Abstract
Situated in the field of literary pragmatics, this chapter takes a fresh look at Tolkien’s style through a discourse-pragmatic analysis of some of the authentication strategies in The Hobbit and reconsiders Tolkien’s linguistic beliefs about language and communication (either explicitly stated or implicit in his authorial strategies) from a pragmatic perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
Often supported by Tolkien himself, cf. e.g. Ltr 165: “The invention of languages is the foundation. The ʻstories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows”.
- 2.
Letter 294. A FŐSZÖVEGBE A bibliográfiában ez az item a címmel szerepel, nem kellene a szerkesztőt előre írni, és így hivatkozni rá?
- 3.
Discursization (a term coined by Arnovick) is a type of pragmaticalization process, whereby an utterance undergoes “illocutionary ʻsmoothing’ and subsequent highlighting of discourse function” (Arnovick 1999: 117).
- 4.
- 5.
This is a simplified description of the major claims of RT; because of space considerations, I do not make reference to the communicative principle of relevance, only the cognitive principle of relevance.
- 6.
For example, the assumptions that Bilbo wants Gandalf to stay/Bilbo treats Gandalf with hospitality/Bilbo is in good/bad spirits, etc.
- 7.
The verbs are in the past tense in the original text: “came and made”.
- 8.
Throughout the chapter, unless indicated otherwise, all bolded and italicized emphases in the examples are mine, not Tolkien’s.
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Furkó, P.B. (2020). Discourse Markers and Their Translation in Literary Discourse: A Case Study of Discourse-Pragmatic Devices in The Hobbit. In: Discourse Markers and Beyond. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37763-2_8
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