Parameters of Narrative Perspectivization: The Narrator

Proceedings of the 4th Workshop of Narrative Understanding (WNU2022)

“…This is different in the following example from story 082601: '[...] and then came well myself in fact who came with a gun / and I said why are you fighting Batman and Superman [...]', since the 'I' is making an appearance in a story world clearly detached from the here-and-now of telling the story. 4 The rationale for singling out ego-narration as a preliminary phenomenon is that it evidences a lack of 'transcendence' (Zeman, 2020), marking a departure from the actual speaker and their immediate here-and-now, which we consider a key feature of storytelling. Such transcendence is warranted by a distinction between the child telling the story (ego), the narrator seen as a theoretical entity or 'role', and characters within the story.…”

“…English translations are our own and were made only for the purpose of discussing them here; annotations within the project are based on the Dutch originals. 5 We refrain from going into the widely debated narratological concept of the narrator here and refer to Zeman (2020) for a to-the-point overview.…”

Editorial: Perspective taking in language

“…Reviewing the literature on cognitive and linguistic perspective, three structural properties of visual perspectivization in particular can be identified that are mapped onto the different "perspectival" phenomena (see Zeman, 2020). First, perspective implies the existence of a set of possible alternatives that allows us to "take" and "shift" a perspective.…”

“…There are, however, also crucial differences between visual vs. cognitive and linguistic perspectivization, linked to the fact that in language and cognition, viewpoints are not physically located in the real, but in a mental world. As soon as we expand the concept of "perspective" in this way, the structural properties of visual perspective are understood in a more abstract sense when it comes to cognitive and linguistic perspective (see Zeman, 2017Zeman, , 2020.…”

“…The perspectival center can also be a hypothetical or a fictional character (Stokke). Fictional narratives, for example, offer many examples of "unnatural" viewpoints of (anthropomorphized) animals and objects (Richardson, 2006;Trompenaars et al, 2018), and the status of the narrator as a "person" has been an issue of controversial debate (for an overview see Zeman, 2020). Also, viewpoints can be quite abstract, as seen in studies on perspectivization in grammar (Bergqvist; Spronck and Casartelli).…”