Introduction

There is a historical lag between the way in which subjectivity may be structurally encoded in the grammatical system of any language, and the way in which speakers may (consciously) realise and exploit it for expression. An area which exemplifies effectively the variable relationship between structure and use over time is the domain of literary language. The historical development of literary styles demonstrates a changing consciousness on the part of speakers of the potential held by grammatical resources for subjective expression. This essay is intended to address the problem of historicising subjectivity in the literary language of narrative.

The construal of subjectivity is not straightforward, as is amply demonstrated by the chapters in this volume. The dominant definitions do however offer some guide to interpretation. Elizabeth Traugott's approach is based on the understanding that a speaker's consciousness of self is imprinted in his or her linguistic expression of his or her relation to the world, its events, and its objects. And this understanding informs the now familiar definition of subjectification as ‘the development of a grammaticalised expression of speaker attitude to what is said’. Traugott's treatment assumes a clearly historical or at least temporal context for subjectification. By contrast, Langacker's (1985, 1990) notion of subjectivity does not. For Langacker, subjectivity is the implicit presence of a speaker in an expression, for the more overtly or explicitly a speaker is present in an utterance, the more objective that utterance is likely to be.