Ritið : tímarit Hugvísindastofnunar - 01.10.2015, Page 136

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inni fremur að nánasta umhverfi persónunnar og aðstæðum. Þetta er í raun fjórða
aðferðin til að halda kyni Marion leyndu og kemur m.a. fram í kaflanum þar sem
Marion er kynnt/kynntur til sögunnar.
Lykilorð: mál, kyn, kynóvissa, sínefnihamla, glæpasögur
A B S T R A C T
Language and gender uncertainty:
The mystery of Marion Briem
The Great Match (2012) is a crime novel by Arnaldur indriðason where the gender
of the main character, Marion Briem, is never revealed. in this way, the author
creates an interesting but ultimately insoluble riddle for the reader to work on
while the police gradually solve the actual murder mystery. To hide the gender of
Marion Briem, the author avoids gender-specific pronouns like hann ‘he’ and hún
‘she’ referring to Marion. The author does this (a) by referring to Marion Briem
by various kinds of noun phrases describing the character, (b) by talking about
the character’s body or body parts rather than the character him/herself, and (c)
by repeating the name Marion. These strategies are known from other literary
traditions, and it has also been shown that the reader’s empathy with a person is
reduced if he/she is never referred to with a gender-specific pronoun (Livia 2001).
in the present article, we argue for two additional points relating to the gender
avoidance in The Great Match. First, although the repetition of a given name is a
traditional method to hide the gender of fictional characters, in the case of Marion
Briem it obeys a constraint called the Repeated Name Penalty (Gordon, Grosz &
Gilliom 1993), which prohibits the repetition of a subject as the subject of the
following clause. We show that this constraint is always observed in The Great
Match, even in passages where the name Marion occurs with only short intervals.
Secondly, we illustrate that the author sometimes avoids referring to Marion by
focusing on the character’s surroundings and circumstances. This, in effect, is
yet another way in which Marion’s gender is concealed, as can be seen e.g. in the
chapter where the character is first introduced.
We hope to have shown in this article that a close linguistic analysis of a clearly-
defined problem in a particular literary work can reveal various characteristics of
the text which would otherwise have gone unnoticed and illuminate the literary
techniques of Arnaldur indriðason. However, a more extensive combination of a
linguistic and a literary analysis of The Great Match is a task for future research.
Keywords: language, gender, gender uncertainty, Repeated Name Penalty, crime
fiction
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