Quotation and Unquotation in Free Indirect Discourse

Abstract

I argue that free indirect discourse should be analyzed as a species of direct discourse rather than indirect discourse. More specifically, I argue against the emerging consensus among semanticists, who analyze it in terms of context shifting. Instead, I apply the semantic mechanisms of mixed quotation and unquotation to offer an alternative analysis where free indirect discourse is essentially a quotation of an utterance or thought, but with unquoted tenses and pronouns.Keywords: free indirect discourse; direct and indirect discourse; context shift; indexicality; semantics; narrative; quotation; unquotation Word count: 12,836 I thank Philippe de Btabanter, Annika Hübl, Franziska Köder, Markus Steinbach, Andreas Stokke, Philippe Schlenker, Chung-chieh Shan, Jennifer Spenader, Arie Verhagen, Thomas Weskott, and in particular Regine Eckardt, for valuable feedback on various occasions in the years between submission and acceptance of this paper. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their constructive comments. This research is supported by the EU under FP7, ERC Starting Grant 263890-BLENDS. anniversary with Spencer, without fully switching over to the character's perspective, as would happen in direct discourse. In fact, the adjustment of tense (is → was) and pronouns (my → her) to fit the narrator's story telling context, strongly suggest that, if it is a report, it must be of the indirect variety. But then where is the subordinating framing clause, e.g. she thought that? And why don't we adjust other indexicals like tomorrow (→ the next day)?1 fanfiction.southofnowhereonline.com/story/15004/page1.html 2The critical contribution of this paper is to argue against the emerging consensus among semanticists, according to which free indirect discourse involves interpretation with respect to a shifted context, either by a covert context shifting operator, or otherwise (sections 2 and 3). Building on recent developments in the semantics of quotation, I then propose that free indirect discourse is essentially quotation with systematically punctured 'holes'(section 4).But first, in the remainder of this section, I'll describe four defining characteristics of free indirect discourse (sections 1.1 -1.4). I end the introduction with a brief preview of my own proposal in section 1.5. . . . a Form of Reported Thought, or SpeechIn example (1) above, free indirect discourse is used to report what the protagonist, Ashley, is thinking. Reporting thoughts (or 'stream of consciousness,' if you will) seems to be the primary function of free indirect discourse.However, actual speech can also be reported in free indirect discourse:(2) My mother reminded me of this every day with a raised eyebrow and sentences that trailed off into a question mark -she was married at 24, which was already 'up there,' and all my friends back in Tombov had at least one child by now. She was only living to see me married, she said. 2 2 killingthebuddha.com/mag/crucifiction/the-domovoi/ Note that in my eventual, quotational anal...

Two kinds of perspective taking in narrative texts

“…Second, while in (1c) the thought is quoted in its entirety, the pronoun she and the past tense of the modal auxiliary are unquoted in (1a). Concerning the question of why pronouns and tenses, as opposed to other items, are unquoted in FID, Maier (2015) assumes this to be a pragmatically driven convention that is also in effect in other forms of mixed quotation (see Maier to appear for discussion). The most important argument that Maier gives in favor of his analysis is the following one: FID involves more than a shifted interpretation of context-sensitive items.…”

“…If one adopts an analysis of FID as a special kind of mixed quotation (as in Maier 2015), in contrast, the restriction of FID to the root level can be accounted for as follows: The speech or thought act to be partially quoted can only be accommodated at the root level, but not sentence-internally. In Section 3 I will turn to the question of which of the existing analyses of FID is best suited to account for the contrasts observed in this section, after having proposed my analysis of a second kind of protagonists' perspective-taking, viewpoint shifting (VS), which will be introduced in the next subsection.…”

“…This particular form of speech or thought representation, which is formally clearly distinguishable from both direct discourse (henceforth: DD) and indirect discourse (henceforth: ID), has long been known to literary scholars by the name free indirect discourse (henceforth: FID) (see Hamburger 1968 andStanzel 1979 and the references therein), and has also been discussed by many linguists in descriptive terms (Harweg 1972;Plank 1986;von Roncador 1988;see Dirscherl and Pafel 2015 for a recent overview). More recently, FID has become a research topic for linguists working in the tradition of truth conditional semantics, and, building on ideas first formulated by Banfield (1982) and Doron (1991), various analyses have been proposed to capture the distinctive properties of FID in a formally precise way (Schlenker 2004;Sharvit 2008;Eckardt 2014;Maier 2015). 1 The most striking of these properties is that in FID all deictic expressions with the exception of pronouns and tenses are interpreted with respect to a fictional context (in the sense of Kaplan 1979) that has been set up by the preceding linguistic context.…”

“…This mixed behavior of deictic elements has lead Schlenker (2004), Sharvit (2008) and Eckardt (2014) (whose analyses otherwise differ in many important respects) to postulate that sentences in FID mode are interpreted with respect to two different contexts: the narrator's context, which is only relevant for the interpretation of pronouns and tenses, and the fictional context of the respective protagonist, which is relevant with respect to all other context-sensitive expressions. Maier (2015), in contrast, analyzes FID as a special, highly conventionalized form of mixed quotation: The reader has to accommodate a prominent protagonist's speech or thought act to be partially quoted, with pronouns and tenses being unquoted.…”

“…The first, Free Indirect Discourse, represents conscious thoughts or utterances of protagonists and involves context shifting: All context-sensitive expressions with the exception of pronouns and tenses are interpreted with respect to the fictional context of some salient protagonist (Schlenker 2004;Sharvit 2008;Eckardt 2014, Maier 2015. The second, which I dub viewpoint shifting, does not necessarily represent conscious thoughts or utterances and it does not involve context shifting.…”