Free indirect speech as a means to introduce archaic style into the author’s narration: A Russian linguistics perspective
The phenomenon of free indirect speech was intensively studied in the 20th century from two fundamentally different directions. Some scholars viewed it as a special syntactic or stylistic-syntactic structure in comparison with direct and reported speech. Others considered it more as a poetic-stylistic technique of characters’ speech reproduction in artistic works. The main aim of this research is to reveal the specific functions of free indirect speech in the genre of the historical novel and show their determining influence on the use of stylistic forms. The study shows that in the genre of historical novels the use of free indirect speech is represented in its small forms, in particular lexical, phraseological, phonetic and grammatical microforms, bearing the imprint of the living and documentary language of the epoch described.