Deixis and first-person narrators: A diachronic study of the American short story

First person narrators are categorically defined by the personal pronoun system used by an author to construct the narrative voice of literary texts. Narratives, oral or written, "told in the first-person" or written from a "first-person" point of view are marked by the presence of first-person pronouns (I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours ). The presence of one or more first-person pronouns in the narration marks the text as having a first-person narrator. Personal pronouns are part of a set of linguistic features classified as deixis (orientation of people, places, and events relative to some zero point, typically the speaker). Deictic language can mark an utterance as proximal (centered in the speaker, the "first person") or distal (distanced from the speaker, someone other than the speaker, the "second person" or "third-person"). In a first-person narrated text, where the speaker is also a character (subject) in the narrative, the author needs to be able to represent the minds of both selves. Since I refers to both the narrating and narrated selves other linguistic resources must be relied upon to mark the two different perspectives.; The present study was undertaken to investigate the role deixis plays in marking the two voices of the I-narrator, the narrating- I and the narrated-I. The primary research goal was to determine ways in which authors manipulate the deictic language of the narration to differentiate between the distanced narrating-self and the self-as-subject---the "experiential self."; A diachronic corpus of American first-person short stories was compiled with representation from five time periods from the early 1800s to the present. By using a diachronic corpus of similar texts, it was also possible to see whether there was evidence of trends in deictic pattern use over two hundred years of first-person short stories. A computer program designed for this study calculated frequency counts for 23 variables in the deictic dimensions of person and time. A second computer program identified and characterized approximately 15,000 finite verb phrases in 36 texts. Text maps that display four fields of deictic activity in the finite verb phrase (tense/modality, aspect, voice, and subject) were generated for each text in the short story corpus. Comparison of deictic use patterns in each text revealed some similarities among the texts across the diachronic corpus as well as the unique deictic patterns of each individual text.; The results of this study show that first-person narrators are far from being categorically alike. No attempt has been made here to propose a typology of first-person narrators. Following Chatman's (1975) call for "the study of individual elements" that contribute to the variety in narrative not possibly accounted for in reductionist typologies, this study contributes to a better understanding of the role deixis plays in the construction of a first-person narrated literary text.