In this section, I will examine the usage of verbum dicendi and r-relations in high and low fiction novels to find the differences in text types. Text types specify what variation is part of the definition is suitable with its correct usage hence, making the author’s knowledge explicit to the reader’s expectation and convention (Görlach, 2004). For instance, an author may use the phrase “religious words”, which is not precise and thus, readers may take this phrase to mean a sermon or a prayer depending on their understanding and conventions concerning the phrase. Such ambiguous words and phrases provide a background information, which provides the gist of the narration. I will also explore the types of verb used in these …show more content…
1). Although the phrase contains verbs, it does not take the form of a subject or object. Typically, there will always be a subject who is the doer and an object who is a receiver or patient. However, there are always exceptions to this practice. For instance, a dialogues that ensues between King Fynn and his subjects depicts this exception, ‘Your grandfather dead in howe, the women of Yaletoft weeping over the corpses of theirs sons, this hall made ashes and you, princess, wearing a slave’s collar hackled to the High King’s chair. That is what I think “lost” would look like. Which I say come to terms’ (Abercrombie, 2015, p. 2). In this sentence, the King’s grandfather, the women of Yaletoft, their sons, the princess and the High King’s chair are all subjects, but not agents because they do not undertake any action. Some of the sentence structures in Joe’s War contain passive verbs i.e. “The King became numb”, ditransitive verbs that use one subject and two objects i.e. “The King gave Skara the royal seal”, and the causative i.e. “But Blue Jenner made Mother Kyre afraid …” (Abercrombie, 2015, p. 2, 10, 17). The other thing I noticed about Joe’s War is that it contained many instances of actual reporting of verbs. This partly because the whole novel is made up of dialogue. Hence, it does not come as a surprise that the single most used verb is ‘said’, which is the past tense of said. In virtually two thirds of the whole book this was the most used