Analysis of Reporting Verbs in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling: Syntactic and Semantic Approach

Abstract

The syntagmatic relations of reporting verbs and the semantic manifestation of these relations are discussed in this article. We describe five positioning types of the author’s comment related to direct speech and calculate the absolute and relative frequency of each of them. We also study the means of expressing subjects and their possible positions in reporting clauses; furthermore, we describe the grammatical forms of reporting verbs, the past simple being overwhelmingly predominant. We especially focus on the semantic nature of reporting verbs with their division into semantic groups. We also analyse different approaches to the issue of direct speech being considered as a direct object of a reporting verb. Our analysis of examples indicates that direct speech is not a direct object of a reporting verb. In addition, we examine the direct and optional objects of reporting verbs and characterise the prepositions of optional objects. Adverbs used as reporting verb modifiers are classified according to their meanings. Adverbial phrases, prepositional phrases and -ing clauses, modifying reporting verbs, are analysed and their structure, syntactic functions, and meanings are described.