“Foreign Speach” in the Novel The Great Water by Zhivko Chingo

The problem with “foreign speech” in this text structure, and especially in a narrative text, primarily relates to the use of foreign words from foreign languages. But not only that. “Foreign speech” is also “imported speech” where the replica content is preserved and is grammatically integrated in the narrator's text. “Foreign speech” may be “paraphrased speech” in which none of the elements of the speech act itself are preserved except for their content. However, those speeches can be mixed and representatives of foreign speech may equally exist. These are usually graphically emphasized by quotation marks in the narrative text. However, that does not apply to foreign words. As quotes from a foreign language code, they are not enclosed in quotation marks and in this case, the hallmark of the “foreign word” is exclusively, its foreign linguistic form or foreign pronunciation.

In a literal sense, “foreign speech” is a word that originates from another, nonnative language, for example, English, French, Russian, etc. However, “foreign speech” is not just a foreign word. A text written in a native language but from another author can have a role of foreign speech. It can be a separate word or an entire construction spoken by a character in a novel, by the author or the narrator. An example of “foreign speech,” in its widest sense, also includes such constructions that originate from another plain of the text, which is distinguished from the main text, from the rest of the style, from the language region, from the other personal manner of expression and at the end, from another language, completely different from the native one – that is, a foreign language. The problem of the foreign in contrast to the native narration refers to the relation: the author's text (original): translation text, narrator's expression: character's expression with all variations of the retold text as foreign in the language of the raconteur (author or narrator). And, essentially, they are the intertextual metatextual and metalinguistic relations.