The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

Imagination in Discourse 777
the cake, and in unit 3, it is inside the cake on the table. Fran changes her point of
view in a trice, and she expects her audience to follow.
Deictic gestures are equally demanding. Consider an example from a Tzetal narrative
recorded by Haviland (1996: 305–6), presented here in translation:
(14) There were indeed people living there [pointing to a fence in the imaginary
space of the narrative]. Beside the path [vertical hand moving up and down,
representing an imaginary gate]. (That house) was the same size at this house
here [pointing at actual house nearby].
The narrator first points at an imaginary fence in the space in which he has situated
the story around him, and with an iconic gesture, he adds an imaginary gate. But then
he points at an actual house nearby, saying, in effect, “That house [whose gate I can
point to in the imaginary narrative space] is the same size as this house [which I can
point to here].” As Haviland noted, narrators and their audience must keep track of
the imaginary and the actual spaces separately and in relation to each other.
Narrators must represent the appearances and locations of objects and events
to produce iconic and deictic gestures. With each gesture, they make reference to
locations, shapes, and events in imaginary or actual spaces around them. Although
they may use some of these gestures to help themselves keep track, they use at least
some of them as part of what they are telling their addressees, who could not interpret
the gestures without creating the corresponding imaginary locations, shapes,
and events.
1.4 Voices
Most narratives require us to imagine more than one voice. Take the first lines of a
joke told by Sam to Reynard (Svartvik and Quirk 1980: 42–3):
(15) let me tell you a story, - - -
a girl went into a chemist’s shop, and asked for, . contraceptive tablets, - -
so he said “well I’ve got . all kinds, and . all prices, what do you want,”
she said “well what have you got,”
Here we find four voices. The first is Sam’s announcing the story to Reynard. The
second belongs to the fictional narrator as he describes the girl and chemist’s conversation.
With the quotation in 1. 3, we move to the chemist‘s voice, and in l. 4, to the
“girl’s” voice. Some of these voices are introduced by “he said” or “she said,” but
others later in the joke are not. As David Lodge (1990: 144) noted, “[The] alternation
of authorial description and characters’ verbal interaction remains the woof and warp
of literary narration to this day.”
Quotations, like gestures, are clear aids to imagination. Narrators use them to help
us imagine specific individuals, what they say, how they speak. Narrators often
dramatize the voices for gender, emotion, dialect, and much more (Clark and Gerrig
1990; Tannen 1989; Wade and Clark 1993). For one recorded story, Tannen (1989: 121)