A review of Leech and Short’s norms of speech and thought presentation

Abstract

This paper discusses how the concept of norms of speech and thought presentation relates to speech and thought presentation in actual texts with reference to the examination of two corpora, Semino and Short’s discourse presentation corpus, and a corpus of contemporary present-tense fiction. Through this approach, we review the meanings of the norms in each kind of discourse presentation. Leech and Short suggest that the norm of speech presentation is direct speech (DS) and the norm of thought presentation is indirect thought (IT). Examining their claim quantitatively and qualitatively, we will discuss how forms of speech and thought presentation are chosen in different socio-lingual contexts. Our examination strongly indicates that DS predominantly serves as the norm for speech presentation. However, thought presentation exhibits a higher degree of variability, influenced by genre, text type, and narrative tense and mode, and thus our investigation did not ascertain a singular category that consistently prevails quantitatively over others in thought presentation.