FROM EMPATHETIC DEIXIS TO EMPATHETIC NARRATIVE: STYLISATION AND (DE-)SUBJECTIVISATION AS PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE CHANGE

In this paper I try to relate a problem in the history of literary style to wider issues in the theory of language change. The stylistic question I address concerns the historical origin of empathetic narrative (Bally's style indirect libre). I contest the standard account, which associates its first appearance with the nineteenth-century novel, and argue instead for a linguistic origin in the everyday use of shifted (empathetic) deictics and for a historical origin in the emergence of modern subjectivity in seventeenth-century epistemology. I propose a quantificational method for comparing the incidence of empathetic narrative in texts and a theory of stylisation to account for its progressive development across a historical corpus. The paper's interest to non-literary readers lies, on the level of data, in the evidence it presents of the use of tense-adverb combinations as an exponent of aspect and, on the level of theory, in its challenge to Traugott's account of the role of subjectivisation in language change.