The SFL/Pragmatics Interface: Reporting Strategies in Poe’s William Wilson

Reporting strategies, referred to as projection in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), are generally classified in terms of their degrees of reflection of a speaker’s speech or thought representations. We argue that different categories of direct and indirect representations are logically, semantically, grammatically and pragmatically so complex that a combination of SFL and pragmatic angles could provide fruitful results in the interpretation of their meanings. The chapter focuses on a short story by Poe entitled “William Wilson” and shows how SFL and pragmatics complement each other for while the former offers a solid ground for the grammatical analysis of reporting in the story, the latter builds on these findings and goes beyond them by looking at their potential ideological, psychological and social implications.