The Reaction Object Construction in the Leech and Short’s model: A new strategy of discourse presentation in the nineteenth-century novel

Abstract

Discourse presentation in the history of English has recently caught the attention of a number of studies. This paper aims to contribute to this area of research by making the case of the Reaction Object Construction or ROC (e.g. He shouted his excitement to come back) as another option used by narrators to frame and evaluate the speech/thought they represent in nineteenth-century sentimental novels. On the basis of data from the British Sentimental Novel Corpus, it will be argued that the ROC constitutes an emerging fully fledged subcategory within the Leech and Short’s model of discourse presentation constructions. The ROC fits in within their category Narrative Report of Speech/Thought Acts (NRS/TAs); the difference between the ROC and a prototypical NRS/TA is that the ROC is closer to the original act of communication that is being reported as it always conveys via a descriptive verb and an emotional object the illocutionary force (attitude) of the speaker’s utterance. The more than 500 ROC examples attested also confirm the tight connection between the ROC and the British sentimental novel, and reveal an array of meaningful stylistic, and socio-pragmatic motivations in the use of the nineteenth-century ROC.