”afbröt skolläraren ifrigt”. En diakron studie av anföringssatsen i svensk skönlitteratur

David Håkansson, Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University Carin Östman, Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University “the teacher interrupted eagerly”: A diachronic study of the speech-tag in Swedish fiction (“afbröt skolläraren ifrigt”. En diakron studie av anföringssatsen i svensk skönlitteratur) The narrative structure of Swedish fiction underwent several changes during the 20th century, and it has been emphasized that the role of the narrator was reduced. In order to shed light on this change towards a more ”objective” style in Swedish fiction, this article reports a diachronic study of speech-tags in Swedish 18th- and 19th-century novels. In direct discourse the reader meets the voices of the characters without any involvement of the narrator. However, the narrator still has an opportunity to give complementary information about the utterance and the speaker by using the speech-tag, and hence, a study of speech-tags can contribute to the discussion of the narrator’s transformed role in Swedish fiction. In this study, the form and function of speech-tags are examined in terms of structure, position and content. The result of the analysis shows that the speech-tags in the 20th century novels are much less varied in comparison with the novels from the 19th century. Moreover, the speech-tags in the modern novels are shorter and dominated by the verb säga ’say’ to a much higher extent. In the older novels, on the other hand, the speech-tags are dominated by verbs reporting something about the content or the function of the utterance, such as fråga ‘ask’ or hota ‘threaten’. As far as the position of the speech-tags is concerned, the results show that the final position dominates to a greater extent in the modern novels. On the whole, the results of the study confirm the picture of a reduced narrator in Swedish fiction over time