Dialogue in fiction

Abstract

Characters and narrators, in fictional narrative discourse, exchange speech. Their interaction however is pseudo (see Sinclair, 1981), since it is not interactive in the real sense but imagined by an author, and it only happens intra-textually (the conversation only exists on a page of a book.) Composed dialogue therefore, has features that distinguish it from real talk, although authors base their representation of speech on a model of what they think conversationalists do.