Two kinds of perspective taking in narrative texts

Abstract

In this paper, I argue for the existence of two distinct kinds of protagonists' perspective taking in narrative texts. 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. Rather, a situation is described as it is perceived by a salient protagonist or in a way that reflects the doxastic state of such a protagonist, not with respect to the Common Ground (CG) of narrator and reader. While FID is only available at the root level, i.e. at the speech act level, viewpoint shifting is available at the level of finite matrix clauses.

Who Perceives? Who Thinks? Anchoring Free Reports of Perception and Thought in Narratives

“…Unlike in literary theory where FID is often taken as a special stylistic device of reporting a character's consciousness in general, be it speech, thoughts, emotions or perceptions, semanticists usually discuss FID as a form of reported (inner) speech. 3 In a recent study though, Hinterwimmer (2017b) argues that apart from FID, there is a different kind of perspective shifting which he terms Viewpoint Shifting and involves the representation of the mental or perceptual state of a character. In this respect it contrasts with FID, as Viewpoint Shifting is the reporting of objects that are nonlinguistic in nature.…”

“…Let us first discuss free perception reports. The most natural prediction is that they are anchored to the experiencer of the perceiving event mentioned or accommodated in the discourse (Abrusán, 2018;Abrusán, 2019;Hinterwimmer, 2017b).…”

Parameters of Narrative Perspectivization: The Narrator

“…), 2019; Głaz and Trofymczuk, 2020;Lee, 2020;and Altshuler and Maier, in press). Despite this increasing interest, the concept of the narrator itself has not been the main focus of the linguistic discussion (also see Eckardt, 2015), and in studies that investigate how narrator's and characters' viewpoints can be shifted and disambiguated (for example, see Kuroda, [1973] 2014; Hinterwimmer, 2017;, the narrator's perspective is often seen as the default case.…”

“…Under this definition, narratives are particularly interesting objects of investigation as they integrate viewpoints of different characters and narrators as alternative viewpoints besides "the speaker" and offer a potential for "viewpoint shifts". In consequence, one central aspect of linguistic studies on narrative perspectivization has been the question of which factors indicate whether a proposition can be ascribed to the narrator's or to a character's viewpoint (for examples, see Hinterwimmer, 2017, and.…”

On the exceptionality of reported speech

“…When Billy looked up in his hiding place a few seconds later, a T-Rex bent down to the entrance of the cave and squinted into the dark. (Hinterwimmer 2017) The idea is that in (10a) the ring is studded with diamonds from the perspective of the woman receiving the ring, but it's glass from the narrator's perspective. In (10b) the T-Rex is familiar from the perspective of the narrator and the reader, hence the definite article in the first sentence, but unfamiliar from the perspective of the little dinosaur character Billy, hence the indefinite article in the third sentence.…”