ABSTRACT
In this chapter I propose to demonstrate some of the ways in which the theories and principles developed by linguists and conversational analysts for the systematic study of discourse and natural conversation may be applied illuminatedly in the stylistic and structural study of a fictional conversation within a literary text (the Christmas dinner scene in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).1 I acknowledge at the outset that natural and fictional conversation differ in many ways. It is not merely that in fiction the talk is ‘tidied up’, that there are relatively few unclear utterances, overlaps, false starts, hesitations, and repetitions: there are also literary conventions at work governing the fictional representations of talk, so that the rendered text is quite other than a faithful transcription of a natural conversation. However, certain structural and functional principles govern fictional dialogue, as they do natural dialogue, and in the former case as in the latter any witness (a reader or hearer) must recognize and attend to those principles in order to comprehend the dialogue.
