Come into My World: Styles of Stance in Detective and Romantic Fiction

Come into My World: Styles of Stance in Detective and
Romantic Fiction

Lisa
Lena
Opas-Hänninen
Department of Foreign Languages University of
Joensuu, Finland lisa.lena.opas@joensuu.fi

Fiona
Tweedie
Department of Statistics University of
Glasgow
fiona@stats.gla.ac.uk

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

This poster presents results of research on popular romance and detective
fiction. The predictability of these stories resembles the oral storytelling
tradition, i.e. a story already familiar to its readers is being retold over and
over again (Radway 1984:198). The reader is not left in suspense of the final
outcome of the story; it is the events leading up to it which make each story
different. Through these events the reader becomes involved in the emotional
life of the romantic heroine or deliberates with the detective over the various
clues to the case.
This poster examines how the reader is made privy to emotions, attitudes and
thoughts of the protagonist by looking at markers of stance in three types of
romantic novels and two types of detective stories. These markers include
syntactic and semantic features that express the protagonist's feelings,
emotions, moods, etc. Principal components analysis was used to reduce the 12
markers of stance to two dimensions. The results are then compared with Biber
and Finegan's (1989) analysis of stance across various text types.

References

D.
Biber

E.
Finegan

Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical
marking of evidentiality and affect

Text

9
1
93-124
1989

J.
A.
Radway

Reading the Romance

Chapel-Hill
University of North Carolina Press
1984