Framing Direct Speech

clauses (frames). To that end a corpus was assembled consisting of three Czech, and
three English fiction samples, together with their translations. A number of aspects
were scrutinized, including the position of the frames, the subjects featured, the word
order, type of verbs employed, syntactic patterns displayed, involvement of optional
modification, etc. e results seem to suggest, among other things, that analytic English
tends to feature explicit subjects, the prosodically more prominent among them causing
inversion typically, it frequently displays the crucial SVO pattern, as a rule employs the
dicendi verbs, primarily to say, and usually avoids optional syntactic modification.
Conversely, Czech, as a synthetic language, gives preference to implicit subjects, exhibits
in frames a variety of verbs, both dicendi and other classes, and apart from them,
frequently incorporates in frames additional clause constituents. us, compared to
English, Czech appears to integrate the frames far more smoothly in the narrative, gives
a fuller picture of the reported speech situation, encoding more of its elements and in
this way it strives to shape more conspicuously the processing of direct speech, taking
greater control over the recipient’s reception compared to the English original, and
simultaneously taking over some interpretative burden from the recipient. Conversely,
English appears to treat the frames as more or less automatic, parenthetical units,
clearly set off from the narrative, biasing the recipient’s processing to a minimum,
though inviting much more interpretative and evaluative effort.