IN MY OWN WORDS: THE TRANSLATION OF REPORTING VERBS ON THE PARALLEL CORPUS THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN – AS AVENTURAS DE HUCK

Abstract This article examines Monteiro Lobato’s (re)textualization of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The analysis focuses on reporting verbs in instances of direct speech. The methodology used for data collection is based on Corpus Linguistics and the analysis built on the hallidayan systemic-functional grammar. The aim of this paper is to explore patterns in the choice of reporting verbs in Twain’s and Lobato’s textualizations particularly in connection with neutral verbs, such as ‘say’ in English and ‘dizer’ in Portuguese. Results show that Lobato’s (re) textualization tends to select Free Direct Discourse, (instead of Direct Discourse) and a wider variety of reporting verbs, there being no single verb accounting for more than 25% of all occurrences of direct discourse examined. The neutral verb ‘say’ was also observed to have been (re) textualized by reporting verbs that signal speech function, indicating either information giving or demanding, and by verbs that realize an additional feature or specify speech connotation.