THE DISCOURSE OF SOMEONE IN THE LITERARY TEXT

Abstract

Other people’s voices are part of our daily lives, in usual talks, in the media, and mainly in the literary discourse. Bearing this in mind and under the bakhtinian polyphonic perspective (1981, 1982) this paper aims at understanding in which ways someone else’s speech, either overt or covert, according to Authier-Revuz (1982, 1998), is present in literary works. We have chosen three articles published in a newspaper distributed in the state of Rio Grande do Sul and analyzed the linguistic and discursive strategies that overt or covert the interlocutor’s speech, producing meaning in the literary texts. We have tried to understand the uses of direct speech, indirect speech and free indirect speech, as well as other indices, relating them to the narrator’s voice, which sometimes gets close and sometimes leads away from the alien voice, depending on the meaning.