A Pragma- Discoursal Analysis of ‘Grammatical Shift’ in Virginia Woolf ‘s Story ‘The Mark on the Wall”

Grammatical shift is an extremely interesting grammatical phenomenon but does presuppose some knowledge of grammar as such knowledge provides some basic understanding about the operations involved in such shift. In English, shifts which involve shifts in pronouns, verb tenses, discourse and other types are quite acceptable and frequent as long as the shifts are motivated by meaning and discourse.„Grammatical shift, in this paper, involves three types of important shifts: shifts in pronouns, tenses and discourse. The paper aims at analyzing a number of selected texts from Woolf‟s short story „ The Mark on the Wall‟ which applies „stream of consciousness‟ (hence SOC) as a method of narration. This is done to illustrate how English uses the phenomenon of shift within this context. The analysis of its relevance to establishing cohesion and coherence within the texts including the identified shifts will be done by using a pragma- discoursal model based on the application of an integrative approach of Halliday and Hasan (1976) and De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) towards cohesion. Moreover, three other criteria of Beaugrande and Dressler s will be included for their relevance in illustrating the pragmatic aspect of the phenomenon under study.Thus, the analysis will be made in terms of two main levels: co-textual and contextual.