Abstract
The “deliberate act of omission in detective discourse” is examined in the double function (DF) of linguistic features. It is the hypothesis that in DF there is replaying or re-experiencing of a narrative event in prospective reading in the form of rectification or omission of narrative information. DF is analyzed in linguistic elements like the participant role in transitivity analysis and in circumstantial elements. By using this functional approach, I examine how information flow is withheld in a participant shift in manipulated contexts of crime fiction. In her “Time in Agatha Christie Novel,” Carol De Dobey Rijelij discusses these contexts as cluster of analepsis around certain times in the story, a defining characteristic of Christie novels (218). A manipulated context (forthcoming) is not a flashback; it is here that the process of filling in a gap or rectification takes place in an episode (a cluster of events that constitute an episode). The crime fiction used for this is Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1993; Ackroyd). The framework used for analysis is the transitivity function for participant shift, the minor process in circumstantial elements and the ergative perspective in clauses. This is an interdisciplinary approach, where narrative discourse is analyzed in functional linguistics to investigate the grammar of the language of crime, and provide a further level of reader involvement in the narratology of ‘whodunit’ detective stories.
