No abstract

In narratives, either a narrator or a protagonist may be the perspective taker. Importantly, shifts between the two are possible. German and French differ with respect to the means which indicate that the perspective is shifted. While German may use a specific pronoun to indicate that the perspective is shifted from the protagonist to the narrator, French may display tense-aspect forms deviating from the expected ones. In our analysis, we take into account larger strings of context, thus committing to the discourse level. We apply a staged translation approach. This allows us to determine more precisely the diverging functioning of the language-specific means of perspective marking. The comparison of the means indicating perspective shifts opens a second question. If French allows for deviating tense-aspect forms, may the temporal anchoring diverge between the two languages? We confirm this on the grounds of a comparison of translations of German free indirect discourse to French.

No abstract

In this article, we investigate the role free indirect discourse (FID) plays in temporal discourse structure. In contrast to the most widely accepted account of FID, which compares the content of FID to the surrounding content (two voices or two contexts), we take FID as a discourse entity and, thus, focus on the FID event. We follow a prominence-based approach to temporal discourse structure, through which we are able to describe the temporal relations the FID event maintains to the preceding and the following discourse in a precise manner. We can also account for the temporal developments that may be brought about by FID events. This becomes especially interesting in longer passages where FID events alternate with non-FID parts of discourse. The interaction involves the three levels which together make up our account of temporal discourse structure.