Isomorphic mapping in fictional interpretation

This chapter investigates how readers/hearers come to assign a subjective interpretation to a fictional text. It argues that fictional texts use a speech act operator that involves an inference from the text worlds to the reader’s reality (Bauer and Beck 2014). The inference is based on a mapping from concepts in the text to real objects, properties, and relations which has isomorphic features, i.e., it is a structure-preserving mapping. We illustrate the workings of our semantic framework by applying it to two poems by Emily Dickinson and offer some generalizations regarding plausible vs. implausible mappings and what governs their choice.