The final issue that concerns us is that of the degree to which the attributed material is integrated or assimilated into the text itself. That is to say, we are concerned with whether there is clear separation between the words of the attributed source and the words of the text itself or whether this distinction has been blurred. To put it another way, we are concerned with whether the writer purports to offer the reader the actual words of the attributed source or whether these have been reworked in some way, often with the result that the wording is more like that of the text than that of the original speaker/writer. At its most simple, this distinction separates direct quotation (where the attributed material is clearly separated from the rest of the text) and indirect quotation (where the words of the attributed are not so clearly demarcated and where there may be considerable paraphrasing.)
Consider, for example,
example 1. UNITS SPARK ANGER Approval political suicide by CATE BAILEY A DECISION by Drummoyne Council to allow a new townhouse development at Abbotsford Point is political suicide, residents claim. Council sparked widespread community anger last month when it approved the Great North Rd. development, despite 400 objections to the proposal. Abbotsford Point resident Eva Flegman addressed council on December 17, telling councillors their decision would return to haunt them at the polls. "This development with eight dwellings on a relatively narrow block is inappropriate to Abbotsford," she said. "The density of this development is causing a great deal of anguish and distress within our community. "We are concerned not only about the loss of character but of the deterioration of amenities and services." (The Glebe and Inner Western Weekly 8/1/97: 1) example 2, Taliban officials in the Afghan capital, Kabul, have accused Russia of fanning the flames of regional tension. A foreign ministry statement released in Kabul accused Moscow of opposing positive developments and growth of central Asian countries. (Australian Associated Press 7/4/97)
In example 2, there are stretches of direct quotation where the meanings are clearly those of the external source. But what do we make of
A DECISION by Drummoyne Council to allow a new townhouse development at Abbotsford Point is political suicide, residents claim. Council sparked widespread community anger last month when it approved the Great North Rd. development, despite 400 objections to the proposal. Abbotsford Point resident Eva Flegman addressed council on December 17, telling councillors their decision would return to haunt them at the polls.
How certain can we be that the quoted source actually said that approving the new development would be 'political suicide', or 'would return to haunt them in the polls'? Are these the actual words of the source or are the more likely to be the formulation or paraphrase of the journalist?
We see a similar phenomenon in example 2. Once again, it is impossible to determine whether 'fanning the flames of regional tension' were the words of the quoted source of the journalist/editor.
Thus we see here that through indirect speech of this type, the distance between external and the authorial voice is reduced. There is some degree of assimilation by the text of the attributed meanings.
Such assimilation may be increased through the use of the various grammatical structures of attribution. Consider, for example,
They referred to the Minister's cowardly decision to cross the floor.
Here the claim that the Minister made a cowardly decision is being attributed to an external source, and yet, the text also, to some degree, asserts that claim itself. Thus the distinction is blurred between what the authorial voice and the external voice asserts.
This process by which there is a blurring of the distinction between the author's voice and that of the external source has, of course, been widely explored in the literature in considering the difference between what has been termed "Direct Speech", "Indirect Speech" and "Free Indirect Speech". (See, for example Simpson 1993 or Leech and Short 1981). This is one area where there are some marked differences between some registers and text types. Thus there are certain types of assimilation which occur in novelistic fiction which, for example, would seldom be found in hard-news reporting. Consider the following extract from Dickens' Little Dorrit.
As a vast fire will fill the air to a great distance with its roar, so the sacred flame which the mighty Barnacles had fanned caused the air to resound more and more with the name of Merdle. It was deposited on every lip, and carried into every ear. There never was, there never had been, there never again should be, such a man as Mr Merdle. Nobody, as aforesaid, knew what he had done; but everybody knew him to be the greatest that had appeared.
The proposition that 'there never was such a man as Mr Merdle" is, of course, attributed but substantially assimilated. The grammatical indicators of this are relatively subtle, as is often the case in such texts. Firstly, it is necessary to look back to the earlier text, to such propositions as "the sacred flame...caused the air to resound more and more with the name of Merdle" and "It was deposited on every lip, and carried on every ear" Such observation set up the possibility that subsequent utterances are material which had likewise "caused the air to resound" or has been "deposited on every lip". There is, however, one more concrete grammatical indicator of the proposition's attributed status - the use of pluperfect tense/aspect in "there never had been". Such a tense, of course, locates the saying of this utterance at a point prior to text-time, a point earlier than the "saying" or "telling" by which the authorial voice is constituted in the novel.
The Appraisal framework does not as yet provide a fully systematicised account of these and other differences in the way in which attributions can be assimilated into a text. Thus it doesn't have any categories which would directly correspond to categories such as "indirect speech" and "free indirect speech". For now, Appraisal theory would employ the notion of greater or lesser degrees of assimilation to handle the differences in intertextual positioning which are typically at stake in a shift, for example, from indirect speech to free indirect speech. This is obviously and area warranting further investigation
