'Meaning you have been known to act rashly.' How Mrs. Weasley negotiates her identity in conflicts in Harry Potter series
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | If given a chance by the author or the narrator, fictional characters negotiate their roles and identities via a face-to-face interaction. A speech event that allows them to (re)construct their roles and identities can be represented by a conflict in which they have to perform how pragmatically skilful they are. Being interested in the character of Molly Weasley, the leading figure of the Weasleys’ clan and the like-a-mother to the main protagonist, Harry Potter, in Harry Potter series, the present paper draws upon the assumption that Mrs. Weasley’s identity is not limited just to her parental and marital status, but she also has to negotiate her identity of a member of the Order of the Phoenix and that of a skilful witch when engaged in an interaction with her peers. In order to analyse her identity construction the paper studies those dialogues in which Mrs. Weasley gets into a verbal conflict with her relatives, co-members of the Order and with her enemies. The paper works with Culpeper’s (2011) theoretical framework of implicational impoliteness that derives from the fact that impoliteness is implied in a conversation, and thus highly context-dependent. The objective of the paper is to study which form-driven, convention-driven and context-driven linguistic triggers Mrs. Weasley uses in her direct speeches. Besides, the narrator’s reporting clauses are taken into consideration as well. Considering the variables of her gender, social roles and those of the immediate context, the paper hypothesizes that Mrs. Weasley tends to mitigate the impact of causing offence. |
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