Fictionalising orality: introduction

Fictional texts display traces of orality to a greater or lesser extent. As argued in a great deal of scholarly work on stylistics, whatever the precise characteristics of the textual representation of orality may be, for interactive talk in fiction to be understood, it must be interpretable in terms of the same rules of discourse that govern everyday verbal interaction. That is not to say that fictional dialogue is in any sense the same as real speech. Fictional dialogue, except in experimental works, is seldom a recording of actual spoken language. Indeed, it has been pointed out by Page (1988:7–11) that textual representations of real-life speech in accurate detail would strike readers as unacceptable in written texts, which necessarily lack the detailed rendering of both the contextual and the phonological elements that carry much of the information and significance conveyed by real speech. Page formulated the ‘central dilemma’ of fictionalising orality as being that: