The Relationship Between Dialogue Forms and Verbs of Non-Speech in Russian and Japanese Novels

Abstract

Abstract In literary works, the dialogue is expressed by direct speech construction. The direct speech construction consists of author’s words (AW) and character’s words (CW). The predicate verbs of AW in the dialogue form include not only verbs indicating speech (TVS) but also verbs that do not denote speech (TVN). The dialogue forms are divided into four types according to the positional combinations of AW and CW. Type A: AW is in preposition to CW; Type B: AW is in postposition to CW; Type C: AW is in interposition to CW; Type D: AW includes CW. Previous studies have not paid sufficient attention to the relationship between TVN and the dialogue forms. This paper proposes two analysis criteria: 1) frequency of the 4 types indicated above and frequency of TVN, 2) frequency of the 4 types and frequency of TVN depending on semantics. Here, we study the material selected from Russian novels and Japanese novels of the second half of the 19th – second half of the 20th century. Our analysis has revealed the following: 1) in Russian novels, TVN appears intensively in type C, while in Japanese novels TVN does not appear disproportionately in a specific type of the dialogue form while the use of TVN depends on the most frequently used dialogue form. 2) TVNs meaning ‘facial expression’ and ‘gesture’ are frequently used in all dialogue forms in Russian and Japanese novels. Theoretically, TVN and type C are closely related, but it seems that TVN appears differently in type C due to the difference in recognition of type C between Russian and Japanese.