Narration and Speech and Thought Presentation in Comics

The purpose of this study was to test the application of two linguistic models of narration and one linguistic model of speech and thought presentation on comic texts: Fowler's (1986) internal and external narration types, Simpson's (1993) narrative categories from his 'modal grammar of point of view' and Leech and Short's (1981) speech and thought presentation scales. These three linguistic models of narration and speech and thought presentation, originally designed and used for the analysis of prose texts, were applied to comics, a multimodal medium that tells stories through a combination of both words and images. Through examples from comics, I demonstrate in this thesis that Fowler's (1986) basic distinction between internal and external narration types and Simpson's (1993) narrative categories (categories A, B(N) and B(R) narration) can be identified in both visual and textual forms in the pictures and the words of comics. I also demonstrate the potential application of Leech and Short's (1981) speech and thought presentation scales on comics by identifying instances of the scales' categories (NPV/NPT, NPSA/NPTA, DS/DT and FDS/FDT) from comics, but not all of the speech and thought presentation categories existed in my comic data (there was no evidence of IS/IT and the ategorisation of FIS/FIT was debatable). In addition, I identified other types of discourse that occurred in comics which were not accounted for by Leech and Short's (1981) speech and thought presentation categories: internally and externally-located DS and DT (DS and DT that are presented within (internally) or outside of (externally) the scenes that they originate from), narratorinfluenced forms of DS and DT (where narrator interference seems to occur in DS and DT), visual presentations of speech and thought (where speech and thought are represented by pictorial or symbolic content in balloons) and non-verbal balloons (where no speech or thought is being presented, but states of mind and emphasized pauses or silence are represented by punctuation marks and other symbols in speech balloons).