgments in terms of social and historical theory. Applied to the study of language, our present concern, this line of thought leads to the conclusion that the analysis of the function(s) of language cannot achieve meaningful results independently of social theory and, ultimately, of the philosophy of history. These fields provide the necessary principled framework in which to assess whether or not a specific observed use of language is aberrant in a given society or, ultimately, for the human species itself.

here [AN]. – EN: Patrick H. Murray, author of a PhD thesis in linguistics supervised by Kuroda (see Murray 1980).

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The automobile is an instrument designed by rational agents for specific purposes; language is not. Analogical arguments by themselves can hardly justify any conclusion about language. Neither would I, however, defend in the abstract the position that the analytical study of the function(s) of language can be carried out autonomously, with absolutely no reference to social theory or the philosophy of history. But we must distinguish two different issues here. We may well assert that we must depend on social theory and the philosophy of history in distinguishing aberrant from nonaberrant uses of language in specific societies or for the human species in general; yet it remains true that we need a theory of language use that determines the mutual dependence relations among various functions of language, quite independently of their value in society or the species life, so that we may determine what is more essential in a logical or structural sense. I am not in a position to examine in detail the factual question as to what place noncommunicative functions of language occupy in human life, or even in a larger evolutionary perspective. I would, however, like to suggest that noncommunicative functions are far more significant than one might ordinarily assume. In the first place, human language is often compared with animal communication (or vice versa) and animal communication is usually conceived of in terms of the addressor-addressee paradigm. Further, it often seems to be assumed that human use of language is an extension of animal communication, even though the code employed in human communication, it might be conceded, is complex to an extent qualitatively different from any found in animal communication. Such a conception might favor the prevalent belief that the function of human language is communicative. But it might be more appropriate to say that the communicative function of language is characteristically human. Consider the celebrated example of bee dancing. A bee communicates to other bees the location of nectar that it has found by a specific way of dancing. But the bee, it would seem fair to assume, has no means of selecting a particular addressee in this manner of communication. The “communication” involved here is a totally public act, consisting in objectifying whatever relevant information is formed and stored in the inner system of the bee. It is not a communication between “individuals” in the proper sense, between the first person and the second person. The informant bee cannot select a particular individual bee or bees to inform them of the location of the nectar so that they are alone held by the informant bee to be responsible for receiving the relevant information. A parallel situation may even be observed in human language use. Previously I have referred to the act of issuing an order as a canonical example of the communicative function of language, as opposed to the objectifying function. But even issuing an order, I would now like to claim, may not count as communicative, in the sense intended here, under certain circumstances. Imagine we are

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soldiers in the barracks of a battalion. A public address system is heard to broadcast the following message: “Sergeant Smith, report to Lieutenant Scheisskopf immediately”. This “order” concerns Sergeant Smith, but it might be assumed that properly speaking it is not addressed to Sergeant Smith. The order does not make Sergeant Smith alone responsible for getting Sergeant Smith to report to Lieutenant Scheisskopf. If you know that Sergeant Smith has missed the announcement and yet fail to bring the order to his attention, you are taken to be equally responsible for any consequences that might follow from his failure to obey the order. One might say that the order has been issued to the entire battalion, and that the entire battalion is the addressee. But what is claimed to be crucial here is that the distinction between the second and the third person is obliterated in the official life of the battalion as depicted in this example. Under such circumstances the distinction between the intended hearer and the bystanders is also obliterated, and the notion of addressee becomes redundant. Soldiers do not exist as free agents or as human beings, but only as pieces in an organization, and the will of the command of the battalion deals only with the organization. Orders are the commander’s will objectified in language – no less, no more. In the human setting (given the meaningful sense of the word human) the communicative function has commonly and rightly been characterized in terms of addressor and addressee, that is, in terms of the first person and the second person. But the above observations indicate hopefully, that the notion of the second person as the addressee of communication should not be taken for granted in the general perspective of “communication” to the extent that it usually has been. The notion of addressee in communication, in the sense equated with the second person and contrasted with the first and the third person, is perhaps more of a characteristic of human linguistic communication than of communication in general. This recognition will give less credence than before to the view (derived from a conception of human language as an extension of animal communication²⁴) that the basic function of language is communicative – either in the commonly understood sense or in the particular sense defined here. In my earlier works, I have been concerned with the objective function of language solely on the basis of a specific narrative style characteristic of modern fiction, perhaps at first blush quite a narrow basis on which to argue for the independent status of the objective function of language. This narrow choice was quite deliberate. I intended to establish from a purely linguistic point of view the independence of the objective function of language and the inadequacy of a theory of language use exclusively built on the communicative (and the objectify24 This understanding is obviously false for Kuroda, who agrees with Chomsky here; see Chomsky [1968] 2006: 58–84 and passim [EN].

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ing) function of language. To this end I took advantage of certain grammatical characteristics of a particular literary style. But once the independent status of the objective function of language is argued for in a formally clear setting, one can and must deal with the significance of this concept in the theory of language in a broader perspective and also from different points of view. Thus, we might take our discussion concerning the act of issuing an order one step further, and consider the linguistic basis of legal institutions in general. As far as mundane business inside a relatively small and concrete organization like a battalion is concerned, issuing an order might be accounted for at the level of the objectifying function of language, an order being a linguistically objectified reflection of the commander’s will. But when it comes to the question of legal decrees issued by a conceptually much more complex and abstract organization like a modern state, a theory of language use defined exclusively in terms of the communicative or the objectifying function must rely on an abstract rational agent, whether the state, the people, or the majority, in order to account for the sentences of the legal decrees as representing the will of some agent however mysterious. If one admits, in contrast, that language may be used at the level of the objective function, without assuming that the meaningful use of a sentence is necessarily an expression of a mind behind it, one may assume that members of the society – legislators, government functionaries, and common people, each with his own role in the society – simply relate themselves to legislated sentences as meaningful objective entities as they understand their linguistic and social meanings. One may also consider the significance of the “magical” use of language in primitive rituals along similar lines, although the cultural presuppositions involved are quite different from those of modern society.²⁵ To conclude, my feeling is that each of the three functions of language I have isolated in the preceding discussion manifests itself under various circumstances in every stage of the cultural and societal development of the human species. To assume that the objective function is only the manifestation of an aberrant use of language in the peculiar technique of a small number of writers in a corner of bourgeois society is, it seems to me, as misplaced as to claim that the communicative use of language is characteristic of the modem, individualist society. But these are topics for empirical and theoretical research in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics. They lie outside the scope of the philosophical and phenomenological analysis of the function of language, to which objective this paper has been restricted. 25 Possible allusion to the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, often considered to be ground-breaking in the field of pragmatics (see notably Malinowski [1923] 1949). Kuroda had some knowledge of it (source: Susan Fischer, personal communication, 13 Oct. 2011) [EN].

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In summary, the present work is a continuation of, or a supplement to, my earlier work cited above. In the earlier work I was concerned with the identification and characterization of the objective function of language as opposed to the communicative function, which was left unanalyzed. In the present paper, this latter function is further analyzed and the concept of the objectifying function is abstracted from it. The objective function is now claimed to be a constituent of the objectifying function, and its relation to the communicative function is determined more exactly than before. In this study, little has been said directly about discourse or syntax.²⁶ But what I have been concerned with is intended to serve as a foundation for the study of language use, or of that which results from the use of language, discourse in the broad sense. As I mentioned earlier, the recognition of the objective function as an independent function of language goes hand in hand with the comprehension of syntactic characteristics found in a certain prose style. As hinted at above, I believe that the distinction between the communicative and the objectifying function also has a variety of formal reflexes in grammar – perhaps more prominent syntactically or lexically in some languages than in others. The study of such grammatical characteristics of distinct language functions will, I am confident, help identify different types of language use and different types of discourse and will determine their proper characteristics. But I have to leave such empirical studies of language use for the future, and for now I have presented only some thoughts on the foundations of the theory of language use.

26 Allusion to the subject of the 1977 symposium [EN].

Chapter 5 The reformulated theory of speech acts: Toward a theory of language use 1 In the recent history of linguistics and the philosophy of language the study of language use has suffered unfortunate developments. To be sure there have been strong voices advocating the importance of the study of language use. But these voices have not harmonized well with those stressing the study of language structure. In the first place, the interest in the study of language use climaxed in the form of the theory of speech acts by J. R. Searle, following the work of J. L. Austin, in the British tradition of the philosophy of language.¹ But the ultimate objective of Searle’s theory of speech acts was to account for meaning in the framework of this theory. This is a reductionist program according to which the abstract structure of meaning is denied autonomous justification, and is to be accounted for in terms of the purposes it serves in language use. The theory of speech acts and its precursors were developed largely before the advent of the Chomskian revolution in linguistics, which restored the legitimacy of the autonomous study of language structure, including the study of meaning in the Anglo-American circles. Generative grammarians who have followed Chomsky, either theoretical allies or adversaries of the orthodoxy, have not cared for the speech act theorists’ program to account for meaning in functional terms, in terms of the speaker’s intention and the effects of speech acts in the hearer. The theory of speech acts, however, has made its influence felt among generative grammarians. The word “performative” has become a favorite technical term in linguistics. Quite a few papers have been written by linguists dealing with performatives and speech acts, and an anthology of such articles has recently been published.² However, the interest of those linguists who have been concerned with speech acts and performatives is not directed to construction of a theory of language use for its own sake. Rather, they are concerned with the categorization and codification of speech acts and 1 See Austin 1962; Searle 1969 [AN]. 2 See Cole and Morgan (eds.) 1975 [AN]. – EN: This volume includes articles by specialists in linguistics and the philosophy of language focusing on speech acts through two major themes: the performative hypothesis (with contributions by Alice Davison, John R. Ross, Dennis W. Stampe, etc.) and conversational implicatures (contributions by H. Paul Grice, Richard A. Wright, etc.). John Searle’s article on indirect speech acts and David Gordon and George Lakoff ’s on conversational postulates (see infra n. 4) were also published or republished in this volume.

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illocutionary force in syntactic and/or semantic terms. Proposals have been made as to how the underlying structures of sentences represent correctly various illocutionary forces of surface sentences. ³ Attempts have also been made to account for certain illocutionary forces in the conceptual framework of logical semantic theory by means of so-called conversational postulates,⁴ conceptual variations on logicians’ meaning postulates. These proposals and attempts might be characterized as syntacticization and semanticization of the speech act theory, apparently a reductionism going in a direction opposite to that aimed at originally by the theory of speech acts. But it is worth recalling that the interest in the theory of speech acts by generative grammarians has intensified in the atmosphere of increasing clamor against the distinction between competence and performance, of language structure and language use. It is indeed remarkable that one linguist has recently taken on the occasion of discussing performatives to remark that serious questions about the ultimate validity of the distinction between language structure and language use are raised.⁵ In spite of the apparent syntacticization and semanticization of the theory of speech acts, the circle may ironically be closing again to come back to the original point, reductionalist functionalism.

2 In a more immediate context, recent disputes between Chomsky and Searle make the need of an adequate theory of language use felt urgently. In those disputes, Searle takes the position that “the purpose of language is communication”, that language is “essentially a system of communication”.⁶ Responding to this conception of language, Chomsky refers to a “very respectable tradition [...] that regards as a vulgar view the ‘instrumental view of language’ as ‘essentially’ a means of communication, or means to achieve given ends”. In this tradition “language, it

3 Allusion to the performative hypothesis; see Introduction, pp.  8–9; Ch.  2, pp.  60–63; Ch.  3, pp. 72–77 [EN]. 4 See Gordon and Lakoff 1971. Conversational postulates are defined as rules known to the speaker-hearer allowing the relation between the primary illocutionary act and the secondary illocutionary act to be explained in the case of indirect speech acts [EN]. 5 Langacker 1975: 375. Langacker’s misgivings are misplaced. The examples he cites, if correctly analyzed, reveal inadvertently how the study of language use is dependent on the study of language structure. See Kuroda, “On functionalism  – a discussion” (in preparation).  – EN: This article was not been found. It does not appear in the bibliography published on the UCSD Linguistics Department website. 6 Searle [1972] 1974: 16, 30 [AN].

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is argued, is ‘essentially’ a system for expression of thought”. Chomsky “basically agree[s] with this view”, but continues to state that “little is at stake here, given Searle’s concept of ‘communication’ as including communication with oneself, that is, thinking in words [...]”. Thus, Chomsky “agree[s] with Searle that there is an essential connection between language and communication once we take ‘communication’ in this broader sense”, although Chomsky considers this broadening of the sense of communication as “an unfortunate move [...] since the notion ‘communication’ is now deprived of its essential and interesting character”.⁷ Without an adequate theory of language use as a frame of reference, however, it is difficult to evaluate Searle’s and Chomsky’s position on these issues and their mutual reactions against each other. We cannot be sure how Searle’s claim that thinking in words can be justified as communication in the conceptual framework of the theory of speech acts, nor can we be sure how Chomsky can agree with Searle that there is an essential connection between language and communication once we take “communication” in Searle’s broad sense, at the same time thinking that this broadening of the sense deprives the notion of its essential and interesting character. What character of thinking justifies thinking to be conceived under the notion of communication? What essential and interesting character is deprived of the notion of communication if we so broaden the notion as to include thinking in it? In a different vein, for a number of years I have been concerned with the problem of what I called the nonreportive style, a prose style quite common in modern fiction.⁸ This issue relates to the problem of point of view in stylistics, and other scholars touched on the issue, naturally with some variations, among them, notably, É. Benveniste with his notion of histoire, which is paired with discours, and K. Hamburger with her notion of Erzählung, which is contrasted with Aussage.⁹ I argued in some detail why narratives in nonreportive style cannot be accounted for within the framework of the communicational theory of language use. I did not, however, relate my argument to the conceptual framework of Searle’s speech act theory. More specifically, I did not make it clear how the theory of speech acts fails to account for narratives in nonreportive style, or what position the theory of speech acts might occupy in an adequate theory of language use that can both take care of ordinary cases of speech acts and narratives in nonreportive style. In order to accomplish this unfulfilled task, I need to clarify the notion of communication in the conceptual framework of the theory of speech 7 Chomsky 1975: 56–57 [AN]. 8 Kuroda, 1973a, 1975, 1976a [AN]. – EN: See Ch. 1 and 3. 9 Benveniste 1966; Hamburger 1968 [AN]. – EN: See Benveniste [1966] 1971; Hamburger [1968] 1993. On Erzählung and Aussage, see Ch. 2, p. 67, and Ch. 3, pp. 80–81.

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acts or an extension of it. Thus, I have another opportune reason to start with Searle’s speech act theory, reanalyze it, and expand it so that we can absorb it in a more adequate theory of language use.

3 Central to the theory of speech acts is the notion of illocution, or more specifically, notions such as illocutionary act, illocutionary effect and illocutionary force. Typically, different sentence types correspond to different illocutionary acts. Uttering the declarative sentence “the window is open” is, basically, associated with an illocutionary act of stating; uttering the imperative sentence “close the window” is, generally, associated with an illocutionary act of ordering or requesting.¹⁰ The difference in the facts indicated by such examples as these seems clear enough, and the notion of different illocutionary acts, quite natural and nonproblematic. But it is not in perceiving the differences in speech acts, or in illocutionary effects, that the difficulty in understanding the theory of speech acts lies. Subtler discussions begin to become necessary when we try to understand exactly what is meant by an illocutionary act or effect, rather than differences in such acts or effects. Searle informs us: “The [illocutionary] effect on the hearer is not a belief or response, it consists simply in the hearer understanding the utterance of the speaker. It is this effect that I have been calling the illocutionary effect”.¹¹ Thus, when one says “open the window” and the hearer opens the window, this effect of getting the hearer to open the window is not the illocutionary effect of the utterance. The notion of illocutionary effect is paired with that of perlocutionary effect. Getting the hearer to open the window is a perlocutionary effect. If the hearer understands the speaker’s order or request, the utterance has performed the right illocutionary effect, whether the understanding of what the speaker has meant produces the ultimate intended effect or not. This distinction of illocutionary and perlocutionary effects seems fair enough so long as we are concerned with speech acts which generally involve intention to produce obviously nonmental effects.¹² The situation is less clear with speech acts that do not necessarily involve such intention. Consider the speech act of stating, say “the window is open”. One might utter this sentence with the inten-

10 The difference between an order and a request consists in the fact that the latter gives the hearer the option to refuse while an order does not [EN]. 11 Searle 1969: 47 (my emphasis) [AN]. – EN: See Ch. 4, p. 105, n. 6. 12 Meaning: behavioural effects [EN].

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tion of getting the hearer to close the window, and get that effect. In parallel with the preceding example, such an effect naturally counts as perlocutionary. But consider this sentence as a simple example of stating. The effect of this utterance on the hearer would be that he now knows or believes that the window is open. Is this an illocutionary effect? But illocutionary effect is “not a belief or response”. In fact, understanding the utterance “the window is open” is different from being persuaded to believe that the window is open. But is not a speech act of stating necessarily accompanied with the intention on the part of the speaker of getting the hearer to believe what he states? Not necessarily. To quote Searle: “I may make a statement without caring whether my audience believes it or not but simply because I feel it my duty to make it”.¹³ Thus, the illocutionary effect of stating “the window is open” is simply a matter of understanding the utterance of this sentence. But what does it mean to understand this statement? By understanding the statement, the hearer now knows, or believes, that the speaker believes that the window is open. Is this the illocutionary effect of stating? But this is again a belief! It might be possible to analyze minutely the psycho-physical processes or effects involved in understanding a statement so that we can conceptually separate the hearer’s mere understanding the utterance of the speaker from the hearer’s believing that the speaker believes what he states. But I fail to see how these possibly different effects can be independent of each other so that one may be brought about without being accompanied by the other. I fail to see, in other words, an obvious necessity of differentiating two different kinds of effects here as I do in differentiating the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects in the previous examples. Thus, at this level of discussion, remaining in the conceptual orbit of Searle’s theory of speech acts, I seem to have no way to effectively dissociate the illocutionary effect from a belief to be brought about in the hearer’s mind. There is nothing sacred about Searle’s words. Searle could have been somewhat infelicitous when he stated that “the [illocutionary] effect is not a belief or response”. And in fact, the kind of belief that is now associated with the notion of illocutionary effect has a characteristic feature; it takes the form of “the speaker believes...”. It is one degree higher in opacity, so to speak, than the current beliefs of the hearer.¹⁴ But I am going to propose a reinterpretation of the notion of illocutionary effect such that the belief in question which is for the moment associated with the notion of illocutionary effect in fact is not regarded as an illocutionary effect of the speech act of stating. 13 Searle 1969: 46 [AN]. 14 I have changed “of the speaker” to “of the hearer”, which seems more appropriate in this context [EN].

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4 It is often the case that somewhat atypical situations help us see distinctly different factors in the phenomenon under investigation that are not obviously differentiable in typical situations. I am here resorting to this familiar technique of investigation by introducing the role of the bystander (or bystanding hearer, to contrast it with intended hearer) into our consideration of speech acts. To speak of the role of a bystander in the speech act might sound almost self-contradictory. Is not the bystander by definition the one who has no role in the act? But it is, I claim, precisely the role the innocent bystander plays, or indeed must play, just by standing by, that reveals us a conspicuous, characteristic feature of the speech act. In order to discuss the distinction between the intended and the bystanding hearer, we should better begin with speech acts other than those making a statement. In fact, I shall eventually claim that the act of stating, in the strict sense, does not involve this distinction. Take the issuing of an order by uttering the sentence “close the window”. Issuing an order also involves certain propositional content, to use Searle’s term, though not necessarily following his analysis. We might say that in issuing the order the speaker comes to hold a belief, or proposition, P. P contains, among other things, the speaker’s optative belief that the way the world should be is such that the window will be closed¹⁵ by the intended hearer, or, we might say, P entails this optative proposition, W. In addition, the speaker knows, or believes, that his issuing the order results in an institutional fact, again following Searle’s terminology, which, we might say, puts the speaker and the hearer in a certain sociological relation so that if the hearer does not obey the order certain consequences would follow from it. Let us express the proposition representing this relation by R(S, H, W), or simply by R, where S and H stand for the speaker and the intended hearer, respectively. Whatever R might be exactly, we might say P entails R. Thus, in issuing the order, the speaker holds the belief P, and, consequently, W and R. In addition, and more importantly for our present concern, the order does not legitimately establish itself as an institutional fact unless it is understood by the intended hearer, or at least, the speaker believes so. When the speaker sincerely believes that he has issued an order, he must hold the belief that the intended hearer believes that the speaker believes the order is issued. In our example, the speaker holds the belief that the intended hearer believes that the speaker believes P. Using the symbols bS and bH for “the

15 I have changed “opened” to “closed” [EN].

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speaker believes...” and “the intended hearer believes...”, respectively, then, we must conclude that P entails bHbSP. The intended hearer understanding the speaker’s order believes that the speaker believes the order has been issued, i.e., that the speaker holds P. This is not the same as the intended hearer believing himself that the order has been issued. For some reason or other, the intended hearer might believe, for example, that the speaker does not have the authority to issue an order to him; he would not believe, then, that R holds. But so long as he understands the speaker’s speech act of issuing the order, he believes that the speaker believes P, i.e., the intended hearer holds proposition bSP. This proposition entails bSbHbSP. Now, assume that there is a bystander who hears the speaker issue the order and understands it. We can characterize the fact that the bystander has understood the order by exactly the same proposition, bSP. We must conclude, then, that as far as understanding an order is concerned, or as far as the illocutionary effect of the speech act of issuing an order is concerned, the issuing an order has exactly the same effect on the bystanding hearer as on the intended hearer. The consequent effects that follow from the understanding of an order of course can be, or generally in fact are, quite different for the intended and the bystanding hearer. The intended hearer has to decide whether to obey the order or not, the bystander does not. But such are certainly differences in effects that are not illocutionary, to follow Searle’s characterization of illocutionary effect. Whether we call such differences perlocutionary or not, we do not have to be concerned with them here. Consider, now, the speech act of stating. Take the example with “the window is open”. Call the proposition represented by this sentence Q. The speaker holds this proposition in his belief system. By understanding the utterance, the hearer, whether in the sense that the speaker is physically talking to him, or that he is simply overhearing him, comes to hold the proposition bSQ in his belief system. He may not necessarily come to believe Q. If he does, we might count it as a perlocutionary effect, certainly not an illocutionary effect. Thus, so far, the situation is exactly the same for the speech act of ordering and that of stating. The speaker believes P or Q, and the hearer, of whatever role, believes bSP or bSQ, respectively. It is, I take it, a conspicuous fact that if one is present at the scene of a speech act, then one is doomed to understand what is said, whether one is the intended hearer or not. One might say that the difference between the intended hearer and the bystander lies precisely in that the speaker intends the intended hearer to be a hearer. This is a truism. But if a particular person is intended as a hearer in the speech act, then anyone who understands the meaning of the speech act, whether the intended hearer or a bystander, understands this very fact. It is part

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of his understanding of the speech act. This is clear from the preceding analysis of the speech act of ordering. Both the intended hearer and the bystander hold the belief bSbHbSP, which means that both understand who the intended hearer is. The crucial difference between ordering and stating does not lie in whom the speaker intends to be a hearer of his speech, but precisely in the characteristics of the propositions corresponding to the utterances in question. While P, the proposition corresponding to the order “close the window”, entails, as I have claimed, bHbSP, no such entailment is involved with Q, the proposition corresponding to the statement “the window is open”. Understanding a statement does not involve any belief that some hearer believes that the speaker believes the proposition corresponding to the statement to hold. Thus, even if someone is a hearer (addressee) in the speech act of stating, in the physical sense that the speaker is talking to him in his act of speech, he is not the intended hearer of the illocutionary act in the sense that the illocutionary effect of the speech act, as a matter of the understanding the utterance, does not involve the identification of this hearer as a hearer. In contrast with the speech act of stating, the speech act of informing involves the intended hearer. This distinction is reflected in the syntactic fact that the verbs inform and tell require the direct or indirect object while the verb state does not.¹⁶ If the speaker says “I inform you that Q”, the one who understands it believes that the speaker believes the intended hearer (“you”) holds the belief that the speaker believes Q. In fact, the one who understands it believes more, that the speaker believes that the intended hearer believes he informs (has informed) him that Q holds. If we again denote by P the proposition corresponding to the propositional content of “I inform you that Q”, P, whatever that might be exactly, entails bHbSP. The one who understands the utterance of P believes bSP, which entails both bSQ and bSbHbSP. The distinction between the speech act of stating, which does not involve an intended hearer, and the speech act of informing, which involves the intended hearer, is thus rooted in the different characteristics of the corresponding propositions. Admittedly, where to draw a line between these categories is not an obvious question given actual instances of speech acts. For example, an utterance of the sentence “I love you” might be claimed to count as an instance of informing on the basis of the fact that it contains the pronoun “you”. Simply as a matter of understanding the sentence the one who understands this utterance is, it might be so claimed, supposed to believe that the speaker believes that the hearer, “you”, upon hearing it, believes that the speaker believes he loves “you”.

16 Rectified sentence. See Ch. 4, p. 108, n. 9 [EN].

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But, for now, what concerns us is the existence of the distinction between speech acts with the intended hearer and those without, not how to identify them in actual instances.

5 If the illocutionary effect of a speech act is simply a matter of understanding, as I assume it is, following Searle, we have found, somewhat surprisingly, that we seem to have to say that a speech act causes the same illocutionary effect in the intended hearer and the bystander. In other words, the illocutionary effect remains invariant under substitution of hearers, intended or bystanding. Given such a situation the standard-technique of conceptual analysis would be to abstract this contingent factor, i.e., who happens to be a hearer, away from the notion of the illocutionary effect and obtain a more essential concept. An effect requires its locus, which is, in our present case, a hearer’s mind. Abstracting the locus from the effect, we lose sight of the effect, but we are left with potential for effects, or effect-potential. Thus, I propose to say the following. The speech act brings about the illocutionary effect-potential. The illocutionary effect-potential is such that if an understanding mind is present in the sphere of the illocutionary effect-potential, the effect characteristic of the understanding this speech act is generated in that mind. The notion of illocutionary effect-potential is thus dependent only on the speech act of the speaker, not on the hearer, intended or bystanding. Searle’s original notion of illocutionary effect is decomposed into two factors, the illocutionary effect-potential and the presence of the intended hearer in this effect-potential. These factors combined produce the illocutionary effect in Searle’s original sense in the intended hearer. What then is the difference between the intended hearer and the bystander? To repeat, so far as the understanding of the speech act is concerned, we cannot differentiate them. In other words, they are equally subject to the illocutionary effect-potential. The crucial difference lies rather in the fact that the intended hearer is an indispensable element for the speech act of a certain type to be an intended speech act. Without the intended hearer, an order is not an order. Thus, we might be justified to call the effect caused by the illocutionary effect-potential on the intended hearer’s mind the illocutionary effect, and thus save the original notion. The illocutionary effect of a speech act, then, is a necessary component of that speech act, determined by its particular nature. In addition to informing,

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we may mention ordering and questioning (“I ask you whether...”) as examples of speech acts with the intended hearer. But a speech act may have no illocutionary effect, in our sense, for I assume that some kinds of speech acts do not involve an intended hearer. I assume that the act of stating, in the strict sense, does not have an intended hearer. Hence, we may not talk about the illocutionary effect of an act of stating, only the illocutionary effect-potential. Another example of a speech act that does not have an intended hearer is christening or naming.¹⁷ In principle, one can christen a ship without any audience; put differently, all present at a launching ceremony are bystanding hearers. In contrast to questioning, wondering is a speech act without an intended hearer. I would also assume that promising,¹⁸ in the strict sense, does not involve the intended hearer, but I will not elaborate on this point here. Although the illocutionary effect is not a necessary component of the speech act in general, just as the intended hearer is not, the illocutionary effect-potential is a necessary component of any speech act. Within the conceptual framework of Searle’s original speech act theory, an act may be conceived of as a perlocutionary act just to the extent that it produces perlocutionary effects, and it may be conceived of as an illocutionary act just to the extent that it is responsible for causing illocutionary effects. A speech act is, in fact, by definition illocutionary, and possibly in addition perlocutionary. In our conceptual framework, I now propose to call an act illocutionary in so far as it brings about illocutionary effect-potential. Then, as far as the term illocutionary act is concerned, what is an illocutionary act for Searle is an illocutionary act for us, and vice versa.

6 Let us now consider the case of “talking to oneself ” or “thinking in words” and then determine the nature of the notion “communication”. A characteristic feature of the speech act, to recall, is that it generates the illocutionary effect-potential. Another remarkable characteristic of the speech act is that the speaker himself understands what he says and means. Certainly, the speaker says what he means; how can he say what he means without understanding it? Isn’t it thus trivial and tautological to say that the speaker understands what he says and means? Perhaps trivial, but not quite tautological. Consider the case of issuing an order. The speaker issues an order because he intends to issue

17 See Austin [1962] 1975: 23 and passim [EN]. 18 See Searle 1969: 57–62 [EN].

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an order. When he issues an order he knows and understands what he does. But how does he understand that an order is issued? How does he understand the order? Not by having the intention of issuing it. An order is not issued unless it is issued, and the speaker understands that it is issued because he hears it issued. And how does he hear it issued? Because the speaker is in the sphere of the illocutionary effect-potential of his own speech act. In fact, it is a necessary characteristic of any speech act that the speaker is in the sphere of the illocutionary effect-potential of his own speech act. Ironically, every speech act necessarily has one bystanding hearer, the speaker, even though it may not have an intended hearer! The issuer of an order cannot later truthfully deny that an order has been issued, and thus an institutional fact has been created, because as an inevitable witness he understands what he said and meant. With the speech act of stating, the situation is basically the same. The speaker inevitably understands what he states. By hearing what he states he becomes responsible for the fact that he understands what he hears, just as the intended or bystanding hearer does. There is one difference between the speaker as a hearer and the intended or bystanding hearer. That is, the speaker-hearer may not doubt what he hears, i.e., he must believe what he, the speaker, states, not simply believe that the speaker believes what he states. That is, this is so, as long as we do not face the question of self-deception. But this difference between the speaker as a hearer and the intended or bystanding hearer is a matter of perlocutionary effects! It is now obvious how we deal with “talking to oneself” or “thinking in words”. It is a speech act with one hearer, an inevitable hearer, the speaker. And for this hearer, the speech act may not have to use sound as the medium. Somewhat ironically, thinking, in this sense, is the speech act par excellence. It is the speech act from which all contingent factors are abstracted away!

7 If thinking is the speech act par excellence, is it communication? It is commonplace to conceive of communication as involving the addressor and the addressee. Communication is transmission of information from the addressor to the addressee via common code. If we project this notion of communication in the theory of speech acts, built on the concept of illocution, we are led to identify the speaker as the addressor and the intended hearer as the addressee. Then, the speech act with the intended hearer, informing, questioning, ordering, may be considered as communication in this sense, but not stating, wondering, christen-

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ing. Thinking can be considered as communication, in this sense, with oneself to the extent and only to the extent, that it can be considered as informing to oneself, questioning to oneself, etc. and as noncommunication to the extent it can be considered as the speech act of stating or wondering, the thinker being the sole and indispensable bystander. This is in a way begging the question, as far as the question as to where to draw the line is concerned, but I believe thinking should be compared with stating and wondering as much as possible, rather than with informing and questioning, unless of course, it takes explicitly the form of informing to oneself, questioning to oneself. The speech act in general, in contrast, may be considered as communication in the broad sense in that it gets someone to understand what the speaker means in saying. In this sense the speech act is an act of communication as much for the bystanding hearer as for the intended hearer. Stating is communication in this broad sense. By getting oneself understood in the speech act, one lets one’s knowledge and will be partially revealed and objectified in the form of a system of beliefs in the hearers’ mind. This system of beliefs is shared by the hearers, intended or bystanding, and the speaker necessarily included as an indispensable bystanding hearer. This objectifying function is what makes the speech act communication in the broad sense. Then, thinking in general is communication in this broad sense to the extent that it reveals one’s knowledge and will to oneself in an objectified form. The broadening of the sense of communication in this way may strike one as tenuous. To recall, Chomsky considers our taking “communication” in Searle’s broader sense, which includes thinking as communication with oneself, as an unfortunate move, since, he believes, “the notion ‘communication’ is now deprived of its essential and interesting character”. It is not clear in my mind what Chomsky here sees as “essential” and “interesting”. To be sure, communication is commonly conceived of as involving the addressor and the addressee. An obvious interpretation of the notion of addressee in the conceptual framework of speech act theory is to take it as the intended hearer, which led us to our first, narrow sense of communication. But phenomena commonly referred to by the term communication do not, I believe, necessarily fall under this narrow conception of communication. To mention one example, bee dancing, a celebrated example of animal communication, seems better compared with the speech act of stating, a speech act without an intended hearer; if so, it counts as an instance of communication only in the broad sense. The broadening of the sense of communication may not radically conflict with common usage. Perhaps only its conceptual clarification is called for. Be that as it may, the question as to whether the notion “communication” is deprived of its essential and interesting character if it includes thinking as

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communication with oneself is not a meaningful question to be asked in the perspective developed here. If there is a question involved which is more than terminological here, the relevant one is whether “communication” is deprived of its essential and interesting character if it includes speech acts without an intended hearer, thinking in words among others.

8 To recapitulate, I have reworked foundations of Searle’s theory of speech acts by shifting emphasis from the illocutionary effect to the illocutionarv effect-potential. I have introduced the notion of bystanding hearer into the theory of speech acts, and characterized the speaker as an indispensable bystander. A speech act is an act of communication in the strict sense if it has the intended hearer. A speech act in general may be conceived of as an act of communication only if it is considered as communication as much for the bystanding hearer as for the intended hearer. Thinking in words in general can be considered as communication in this broad sense, as the speaker, or rather the thinker, is a bystanding hearer of this speech act. I have claimed in the previous works cited earlier that narratives in nonreportive style cannot be accounted for in the communicational theory of linguistic performance. This claim may now be translated into the present framework. Narratives cannot necessarily be interpreted as speech acts, or series of speech acts, by some speaker, or narrator, real or imagined. Put another way, narratives may not necessarily be communication, either in the narrow or the broad sense specified above. Thus, contra Chomsky, I cannot “agree with Searle that there is an essential connection between language and communication” even if “we take ‘communication’ in [the] broader sense” (including thinking as communication with oneself). We must stress that language is not communication in a more radical sense than Chomsky’s. The reformulated theory of speech act will have to be absorbed in a broader theory of language use that accounts for both narratives in general and speech acts of elementary types. The “poetic” theory of narration that I have elaborated in the earlier works cited has in effect accomplished this task, since it is intended to account for both narratives in communicational settings and those outside the communicational framework. In another, more recent article, I have isolated the functions of language involved in these categories of language use, and deter-

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mined their functional relationship.¹⁹ But the notion of communication was not related to the theory of speech acts in these earlier works. In view of the strong influence of speech act theory on the current linguistic thoughts, clarification of the notion of communication in the conceptual orbit of speech act theory is felt to be called for. A synthesis of the reformulated theory of speech acts and the poetic theory of narration is yet to be spelled out in detail, however. I must leave this task for another occasion.

19 Kuroda, “Some thoughts on the foundations of the theory of language use”, Linguistics and Philosophy, to appear. This article does not refer to speech act theory directly. It rather concerns the functions of language that underlie speech acts and other language use and make them possible – the objectifying function mentioned earlier being one of them. But there is some thematic overlap between this article and the present one. The distinction between the intended and the bystanding hearer, and that between stating and informing have also been treated in this earlier paper [AN]. – EN: See Kuroda 1979d and, in this volume, Ch. 4. Kuroda revisited speech act theory in Kuroda 1986 and 1989.

Chapter 6 A study of the so-called topic wa in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrence, and Faulkner (of course, in Japanese translation) The following paper, except for minor additions and stylistic improvements, was written about ten years ago, but has never been published. The purpose of the paper was, as mentioned in the first section, to present a case study, on the basis of a very limited, but hence well-defined scope, to show that the so-called topic wa¹ functions to represent a “double”-judgment. The notion of “double”-judgment² is derived from the Brentano-Marty theory of judgment.³ I now believe that the Brentano-Marty conception of double-judgment, which underlay the original paper, must be modified for our purpose. Brentano and Marty claimed that a double judgment (a categorical judgment) involves the recognition of the subject,⁴ which is a thetic judgment, but I now maintain that this analysis is not sufficient to characterize the categorical judgment. What is essential for the judgment is the apprehension of substance.⁵ I presented this modified view at the colloquium on Anton Marty’s philosophy and theory of language held at Freiburg, Switzerland, in December, 1985. The analysis presented below in fact fits better with this new interpretation of the notion of double judgment (or, categorical judgment) and I would like to refer the reader to my colloquium paper, “The categorical and the thetic judgment reconsidered”, which will appear in K. Mulligan (ed.), Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics: The Philosophy and Theory of Language of Anton Marty.⁶

1 Kuroda uses the term topic marker elsewhere: “I would like to take up again the particle wa in Japanese, which is commonly identified as a topic marker” (Kuroda 1979b: 75). Kuroda was always opposed to this manner of accounting for wa (see Kuroda 1979b; 1992); he put forward a detailed argument in Kuroda 2005. His basic theory is that the idea of topic is discourse-oriented and that the semantic approach to wa should take precedence over its functionalist-discursivist approach [EN]. 2 Translation of the German Doppelurteil, as opposed to einfaches Urteil (“simple judgment”). See infra n. 4 [EN]. 3 Franz Brentano (1838–1917), German philosopher and psychologist; Anton Marty (1847–1914), Swiss-German philosopher and student of Brentano, author of numerous contributions to the philosophy of language. Kuroda published several articles relating to Marty: see Kuroda 1971, 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1990 (the first and third articles are reprinted in Kuroda 1979c) [EN]. 4 Recognition is the translation of the German Anerkennen. The second act in categorical judgment is the affirmation (or adjudication, Zuerkennen) or negation (or abjudication, Aberkennen) of what the predicate expresses relating to the subject [EN]. 5 Act which is not identifiable with a thetic judgment [EN]. 6 Final preparation of this paper was done while the author was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by the Center, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the System Development Foundation. I am also grateful to Susan Fischer and Leslie Saxon for improvement in the text [AN]. – EN: Leslie Saxon, linguist, specialist of Athabaskan languages, former PhD student at UCSD (see Saxon 1991).

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1 In lieu of an introduction and a conclusion Let me only note here that in previous articles⁷ I compared the distinction between Japanese sentences with the so-called topic wa and those without it with the distinction between the categorical and the thetic judgment in the Brentano-Marty theory of judgment and grammar. What they talked about in terms of a distinction in judgments, I would regard as a distinction in meaning or semantic structure. Let us recall that Brentano considered a categorical judgment as a “doublejudgment”, consisting of a recognition of the subject, and a judgment that relates the subject to the predicate. My intention in this paper is to try to justify certain uses of wa by this characteristic of a “double”-judgment, although certainly not in the same sense as Brentano and Marty. I will take this to be a “semantic” characterization. It is another matter how this semantic characteristic helps explain pragmatic or discourse properties of wa, or vice versa.

2 In the following sections I shall study the stylistic effect of wa, or that of the lack of it, in the subject position of a quotative verb in passages from Tolstoi, Lawrence, and Faulkner in Japanese translation. By a quotative verb I mean here a verb whose object complement is a direct quotation. Since I assume most readers are not familiar with Japanese I will not quote our examples in Japanese. I will put in square brackets those subjects of quotative verbs that are translated by wa-phrases in our Japanese texts and in braces those subjects that are translated by ga-phrases. For example, if we have “‘…’, said [John]” in our English texts, we have “‘…’, to John-wa itta” as the Japanese translation, and if we have “‘…’, said {John}” we have “‘…’, to John ga itta” in Japanese translation. Let it be remembered that the interpretations of the texts given below are interpretations of the Japanese texts I use. Whether they are adequate interpretations of the original texts, or to what extent and in what sense they are so, is not our present concern.

7 Kuroda 1972b; 1976b; both papers are also reprinted in Kuroda 1979c. For the original work of Anton Marty on this matter, see Marty 1908; 1925 [AN]. – EN: See Kuroda 1972b; see also Kuroda 1992, which provides a summary.

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3 The first passage we analyze is from Leo Tolstoi’s War and Peace, Book II, Chapter 15. Nicolai Rostov, staying in Moscow on leave from his regiment is drawn one day into a card game with Dolokhov, who has recently proposed marriage to Sonya, Nicolai’s cousin, and has been rejected. Nicolai is losing 43 000 rubles. Sonya loves Nicolai, and he knows it; he doesn’t know how he feels about her. Dolokhov⁸ has decided to play until the score reached forty-three thousand, forty-three being the sum of his and Sonya’s ages. The following scene is when Nicolai, fallen to an unwonted bottom of gloom from a joyous life in Moscow, comes home to find the usual happy gathering of the family. To say “Tomorrow” and maintain a dignified tone was not difficult, but to go home alone, to see his sisters, brother, mother, and father, to confess and ask for money he had no right to after giving his word of honor, was terrible. At home they had not yet gone to bed. The young people, after coming home from the theater, had had supper and were grouped around the clavichord. As soon as Nikolai entered the ballroom, he was enveloped in the poetic atmosphere of love that prevailed in the house that winter and now, after Dolokhov’s proposal and Vogel’s ball, seemed to have grown heavier around Sonya and Natasha, like the air before a thunderstorm. Sonya and Natasha, looking pretty and conscious of it, in the light blue dresses they had worn to the theater, were standing by the clavichord, happy and smiling. Vera was playing chess with Shinshin in the drawing room. The old Countess, waiting for her son and her husband to come home, was playing patience with an old gentlewoman who lived in their house. Denisov, with sparking eyes and ruffled hair, sat at the clavichord, one leg flung out behind him, striking chords with his short fingers and rolling his eyes as he sang in a small, husky, but true voice a poem of his own composition called “The Enchantress”, to which he was trying to fit music.

“Oh, tell me, enchantwess, what power is this, Dwawing me to my forsaken lyre? My fingers stwumming the stwings in bliss, Setting my heart on fire” he sang in passionate tones, his black agate eyes flashing at the frightened but delighted Natasha. “Beautiful! Wonderful!” cried [Natasha]. “Another verse,” [she] said, not noticing Nikolai. “Everything’s still the same with them”, thought [Nikolai], glancing into the drawing room, where he saw Vera and his mother and the old lady.

8 Rectified sentence segment. Kuroda writes: “In his desperate mood he has decided to play”, where “he” refers to Nicolai. But in Tolstoi’s novel, Dolokhov is the one who decides to play until Nicolai’s debt reaches forty-three thousand, forty-three being the sum of his and Sonya’s ages [EN].

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“Ah! Here’s Nikolenka!” exclaimed [Natasha], running to him. “Is Papa home?” [he] asked. “I’m so glad you’ve come’” cried [Natasha], not answering his question, “We’re having such fun! Vasily Dmitrich is staying on another day for my sake! Did you know!” “No, Papa is not back yet,” said {Sonya}. “Koko, are you back? Come here, darling”, called the old {Countess} from the drawing room. Nikolai went to his mother, kissed her hand, and without saying a word sat down at her table and watched her hands as she laid out the cards. From the ballroom came the sound of laughter and merry voices trying to persuade Natasha to sing. “All wight, all wight!” cried [Denisovl. “It’s no good making excuses now! It’s your tum to sing the Barcawolle – I entweat you!” The Countess glanced at her silent son. “What is the matter?” [she] asked. “Oh, nothing”, [he] replied, as though sick of being continually asked the same question. “Will Papa be home soon?” “I expect so”. “Everything’s the same with them. They don’t know! What am I to do with myself?” thought [Nikolai], and he got up and went back to the ballroom. (Translated by Ann Dunnigan, New American Library)

In our text of the Japanese translation (M. Yonekawa’s Iwanami Bunko edition) the subjects of quotative verbs are all wa-phrases, except for two, the braced {Sonya} and {Countess} In the text, what are the stylistic effects of this contrast?

3.1 We may assume that the quoted passage as a whole represents Nicolai’s point of view. It is a description of the scene in the ballroom and the drawing room as reflected in Nicolai’s consciousness when he entered the ballroom and proceeded to the drawing room. As I interpret this passage from the Japanese translation, Nicolai’s consciousness was centered around Natasha as he walked into the ballroom. Nicolai heard Natasha’s voice “Beautiful! Wonderful!” and the ensuing utterances of hers (up to “Did you know!”) as his attention came to focus more and more on her, asking her a question and listening to her nonreply to it. But then came Sonya’s voice – “No, Papa is not back yet” – into Nicolai’s consciousness out of the field of his attention, which was followed by the voice of the old Countess from the drawing room. Then Nicolai went to his mother and watched her hands when he heard the merry sound from the ballroom. His attention was directed back to the ballroom. He saw Denisov as he cried “All wight, all wight!”. Then as his attention was drawn back to his mother, she asked him “What is the matter?”.

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3.2 Here we should distinguish three different categories of wa-phrases as the subjects of quotative verbs in our text. First, there are two occurrences of Nicolai as the subject of the verb think. These are two sentences where it is lexically explicit that the passage represents Nicolai’s point of view. In cases like this let us say that a wa-phrase is the subject of an inner process verb.⁹ Next, there are two instances in which the subject of a quotative verb is Nicolai, or more exactly in our text, the pronoun he referring to Nicolai (“‘Is Papa home?’ [he] asked” and “‘Oh, nothing’, [he] replied”). For these sentences there are no grammatical clues that they represent Nicolai’s point of view. It is a matter of literary (or stylistic) interpretation whether we take these as Nicolai’s point of view. I assume, to repeat, that the whole passage we are analyzing represents Nicolai’s point of view. (I grant, however, the possibility that the sentence “The Countess glanced at her silent son” can be interpreted as representing the Countess’ point of view, exclusively, or in addition to Nicolai’s.) This is the simplest and most natural point-of-view structure we can impose on the text. In the text there is no evidence, grammatical or otherwise, that forces us to assume that the two sentences with quotative verbs represent, for example, Natasha’s point of view, i.e., a description of the verbal events as they were reflected on Natasha’s consciousness. Nor is it necessary to interpret these sentences as a description given independently of the points of view of all the protagonists, in particular, of Nicolai’s (i.e., description from the narrator’s point of view, if you are willing to use such terminology). There is no reason to assume that the description of Nicolai’s stream of consciousness is interrupted by these sentences. So long as they are interpreted as representing Nicolai’s point of view, then, the subjects of these sentences (i.e., the subjects of the main verbs, ask and reply) are coreferential with the subject of the point of view that the sentences represent. Let us agree to say that a sentence (or, the subject of the main verb) is reflexive of the point of view if the subject of the sentence is coreferential with the subject of the point of view that the sentence represents. The above two cases are, then, those where the subject of a sentence with a quotative verb is (interpreted as) reflexive of the point of view. The difference between them is that in the first case the main verb is a verb of inner process like think, while in the latter the sentence in question represents an external event.

9 The term is borrowed from Hamburger, 1968: 72 and passim (De. Verben der inneren Vorgänge); Hamburger [1968] 1993: 81 and passim; Ch. 3, p. 81.

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We shall postpone further discussion of these two cases; let us now consider the remaining case. All the remaining instances of quotative verbs in our text are such that the subject of a quotative verb is not Nicolai, that is, reflexive of the point of view. For the moment, then, we consider only these instances of waphrases nonreflexive of the point of view.

3.3 From the interpretive analysis of the text given earlier, we may assume that in our text if a quotative verb is accompanied by wa-phrase nonreflexive of the point of view, the subject of the verb (or, more exactly, its referent) is an independent element of the content of Nicolai’s consciousness, independent of the event described by the quotative sentence itself. For example, consider the sentence “‘Beautiful! Wonderful!’ cried [Natasha]”. There took an event, Natasha’s crying “Beautiful! Wonderful!”. Natasha is a constituent of this event. This event was recorded in Nicolai’s consciousness; the image of this event, or the understanding of this event, was an element in Nicolai’s stream of consciousness. To the image, or the understanding, of this event corresponds a meaning which may be represented by a two-place predicate cry, whose first argument is Natasha (or, more exactly, a term standing for Natasha). Natasha (or the term standing for her) was contained as an element of this meaning; she (or her image, notion) was an element of this image, or this understanding, of the event. As such Natasha was an element in Nicolai’s stream of consciousness. However, when this event took place, Natasha (or her image, notion) had existed, and continued to exist, in Nicolai’s consciousness as a center of his attention, independently of the occurrence of this event, or independently of the creation of the image, or the understanding, of this event in Nicolai’s stream of consciousness. The sentence “‘Beautiful! Wonderful!’ cried [Natasha]” with wa attached to Natasha corresponds to this state of Nicolai’s consciousness in which the image (or notion) of Natasha played a double role. In contrast, in the case where the subject of a quotative verb is accompanied by ga, as in “‘No, Papa is not back yet’, said {Sonya}”, the image or notion of the subject was an element of the image, or the understanding, of the event represented by the quotative sentence itself, not independently of this event. It came into Nicolai’s consciousness only as an element of this event. The stylistic effect of the ga attached to the braced {Sonya} in the sentence mentioned just now is worthy of a note. As Nicolai entered the ballroom, Sonya was standing by the clavichord with Natasha. Thus, it is not that Nicolai did not really see Sonya. Nicolai, however, was, perhaps unconsciously, avoiding Sonya

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psychologically. He knew she loved him. But he must have had complex feelings towards the selfless Sonya. She would be the last person he would have wanted to face when he came home after that shameful disaster. In contrast, the simple, happy, cheerful sister, Natasha… – if only he had to face Natasha! This spontaneous psychological discrimination between Sonya and Natasha on the part of Nicolai drew his consciousness towards Natasha as he entered the ballroom. It is this attitude of Nicolai that is reflected in the different particles attached to Natasha and Sonya as the subjects of quotative verbs. Nicolai let Sonya into his attentive consciousness only as an element of perception of her voice: “No, Papa is not back yet”. One might say that the ga attached to {Sonya} is simply to be explained as a focus marker (focus in the grammatical sense,¹⁰ not in the sense of focus of attention). In other words, the sentence “‘Papa is not back yet’, said Sonya” can, one might say, be paraphrased here as “It is Sonya who said (answering Nicolai’s question to Natasha) that Papa was not back yet”. But, first, even if this interpretation is correct and ga is functioning here as a focus marker, the stylistic effect of the contrast between the wa attached to Natasha and the ga attached to Sonya remains intact. Second, it is doubtful that this sentence must be interpreted as a focus sentence answering the implicit question: “who replied to Nicolai’s question?”. There is here a given sequence of events. Nicolai asked the question of whether Papa was home, which is followed by Natasha’s and Sonya’s utterance. The problem posed to us (putting ourselves in the author’s place) is how to describe this sequence of events. And this problem is in principle independent of posing the question “who answered Nicolai?”. We can choose, then, between Sonya wa and Sonya ga as a felicitous expression to represent Sonya in the description of this sequence of events and of the way the events are reflected in Nicolai’s consciousness. If the focused meaning appears to be implied here, it could be accounted for as a derived consequence from the intended meaning of the sentence in the reader’s mind. Let us note, in fact, that Sonya would be followed by wa if the assumed function of Sonya in Nicolai’s consciousness were different. Suppose that Nicolai had turned his attention equally to Sonya as well. Assume, for example, when he saw Natasha running to him, he also directed his active consciousness towards Sonya, who was remaining by the clavichord, or perhaps was slowly walking towards him, smiling. Then, the sentence “‘…’ exclaimed Natasha, running to him” might be followed by “[Sonya] smiled to him” (Sonya wa Nikolai ni hohoemi kaketa). With this change in context (that is, with a change in the situation to be described) the quote “No, Papa is not back

10 In Chomsky’s sense of the word (see Chomsky 1969) [EN].

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yet” could (would be) followed by “said [Sonya] in place of Natasha” (Sonya wa Natasha ni kawatte itta).

3.4 Let us now turn to the case in which the subject of a quotative verb is reflexive of the point of view. We have two instances of this case in our text: “‘Is Papa home?’ he asked”, and “‘Oh, nothing’, he replied”. (As remarked earlier, however, the latter may also be interpreted from the Countess’s point or view.) It is unreasonable to maintain that the same analysis holds here as in the preceding case of wa-phrases nonreflexive of the point of view. For example, consider the first of our two sentences. One would not say that Nicolai’s consciousness had been directed towards himself when he asked whether Papa was home in the same sense that it had been directed towards Natasha when he perceived her exclaim “Ah! Here’s Nicolenka!” and run to him. The wa attached to Nicolai in our present example, then, would have to be justified on the basis of the fact that Nicolai is the subject of the point of view. This fact is not itself a component of the world of the story, the world the story is describing. Rather, it is a feature of the way the story is told.¹¹ Yet, so long as this sentence (“‘Is Papa home?’ [he] asked”) is interpreted as representing Nicolai’s point of view, some degree of self-awareness on the part of Nicolai is implied. Wa attached to Nicolai in the sentence may not be replaced by ga so long as this sentence is understood as reflexive of the point of view, i.e., so long as it is to be interpreted as representing Nicolai’s point of view. For this verbal act to be described from Nicolai’s point of view it seems unnecessary that Nicolai’s consciousness stands in a particular relationship with this event. If so, the meaning of wa in the sentence reflexive of the point of view may also be justifiable internally to the world of the story. Let us first consider this line of thought. We shall return to the possible justification external with the world of the story in 3.5 after we consider the case with an inner process verb think.¹² At the least, Nicolai’s asking whether Papa was home was a willful, self-controlled act of Nicolai. This may be compared with the case in which Nicolai was

11 The term story corresponds here to narrative and the way the story is told to narration. For a clarification of the terms story, narrative and narration, see Introduction, pp.  13–14 and n. 41 [EN]. 12 The distinction made by Kuroda between internal and external explanations in relation to the world of the story is fundamental and predicts numerous studies on the work of fiction. See, for example, Pavel, 1986; Olsen 2001: 107–215; Currie 2010 [EN].

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hypnotized and uttered the same question. In a description or this hypothetical scene the same sentence “‘Is Papa home?’ [he] asked” (he being accompanied by wa) may appear. But in such a case Nicolai is not the subject of the point of view and the sentence cannot be interpreted as reflexive of the point of view. Nicolai, naturally, is not in the content of Nicolai’s consciousness. In contrast, with the wa-phrase reflexive of the point of view the referent of the wa-phrase (Nicolai himself) may be said to be an independent element of the content of Nicolai’s consciousness, independent of the external event of his asking the question as reflected in his consciousness, though not in the same way as in the preceding case of the subject nonreflexive of the point of view. In the present case, this independence of the self as an element of the content of consciousness is purely a matter of, so to speak, the “logical” structure of the content of consciousness. To the extent that he was aware that he asked whether Papa was home, Nicolai was also aware of the self whose willful act he was aware of. He was aware at least that his act of asking the question was not incompatible with his will at the moment, and to the extent he was aware of this he would have to be aware of his self independently of his awareness of this act; the self was contained as a component of the content of his present consciousness independently of the self as an element of the event (his asking the question), which itself was a content of his consciousness. To elaborate on this point a little further, compare the scene in our text with the following variation. Assume, instead of our sentence, we have “‘Is Papa home?’ [he] asked unintentionally”. (In Japanese, “Otoosan wa ie kai?” to kare wa omowazu kiita.) Nicolai was looking for Papa, for he had to ask him for the money he had to pay Dolokhov. But Nicolai did not want others to learn why he was looking for Papa. But in spite of himself he asked Natasha: “Is Papa home?”. This is our present imaginary setting of the scene. Our sentence can still be interpreted as representing Nicolai’s point of view. He was aware of his own act, asking a question to Natasha. At the same time, he was aware that this spontaneous act was contrary to his will. The will of his self and his own act, of which he was aware, is incompatible, and he was aware of this incompatibility. His awareness of self, then, must be established independently of his awareness of his act in the logical structure of his present consciousness. In our original text, Nicolai’s asking the question “Is Papa home?” was a willful act by Nicolai, and he knew it. He knew that his act which was externalized and of which he was aware was not incompatible with the will of his self. I think our sentence “‘Is Papa home’ he asked” means this, so long as it is interpreted as reflexive of the point of view. We must admit, then, that in the logical structure of the content of Nicolai’s consciousness his self is contained as a component independent of the event of his asking a question to Natasha, which event

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is also a component of Nicolai’s consciousness and of which Nicolai is contained as an element.

3.5 We now proceed to consider the case where the main verb is think. This is the case where the fact that we are concerned with Nicolai’s point of view is most explicit. But precisely for that reason the stylistic function of the wa attached to the subject of the main verb is quite different from the previous cases. At the moment when this inner process of Nicolai’s took place, no one’s consciousness may be said to be focused on Nicolai. One cannot even assume that Nicolai was conscious of himself in the same sense, and to the same extent that we assume he was selfconscious in a situation described earlier by a sentence reflexive of Nicolai’s point of view, like that discussed earlier (“‘Is Papa home?’ [he] asked”). The sentence “‘Everything’s still the same with them’, thought Nicolai” does not imply that this psychological act is a willful act of Nicolai. That everything is still the same with them is the content of Nicolai’s consciousness, but our sentence does not imply that he is reflecting on his own thought¹³ (though of course is not contradictory with the conclusion), nor does it imply that this content of consciousness has any interaction with other components of Nicolai’s consciousness. A sentence of this kind represents no one’s act of judging, and one cannot justify the use of wa here in a way internal to the world of the story. A communicational theory of narration would here assume that it is an omniscient narrator who is perceiving and judging on an inner process of Nicolai. Within such a conception one might justify the use of the wa attached to Nicolai, the subject of the verb think, in analogy with the wa attached to Natasha in the sentences that represent Nicolai’s point of view. The omniscient narrator’s consciousness has been centered around Nicolai. I argued against setting up such an enigmatic creature as an omniscient narrator in my earlier papers.¹⁴ In contrast, I assume simply that the function of a sentence such as “‘Everything’s still the same with them’, thought Nicolai” is to create in the reader’s mind a meaning and simultaneously a section of the imaginary world with which it is referentially interpreted. With this conception of narration, only with respect to

13 This is the definition of reflective consciousness according to Kuroda 1974a and 1976a (see Ch. 2, pp. 65–66, and Ch. 3, pp. 83–87). Kuroda uses the term reflective consciousness further on [EN]. 14 Kuroda 1973a: 377–391; 1974a: 165–173; 1976a. The first and third papers are also reprinted in Kuroda 1979a [AN]. – EN: See Ch. 1, 2, 3.

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the reader’s consciousness could one justify the role of wa attached to the subject of a verb of inner process. It is worthy of note that the two wa’s in our text attached to the subject of think, the complement of which represents the point of view of its referent, cannot be replaced by ga. For example, it is impossible to replace the wa attached to the Nicolai in “‘Everything’s still the same with them’, thought Nicolai” by ga. In contrast the wa’s attached to Natasha as the subject of quotative verbs, subjects noncoreferential with the point of view, may be replaced by ga in our texts, of course with certain changes in stylistic effect (i.e., changes in meaning). We shall return to the effect of such replacement shortly. The impossibility of replacement of the wa attached to Nicolai as the subject of think in our text may be taken as an indication that an inner event of Nicolai’s thinking, such a process internal to Nicolai’s consciousness, may not enter the reader’s consciousness in the way an external event, for example, Sonya’s saying “No, papa is not back yet”, may enter (or may be imagined to enter) a protagonist’s consciousness (for example, Nicolai’s), or the reader’s consciousness, with the help of imagination. Perhaps an inner element may not constitute a selfcontained element, as an image or an understanding in the reader’s consciousness in the way an external event may (or may be imagined to) in a protagonist’s, and through the faculty of imagination, in the reader’s consciousness. It is indeed a simple fact that the reader cannot imagine perceiving the inner event of Nicolai’s thinking such and such, nor can he imagine identifying himself with anyone perceiving this inner event (except by evoking the notion of an omniscient narrator who has the superhuman faculty of observing an inner event directly). Note that to identifying ourselves with Nicolai will not do. For, with our example, Nicolai himself may not necessarily be said to have been aware that he was thinking “Everything is still the same with them” in a way he was aware of Natasha’s “Beautiful! Wonderful!” or Sonya’s saying “No, Papa is not back yet,” even though he was certainly aware that everything was still the same with them. Nonetheless, our sentence creates in the reader’s consciousness the understanding that an inner event of thinking that everything was still the same with them took place in Nicolai’s consciousness; the reader is made aware that Nicolai thought so. Representing an inner event of thinking requires a two-place predicate, one argument representing the subject of consciousness in which this inner process takes place and the other representing the content of the consciousness created by this process. Nicolai is in our consciousness as an argument fulfilling this two-place predicate when we obtain this understanding. But at the same time Nicolai is in our consciousness as the subject of the point of view for this sentence, as the locus of this inner process, which process we do not imagine per-

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ceiving directly but whose effect on Nicolai’s consciousness we are made aware of, as a result of our empathy with Nicolai. Thus, the meaning of wa attached to Nicolai as the subject of the verb think must be justified externally with respect to the story, or in other words, with respect to how the reader’s consciousness is to be related to the world of the story. The same external interpretation may also be assumed for the wa’s which are attached to the subjects reflexive of the point of view. What makes this case different from the case with the verb think is that in this case the subject of the point of view himself (in our example, Nicolai) in addition perceives that he himself is a component, in fact a willful actor, in the event described by the sentence in question. Thus, we may also talk about the relationship of Nicolai as the subject of consciousness that perceives this event and Nicolai as an actor in the same event.

3.6 If our preceding argument is basically correct, then, we have the following generalization. We have three cases of wa-phrases as the subjects of quotative verbs in our text. First, nonreflexive of the point of view; second, reflexive of the point of view; and finally, as a locus of consciousness. In each of these cases the existence of the referent of the wa-phrase can be justified in the consciousness of the subject of the point of view or of the reader independently of (as well as in addition to) the fact that it is an argument of the predicate represented by the main verb and as such is also an element of the content of the understanding consciousness. In the first case, one might even be allowed to say that the referent of the wa-phrase is established as an element of the consciousness as a focal point of the subject of the point of view’s attention before it obtains another qualification of existence as an argument of the main verb, i.e., as an element of an event which is perceived by the subject of the point of view. But this presumed temporal order in which the referent of a wa-phrase comes to get doubly qualified as a component of a consciousness is not essential for the generalization we are now concerned with. What is crucial is the uniformity in the “logical” structures, so to speak, of the consciousness whose state the sentence is related to in each case (i.e., in our examples, Nicolai’s in the first and the second case, and the reader’s in the third). The recognition of the existence of the referent of the waphrase is independent of the judgment that the event described by the predicate represented by the main verb takes place. We would conclude that in all the three cases a sentence with a wa-phrase conforms to the structural characteristic of the Brentano-Marty concept of categorical judgment as a “double”-judgment.

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It might be instructive to conduct some gedanken experiments by trying to replace the wa’s in our text by ga. We can replace the wa’s attached to the subjects of quotative verbs noncoreferential with the subject of the point of view, Nicolai. The passage as a whole can still be considered as representing Nicolai’s point of view. But one might say the impression of the passage is much “drier” than before. Nicolai’s consciousness does not particularly seem to be centered around any person or to be responding to his surroundings. It is as though Nicolai’s consciousness accepts the sound and the voices around him simply passively, perhaps somewhat absent-mindedly. Only the two occurrences of wa attached to the subjects reflexive of the point of view (“he asked” and “he replied”) indicate some degree of active response of Nicolai’s consciousness to external events, in these cases, produced by his willful acts. As I mentioned earlier, the wa’s attached to the subject he, referring to Nicolai, of the verb think cannot be replaced by ga. The two wa’s attached to Nicolai reflexive of the point of view also resist replacement by ga so long as the sentences with the verb think invite us to interpret the passage (or at least the neighborhood of these sentences) as representing Nicolai’s point of view. In contrast, if we eliminate these two sentences with the verb think, thus erasing lexically explicit clues for Nicolai’s point of view from this passage, then, one can replace those wa’s, attached to the Nicolai’s which are the subjects of ask and reply. Then, the passage could quite naturally be taken on the whole as representing no one’s point of view. The description becomes still “drier” and more objective. We can no longer read from the passage any sign of Nicolai’s consciousness to the reality surrounding him. It is as if we were listening to someone describing to us a scene s/he saw on the stage.

4 Our second example is from D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Part II, Chapter VII. This scene with a son and a lover should need no introduction. She wanted to show him a certain wild-rose bush she had discovered. She knew it was wonderful. And yet, till he had seen it, she felt it had not come into her soul. Only he could make it her own, immortal. She was dissatisfied. Dew was already on the paths. In the old oak-wood a mist was rising, and he hesitated, wondering whether one whiteness were a strand of fog or only campionflowers pallid in a cloud. By the time they came to the pine-trees. Miriam was getting very eager and very tense. Her bush might he gone. She might not be able to find it; and she wanted it so much. Almost passionately she wanted to be with him when he stood before the flowers. They were going

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to have a communion together  – something that thrilled her, something holy. He was walking beside her in silence. They were very near to each other. She trembled, and he listened, vaguely anxious. Coming to the edge of the wood, they saw the sky in front, like mother-of-pearl, and the earth growing dark. Somewhere on the outer-most branches of the pinewood the honeysuckle was streaming scent. “Where?” [he] asked. “Down the middle path”, [she] murmured, quivering. When they turned the corner of the path, she stood still. In the wide walk between the pines, gazing rather frightened, she could distinguish nothing for some moments; the greying light robbed things of their colour. Then she saw her bush. “Ah!” [she] cried, hastening forward. It was very still. The tree was tall and straggling. It had thrown its briers over a hawthornbush, and its long streamers trailed thick, right down to the grass, splashing the darkness everywhere with great split stars, pure white. In bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass. Paul and Miriam stood close together, silent, and watched. Point after point the steady roses shone out to them, seeming to kindle something in their souls. The dusk came like smoke around, and still did not put out the roses. Paul looked down into Miriam’s eyes. She was pale and expectant with wonder, her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him. His look seemed to travel down into her. Her soul quivered. It was the communion she wanted. He turned aside, as if pained. He turned to the bush. “They seem as if they walk like butterflies, and shake themselves”, [he] said. She looked at her roses. They were white, some incurved and holy, others expanded in an ecstasy. The tree was dark as a shadow. She lifted her hand impulsively to the flowers; she went forward and touched them in worship. “Let us go”, [he] said. There was a cool scent of ivory roses  – a white, virgin scent. Something made him feel anxious and imprisoned. The two walked in silence.

All the subjects of quotative verbs in this passage are marked by wa in the translations I consulted (Akira Honda’s Iwanami Bunko edition). It might appear that we have a simpler structure here than in the previous example from War and Peace. But Lawrence’s prose exhibits an intricate and effectively ambiguous structure of points of view. In this passage, Paul’s, Miriam’s and the “objective” point of view¹⁵ are interwoven, often indistinguishably. In fact, I discussed parts of the above passage from Lawrence in earlier papers of mine to illustrate this point. I refer the

15 On two occasions, Kuroda uses quotation marks around the term “objective”. However the problem, as I see it, comes more from the use of the term “point of view” in the three cases under consideration, or its use for something which is defined precisely through opposition with the characters’ point of view, than from the use of the adjective “objective” itself. See on this point Banfield 1982: 183–223 and 257–274, and Patron 2012 [EN].

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reader to those papers for details.¹⁶ I think that all the quotative sentences (sentences with a direct quotation) are, from the point of view of the points of view, ambiguous. For example, consider the following two lines: “Where?” [he] asked. “Down the middle path”, [she] murmured, quivering.

Interpreted from Paul’s point of view the first sentence is reflexive of the point of view and the second sentence is nonreflexive of the point of view. Interpreted from Miriam’s point of view the role of the sentences switches. And these interpretations are both not only possible but are simultaneously called for, it seems to me, for an adequate understanding of our passage. Paul is in Miriam’s consciousness and Miriam is in Paul’s as they walk side by side. His voice heard by Miriam does not form an independent impression in her consciousness but interfuses with Paul existing in her. Her voice heard by Paul does not form an independent impression in his consciousness but interfuses with Miriam existing in his consciousness. At the same time, Paul is aware that he asks a question, and Miriam is aware she murmurs, quivering. It is not impossible to replace some of the wa’s attached to the subjects of quotative verbs in this passage by ga with, of course, changes in the stylistic effects, or in the meaning, of the passage. For example, we might replace wa attached to he following the “Where” quoted above. Then, the sentence “‘Where?’ he asked” is, it seems to me, separated from Paul’s point of view. And, furthermore, his voice, it seems to me, enters Miriam’s consciousness somewhat abruptly, as if she is taken back to herself by this voice. One might note that the adverb totuzen (‘suddenly’) may quite well be added to the sentence: “Doko” to kare-ga totuzen tazuneta (“‘Where?’ he asked suddenly”). Removing the sentence “‘Where?’ he asked” from Paul’s point of view (which I think is a necessary consequence of the replacement of the wa by ga) impoverishes, albeit slightly, the intricate effects of interaction between Paul’s and Miriam’s consciousness which was to climax in the communion Miriam wanted. In order to see the full consequence of removing Paul’s point of view one might as well try to rewrite the passage in the first person from Miriam’s point of view, replacing Miriam and she by I and they by we. This can be done with some necessary deletions. For example, continuing the two lines I quoted above, one might have, with the bracketed part deleted:

16 See Ch. 1, pp. 45–46, and Ch. 3, pp. 75–76 [EN].

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“Where?” he asked. “Down the middle path”, I murmured, quivering. When we turned the corner of the path, I stood still. In the wide walk between the pines [gazing rather frightened] I could distinguish nothing for some moments; the greying light robbed things of their colour. Then I saw my bush. “Ah!” I cried, hastening forward.

The change caused by this rewriting is not simply that we do not know any more that Paul saw Miriam gazing rather frightened. This phrase, which exclusively represents Paul’s point of view, has the effect of extending a horizon of Paul’s point of view beyond its small stretch in the original text. Paul was watching Miriam unable to distinguish anything in the greying light. In a similar vein, replacement by ga of the wa attached to the he after “Where?” in the Japanese version might have caused a more serious effect than simply removing this sentence from Paul’s point of view, The effect of wa in the original passage, then, is that Paul and Miriam existed in each other’s consciousness through the passage of time independently of their understanding of each other’s actions. Thus, for example, he in the sentence “‘Where?’ he asked” not only functions as a term referring to the actor of the action of asking (which is the only syntactic information coded in English), but, with wa attached to it in the Japanese translation, allows (or, perhaps forces) us to understand that this action of Paul’s took place under circumstances where Paul and Miriam were attentive to themselves and to each other. The sentence represents a “double” judgment in the mind of each of them.

5 Our third and last example is from William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, the first section, April seventh, 1928. This section is a first-person narration by Benjy, an imbecile, of his experience in the afternoon and in the evening until he went to bed on April seventh, 1928, his 33rd birthday. Benjy does not speak and he does not understand language; he is totally incapacitated mentally. It is Faulkner’s ingenious stylistic adventure to have an imbecile without language competence narrate his own experience (with flashbacks  – according to someone’s count there are 127 flashbacks in this section). Benjy’s consciousness simply responds passively to outward stimuli and stimuli evoked by his memory. It is an ironical contradiction that an imbecile lacking totally the faculty of reflective consciousness narrates his experience (in the past tense).

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“It’s too cold out there”. {Versh} said. “You don’t want to go out doors”. “What is it now”. {Mother} said. “He want to go out doors”. {Versh} said. “Let him go”. {Uncle Maury} said. “It’s too cold”. {Mother} said. “He’d better stay in. Benjamin. Stop that, now”. “It wont hurt him”. {Uncle Maury} said. “You, Benjamin”. {Mother} said. “If you don’t be good, you’ll have to go to the kitchen”. “Mammy say keep him out the kitchen today”. {Versh} said. “She say she got all that cooking to get done”. “Let him go, Caroline”. {Uncle Maury} said. “You’ll worry yourself sick over him”. “I know it”. {Mother} said. “It’s a judgment on me. I sometimes wonder”. “I know, I know”. {Uncle Maury} said. “You must keep your strength up. I’ll make you a toddy”. “It just upsets me that much more”. {Mother} said. “Don’t you know it does”. “You’ll feel better”. {Uncle Maury} said. “Wrap him up good, boy, and take him out for a while”. Uncle Maury went away. Versh went away. “Please hush”. {Mother} said. “We’re trying to get you out as fast as we can. I don’t want you to get sick”. Versh put my overshoes and overcoat on and we took my cap and went out. Uncle Maury was putting the bottle away in the sideboard in the dining-room. “Keep him out about half an hour, boy”. {Uncle Maury} said. “Keep him in the yard, now”. “Yes, sir”. {Versh} said. “We don’t never let him get off the place”. We went out doors. The sun was cold and bright.

We note that in the translation of this passage (by Seiji Onoe, Huzanhoo, Tokyo) all the subjects of quotative verbs are translated in ga-phrases. The talk by Versh, Mother, Uncle Maury is all simply voices falling on Benjy’s ears. It is as though Benjy is a recording machine.¹⁷ Their actions are recorded as if they were events passing through Benjy’s mind one by one. Each sentence with a quotative verb represents a “simple” judgment by Benjy, in which the subject of the verb only functions to refer to the actor of the verbal action. It is not the case that the translator avoided using wa completely throughout the first part of The Sound and the Fury. There are a few instances where the subject of a quotative verb is marked with wa. It is difficult to determine what stylistic effects the translator intended by choosing wa instead of ga in those very rare cases. In comparison, a rough count indicates that the subjects of quotative verbs are translated with ga and wa about half and half in the fourth part of

17 This comparison was not new at the time Kuroda was writing: see, for example, Bowling 1948: 556; Millgate 1966: 69. By contrast, the light shed by Kuroda’s approach is completely unprecedented [EN].

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the book, which is written from an “omniscient”, or “objective”, point of view.¹⁸ Again it is difficult to determine exactly what motivated the translator to choose either of them in each instance. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that an overwhelming majority of the subjects of quotative verbs are rendered into ga phrases in the translation of the first part of the novel.

18 See supra n. 15 [EN].

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Index Alber 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 Anderson 37, 155 Aristotle 88 Auerbach 87 Austin 104, 105, 109, 110, 119, 128 Badiou-Monferran 33, 34 Bal 33 Bally 57 Banfield 3, 13, 14, 22, 23, 25, 63, 71, 74, 79, 82, 146 Barthes 13, 14, 15, 33, 34, 60, 61, 72, 73, 95 Beach 46 Benveniste 13, 15, 24, 35, 66, 67, 69, 70, 78, 79, 80, 89, 91, 100, 113, 121 Berthelot 28 Booth 16, 46, 74, 112 Bowling 149 Boyd 37, 156 Braconnier 37 Brentano 33, 133, 134, 144 Chatman 33 Chiss 33, 34, 35 Chomsky 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 60, 82, 102, 104, 108, 109, 111, 116, 119, 120, 121, 130, 131, 139 Cohn 16, 31, 57 Cole 119 Colombat 27 Culicover 6 Currie 140 Davison 119 Dessons 33, 34 Dominicy 1, 3, 35 Dougherty 6 Emonds 3, 6 Empedocles 88 Fauconnier 155 Faulkner 2, 3, 16, 22, 33, 37, 133, 134, 148, 152, 156, 157 Ferrara 37, 156

Fillmore 6, 57 Fischer 3, 107, 117, 133 Flaubert 87 Fludernik 28, 29, 32, 33 Fournier 27 Friedemann 58 Friedman 46, 47, 74 Gale 92 Geach 7 Genette 13, 14, 16, 33, 35, 66, 67, 70, 79, 80, 89, 100 Georgopoulos 1 Goffman 107 Gordon 119, 120 Grice 12, 105, 119 Guéron 3 Hamburger 14, 15, 20, 21, 24, 57, 58, 67, 68, 69, 70, 78, 80, 81, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 100, 101, 113, 121, 137 Hansen 30 Hanson 13 Heinze 30 Hemingway 47 Herman 28, 29, 32, 33 Hinds 37, 156 Hogan 33 Honda 146 Husserl 57, 68, 89 Ishihara 1 Iversen 30, 31 Iwasaki 37, 156 Jackendoff 6, 50 Jahn 29, 33 Jakobson 15, 72 Katz 4, 5, 7 Kindt 112 Kiparsky 37 Klima 50 Kristeva 37, 71, 155 Kuno 9, 14, 19, 20, 41, 42, 62, 64, 65, 75, 84

Index   

Laclos 61 Lakoff 4, 5, 8, 72, 119, 120 Lalande 65, 66 Langacker 120 Lawrence 2, 3, 16, 33, 37, 45, 76, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 156 Leclère 3 Lees 50 Lorck 57 Lubbock 46 Lundholt 32 Lyons 109 Macdonald 92 Malinowski 117 Marty 6, 33, 133, 134, 144 Mathy 86 Maynard 37, 156 McCawley 4, 5, 6 Meister 28 Meschonnic 35 Millgate 149 Milner 37, 71 Morgan 119 Müller 112 Mulligan 133 Murray 114 Nakamura 3 Nielsen 30, 31 Nünning 28 Olsen 140 Onoe 149 Palmer 33 Patron 3, 47, 66, 67, 79, 90, 91, 146 Pavel 140 Peirce 109 Pier 28 Piot 3 Plato 1 Postal 4 Prince 28, 33 Puech 27

   161

Richardson 30, 31, 32 Rimmon-Kenan 33 Robbe-Grillet 58 Rohrer 37, 155 Ronat 10 Ross 4, 8, 55, 60, 72, 119 Russell 17, 18, 23, 38 Ruwet 1, 37, 71, 155 Sadock 8, 72 Sakai 17, 39 Sampy 37 Saussure 33, 34, 60 Saxon 133 Searle 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 92, 102, 104, 105, 106, 111, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 131 Skalin 32 Sôseki 21, 85, 86 Sperber 32 Stampe 119 Stanzel 31 Todorov 13, 14, 33, 61, 62, 73, 74, 91, 95 Tolstoi 3, 16, 22, 33, 37, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 156 Ullmann 57 Vanderveken 8 van Djik 37, 155 Vergnaud 3 Vervaeck 28 Walsh 29 Warshawsky 50 Wilson 32 Woolf 83 Wright 119 Yonekawa 136 Zribi-Hertz 3 Zunshine 33