Proper names as anaphoric expressions in short crime stories: Doing more than referring within and across paragraphs

Abstract

The paper reports the results of a quantitative and qualitative study concerning the pragmatic functions of proper names used anaphorically in a corpus of six British crime stories by three different authors. It evokes previous studies claiming that person references in conversation may do more than referring, and it relies on previous works on marked/overspecified anaphoric expressions in narrative texts. The analysis attempts to pin down the pragmatically-derived meanings resulting from anaphoric name forms occurring within paragraphs, that is, at paragraph starts and in the remaining paragraph sentences, and across paragraphs, that is, in contiguous paragraphs as well as in all the paragraphs of a story. Even though anaphoric name forms generally are still underexplored, they turn out to be the second category of anaphoric expressions being used after third-person pronouns. The results disconfirm that paragraphs preserve continued pronominalization. Various shifts, e.g. of topic, viewpoint, and utterer shifts can occur within paragraphs just as at paragraph starts. Selected passages show in detail which form suggests which shift in which context. Moreover, repetitions of the same name form within paragraphs and throughout stories suggest further implied meanings dealing with the relationships between characters and the authors’ manipulations of person references.