The discourse structure of free indirect discourse reports

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 21-39
Author(s):  
Sofia Bimpikou ◽  
Emar Maier ◽  
Petra Hendriks
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Structure ◽  
Pronoun Resolution ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Attribution Analysis ◽  
Natural Conversation ◽  
Discourse Units

Abstract We investigate the discourse structure of Free Indirect Discourse passages in narratives. We argue that Free Indirect Discourse reports consist of two separate propositional discourse units: an (explicit or implicit) frame segment and a reported content. These segments are connected at the level of discourse structure by a non-veridical, subordinating discourse relation of Attribution, familiar from recent SDRT analyses of indirect discourse constructions in natural conversation (Hunter, 2016). We conducted an experiment to detect the covert presence of a subordinating frame segment based on its effects on pronoun resolution. We compared (unframed) Free Indirect Discourse with overtly framed Indirect Discourse and a non-reportative segment. We found that the first two indeed pattern alike in terms of pronoun resolution, which we take as evidence against the pragmatic context split approach of Schlenker (2004) and Eckardt (2014), and in favor of our discourse structural Attribution analysis.

Temporal relations of free indirect discourse events

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob Egetenmeyer
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Structure ◽  
Temporal Relations ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse

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.

scholarly journals Investigating genre distinctions through discourse distance and discourse network

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kun Sun ◽  
Rong Wang ◽  
Wenxin Xiong
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Study ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Quantitative Method ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
Discourse Structure ◽  
Structure Theory ◽  
Network Data ◽  
Quantitative Studies ◽  
Discourse Units ◽  
Syntactic Dependency

Abstract The notion of genre has been widely explored using quantitative methods from both lexical and syntactical perspectives. However, discourse structure has rarely been used to examine genre. Mostly concerned with the interrelation of discourse units, discourse structure can play a crucial role in genre analysis. Nevertheless, few quantitative studies have explored genre distinctions from a discourse structure perspective. Here, we use two English discourse corpora (RST-DT and GUM) to investigate discourse structure from a novel viewpoint. The RST-DT is divided into four small subcorpora distinguished according to genre, and another corpus (GUM) containing seven genres are used for cross-verification. An RST (rhetorical structure theory) tree is converted into dependency representations by taking information from RST annotations to calculate the discourse distance through a process similar to that used to calculate syntactic dependency distance. Moreover, the data on dependency representations deriving from the two corpora are readily convertible into network data. Afterwards, we examine different genres in the two corpora by combining discourse distance and discourse network. The two methods are mutually complementary in comprehensively revealing the distinctiveness of various genres. Accordingly, we propose an effective quantitative method for assessing genre differences using discourse distance and discourse network. This quantitative study can help us better understand the nature of genre.

Sympathy and Empathy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner
Keyword(s):  
Prosocial Behavior ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Fair Share ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Literary Techniques

Sympathy and empathy are complex and entwined concepts with philosophical and scientific roots relating to issues in ethics, aesthetics, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. For some, the two concepts are indistinguishable, the two terms interchangeable, but each has a unique history as well as qualities that make both concepts distinct. Although each is associated with feeling, especially the capacity to feel with others or to imaginatively put oneself “in their shoes,” the concepts’ sometimes shared, sometimes divergent histories reveal more complicated origins, as well as vexed and ongoing relations to feeling and emotion and to the ethical value of emotional sharing. Though empathy regularly is considered the more advanced and egalitarian of the two, it shares with sympathy a controversial role in historical debates regarding questions of an inborn or divine moral sense, prosocial behavior and the development of human communities, the relation of sensation to unconscious mental processes, brain matter, and neurons, and animal/human difference. In literary criticism, sympathy and empathy have been key components of aesthetic movements such as sentimentalism, realism, and modernism, and of literary techniques like free indirect discourse (FID), which are thought (by some) to enhance readerly intimacy and closeness to novelistic characters and perspectives. Both concepts have also received their fair share of suspicion, as the capacity to feel, or imagine feeling, the emotions of others remains a controversial basis for ethics.

scholarly journals Precedent Names in the Text Field of Marina Tsvetaeva from the Perspective of Free Indirect Discourse

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 142
Author(s):  
Daniya Abuzarovna Salimova ◽  
Olga Pavlovna Puchinina
Keyword(s):  
World Wide ◽  
The Other ◽  
Specific Character ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Personal Names ◽  
Text Field ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

The present study is complied with the topical theme “name in the text” and devoted to the problems of how precedent names as the text-forming elements function in the poems and prose works of Marina Tsvetaeva within the framework of free indirect discourse. The authors study various methods and functions of personal names. The authors make conclusions concerning the frequency of precedent names and the specific character of intertextual elements in Tsvetaeva’s text, which, on the one hand, complicates the perception of the text, but on the other hand, promotes including both the poet and the reader into the world-wide cultural and spiritual environment. The ways of introducing the name and the persona, especially within free indirect discourse, specifies the further existence of the name / or its absence in the text.

scholarly journals Features of Discourse Presentation in Translation: Literary and Narratological Insights into Translation Universals

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Päivi Kuusi
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Represented Discourse

Several translation scholars have recognised translation as a form ofdiscourse mediation or discourse presentation (see, for example, Mossop 1998). In line with this, ‘universals’ of translation have also been re-framed in the larger context of discourse mediation, as mediation universals rather than something strictly translationspecific (Ulrych 2009). In the present article, this line of enquiry is developed by comparing some of the alleged universals of translation, namely standardization and explicitation, with insights from literary and narratological studies on the nature of discourse presentation. The notion of reportive or interpretative interference (Sternberg 1982) and Fludernik’s (1993) claim that all represented discourse is typical and schematic in nature seem to bear curious resemblance to the notion of standardization or normalization, posited as a possible universal of translation (Mauranen & Kujamäki 2004). Drawing on the results of my earlier research (Kuusi 2011), I present examples of free indirect discourse (FID) used in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment with their translations into Finnish. Analyzing the translations, I demonstrate how intranslations, the narratological and literary-theoretical notions of reportive interference and typification/schematization coincide with the translation-theoretical notions of explicitation and standardization.

scholarly journals TIARA 2.0: an interactive tool for annotating discourse structure and text improvement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Wira Gotama Putra ◽  
Kana Matsumura ◽  
Simone Teufel ◽  
Takenobu Tokunaga
Keyword(s):  
Visual Complexity ◽  
Discourse Structure ◽  
Annotation Tool ◽  
Web Technologies ◽  
Four Levels ◽  
Structure Annotation ◽  
Argumentative Structure ◽  
Discourse Units ◽  
Interactive Visualisation ◽  
Tree View

AbstractDiscourse structure annotation aims at analysing how discourse units (e.g. sentences or clauses) relate to each other and what roles they play in the overall discourse. Several annotation tools for discourse structure have been developed. However, they often only support specific annotation schemes, making their usage limited to new schemes. This article presents TIARA 2.0, an annotation tool for discourse structure and text improvement. Departing from our specific needs, we extend an existing tool to accommodate four levels of annotation: discourse structure, argumentative structure, sentence rearrangement and content alteration. The latter two are particularly unique compared to existing tools. TIARA is implemented on standard web technologies and can be easily customised. It deals with the visual complexity during the annotation process by systematically simplifying the layout and by offering interactive visualisation, including clutter-reducing features and dual-view display. TIARA’s text-view allows annotators to focus on the analysis of logical sequencing between sentences. The tree-view allows them to review their analysis in terms of the overall discourse structure. Apart from being an annotation tool, it is also designed to be useful for educational purposes in the teaching of argumentation; this gives it an edge over other existing tools.

Taking the perspective of narrative characters

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 144-162
Author(s):  
Jorrig Vogels ◽  
Sofia Bimpikou ◽  
Owen Kapelle ◽  
Emar Maier
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Mouse Tracking ◽  
Referring Expressions ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Referential Processing ◽  
Narrative Characters ◽  
Processing Differences

Abstract An ongoing debate in the interpretation of referring expressions concerns the degree to which listeners make use of perspective information during referential processing. We aim to contribute to this debate by considering perspective shifting in narrative discourse. In a web-based mouse-tracking experiment in Dutch, we investigated whether listeners automatically shift to a narrative character’s perspective when resolving ambiguous referring expressions, and whether different linguistic perspective-shifting devices affect how and when listeners switch to another perspective. We compared perspective-neutral, direct, and free indirect discourse, manipulating which objects are visible to the character. Our results do not show a clear effect of the perspective shifting devices on participants’ eventual choice of referent, but our online mouse-tracking data reveal processing differences that suggest that listeners are indeed sensitive to the conventional markers of perspective shift associated with direct and (to a lesser degree) free indirect discourse.

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