and as shaped by narratorial tagging. It also illustrates how a children’s book makes use
of the main principles which inform actual or represented conversations: the principle of
cooperation, the principle of politeness and the principle of irony. In order to
communicate in an orderly and productive way speakers accept five conventions which
organise what we say to one another: an utterance should be of an appropriate size; it
should be correct or truthful; it should relate back to the previous speaker’s utterance (a
change of subject and a change of register may both be breaches of relation); it should
be clear, organised and unambiguous; and each speaker should have a fair share of the
conversation, that is, be able to take his or her turn in an orderly way and be able to
complete what s/he wants to say (Leech 1983; Stephens 1992b: 76–96). These
conventions are very readily broken, and much of everyday conversation depends on
simultaneously recognising and breaking one or more of them. In particular, many
breaches are prompted by the operation of politeness in social exchange. Whenever
conversational principles are breached, the product is apt to be humour, irony or conflict.
After a sequence of four utterances which more or less adhere to the principles of
coherence and turn taking, but skirt the boundaries of politeness by drawing attention
to Ellie’s unusual appearance (shabby but beautiful, she doesn’t conform to the girls’
image of ‘mother’), Kemp introduces a sequence built on crucial breaches of relation and
politeness, beginning with Sue’s ‘Is that your dad?’. This is flagged contextually because
readers know that Juniper’s father is missing, and textually because of the cline in the
speech reporting tags from the neutral ‘said Sue’ to the intrusively persistent ‘Sue kept
on’, and the heavy tagging of Rebecca’s interruption and shift of relation (‘hissed
Rebecca, then said very loudly and clearly’). Finally, of course, Juniper’s escapist
daydream cliché also serves as a narratorial comment on how painful she has found the
exchange: indeed, the blowing ‘grit and rubbish’ becomes a metonym for the anguish at
the heart of her being. Second, Sue’s response to Rebecca’s intervention is to apparently
pursue relation but to breach politeness by turning attention to Juniper’s missing arm.
The upshot is Juniper’s final spoken utterance—interrupting, impolite and nonsensical,
it terminates the exchange and the discourse shifts into represented thought. Such an
astute use of conversational principles is one of the most expressive linguistic tools
available to a children’s writer.
A stylistic examination of children’s fiction can show us something very important,
namely that a fiction with a high proportion of conversation and a moderately
sophisticated use of focalisation has access to textual strategies with the potential to
offset the limitations which may be implicit in a disinclination to employ the full range
of lexical, syntactic and figurative possibilities of written discourse. But stylistic analysis
is also never an end in itself, and is best carried out within a frame which considers the
relationship of text to genre and to culture. Obviously enough, stylistics alone cannot
determine the relative merits of Sue and Rebecca’s preferences for ‘a pop star’ or
‘someone in a TV series’, and cannot determine whether a reader treats either category
as prestigious or feels that both consign Ellie to a subject position without selfhood. The
example illustrates two general principles in language analysis: that significance is
influenced by the larger contexts of text and culture within which particular utterances
are meaningful; and that particular language features or effects can have more than one
66 LINGUISTICS AND STYLISTICS