MEDIATED REPRESENTATION OF INTERNAL EXPERIENCE IN THIRD-PERSON NARRATION: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF WOMEN-CENTRED PROSE

Abstract

The article examines the representation of internal experience in third-person narration in contemporary womencentred prose. The focus is on cases where inner states are not verbalised directly but appear in connection with speech, action and perception. The analysis is based on a corpus compiled from five English-language novels, where narration is organised around a female focalising character and where the pronoun she is used as the main point of entry into the material. The study considers the frequency and collocational profile of she and the contexts in which it occurs. Particular attention is paid to reporting verbs, mental and perceptual predicates, bodily actions and modal forms. The analysis shows that reporting and action verbs are the most frequent, while mental verbs occur less often and do not organise the narration. Internal states are not named directly. They appear in speech, action and perception and are reconstructed in context. These elements occur together within the same fragments of the text and do not function as separate layers. The results also show that this way of representing internal experience is connected with the organisation of narrative situations. Inner states remain tied to interaction, reaction and perception and do not appear separately. They are conveyed through the immediate context in which the character acts and reacts. The focus shifts from naming inner states to the way they appear alongside speech, gesture and perception. Internal experience is therefore not isolated in specific lexical items but becomes visible through recurring configurations in the text. This makes it possible to observe how stable patterns are formed and how they operate across different texts rather than in isolated cases including fragments built on minimal but recurrent signals.