EL CASO SALVO

The results indicate that Christopher tends to use those –ly adverbs that are more frequent in the informal spoken discourse, even though, his narration includes a limited number of –ly adverbs used in the formal discourse.

In the next section, I examine Christopher’s deviant uses of sentence types.

5.4.1.3 Grammatical Categories: Sentence Types

Regarding sentence types, Christopher has an ability to use all sentence constructions:

simple, compound and complex. Christopher uses coordinators including ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’

and subordinators ‘because’, ‘that’, ‘who’ to signify that grammatically he is capable of making a distinction between main clauses and subordinate clauses in complex sentences.

Some examples of Christopher’s sentence structures are shown below:

 It was 7 minutes after midnight.

 I walked onto her lawn and knelt beside the dog.

 It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep.

 Siobhan has long blonde hair and wears glasses which are made of green plastic.

The examples above are fairly typical and tend to follow standard writing conventions.

Throughout the whole novel, Christopher tends to use subordinating and coordinating conjunctions in a sentence-initial position highlighted below in bold¹⁰:

 I wanted to go home and go up to my room and feed Toby and practice some maths.

(1) But I was excited, too. (2) Because I thought she might tell me a secret. (3) And the secret might be about who killed Wellington. (4) Or about Mr Shears. (5) And if       

10  Numbers following the sentence are used for ease of references.

she did that I might have more evidence against him, or be able Exclude Him from My Investigation. (6)

There are six sentences in the above sample. In the first sentence, Christopher overuses coordinating conjunction ‘and’, which grammatically should be deleted and replaced by a emboldened comma as follows:

 I wanted to go home, go up to my room, feed Toby and practice some maths.

The second sentence begins with capitalised ‘But’ and is treated as an independent clause followed by the third ungrammatical complex sentence beginning with a capitalised subordinator ‘Because’. These two sentences could be modified in the following way:

 I was excited too because I thought she might tell me a secret.

The above two corrected sentences could be further grammatically presented as a compound-complex sentence by incorporating the third sentence as follows:

 I wanted to go home, go up to my room, feed Toby and practice some maths, but I was excited too because I thought she might tell me a secret.

When Christopher capitalises ‘and’, ‘or’ in the fourth, fifth and sixth sentences, he again violates the conventional rule of a compound sentence construction. The above

capitalised coordinators ‘And’, ‘Or’ seem to be redundant. The ‘And’ in the fourth sentence could be deleted and the first word after ‘And’ should be capitalised.

The fifth sentence is also ungrammatical, the full-stop before the capitalised ‘Or’

could be replaced by a ‘comma’ and non-capitalised ‘or’ and the sentence becomes:

 The secret might be about who killed Wellington, or about Mr Shears.

The occurrence of capitalised ‘And’ in the sixth sentence should be deleted and the first word should be capitalised. The sentence becomes:

 If she did that I might have more evidence against him, or be able Exclude Him from My Investigation.

With reference to the above extract, Christopher starts his sentences with the conjunctions ‘But’, ‘And’, ‘Or’, ‘Because’ which are foregrounded positionally and grapho-logically since these conjunctions normally function to connect two clauses, either of equal priority (coordinating) or dependent clause (subordinating). When Christopher capitalises those coordinators and subordinators, he violates the conventional rules and treats the

coordinated or subordinated clauses as two separate sentences. The reason can be attributed to his difficulty in making a clear distinction between main and subordinate clauses in regard to embedded clause.

The above whole extract could be grammatically rewritten as follows:

 I wanted to go home, go up to my room, feed Toby and practice some maths, but I was excited, too because I thought she might tell me a secret. The secret might be about who killed Wellington, or about Mr Shears. If she did that I might have more evidence against him, or be able Exclude Him from My Investigation.

In another rarely occurred extract, Christopher foregrounds ‘Unless’ and ‘Or unless’

highlighted below as follows:

I replied, "Somebody must know because the person who killed Wellington knows that they killed Wellington. Unless they were a mad person and didn't know what they were doing. Or unless they had amnesia."

The extract above could be interpreted grammatically in two ways. The first one is although Christopher appears to violate a grammatical rule of ‘unless’, it is possible to argue that he uses a dependent clause (subordinate clause) as an independent sentence for the purpose of emphasis in his direct speech with Mrs Alexander. If this usage of ‘unless’ is made grammatically conventional in this case, the underlined concern of Christopher over the action of murdering the dog will be lost. The second possibility is to use ‘unless’ in a grammatically conventional way by replacing the full-stop to a comma before ‘Unless’ and non-capitalising it. The sentence will appear as follows:

 I replied, "Somebody must know because the person who killed Wellington knows that they killed Wellington, unless they were a mad person and didn't know what they were doing. Or unless they had amnesia."

With regard to using ‘Or unless’ in the last part of the extract above, Christopher violates the rule of coordinator ‘Or’, which could be non-capitalised preceded by a comma with ‘unless’ being omitted as redundant. However, in this case, the emphatic meaning of

‘unless’ would be lost. The whole extract could be expressed as follows:

 I replied, "Somebody must know because the person who killed Wellington knows that they killed Wellington, unless they were a mad person and didn't know what they were doing, or they had amnesia."

Since the positional and graphological foregrounding phenomenon occurs repetitively and systematically in Christopher’s narration, it points to the working of the deviant mind

style. More examples of Christopher’s deviation of compound and complex sentences are presented in Appendix 3, Excerpt 1 DII.

The positional and graphological foregrounding phenomenon is mainly applicable to writing. In conversation, there is more freedom of expression, with writing conventions being mainly inapplicable. If a distinction is made between Christopher-the-narrator and Christ-opher-the-character, the-narrator chooses to present the words of Christopher-the-character as direct speech, which involves more freedom of expression. However, since Christopher-the-narrator has instances of the positional and graphological foregrounding in his narration, this claim pointing to the character’s deviant mind is still valid.

Having examined the application of the EMMS ideational style to analysing Christopher’s mind style, I proceed by investigating Christopher’s interactional style in the next section.

5.4.2 Interactional style

This subsection deals with the main components of the interactional style illustrated in Figure 3 in Chapter Two. As explained in detail in 2.8.2, the theoretical approaches, which contributed to developing this category, include selected theories from pragmatics, namely Gricean Maxim, Speech Acts, Leech PP maxims and social deixis. In the analysis of this section, distinction is made between the interactional styles taking place at the character-character and at the narrator-reader levels. A complete version of the selected chapters, as well as some representative extract samples is given in Appendix 1.