The discourse structure of free indirect discourse reports

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.

Taking the perspective of narrative characters

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.

Sympathy and Empathy

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.

Derogatory terms in free indirect discourse

Free indirect discourse (FID) is a style of reporting speech and thought that combines third-personal narration with direct, first-personal discourse. Expressive terms, such as “idiot” or “asshole”, are known to occur in FID. When so used, the pejorative content reflects the protagonist’s rather than the narrator’s point of view. This chapter broadens the discussion of derogatory terms in FID by investigating occurrences of slurring terms, such as the N-word. The two main approaches to FID, namely the two-context approach and the mixed-quotation approach, are discussed in light of these novel findings. The chapter shows that both are able to account for the data; however, the choice between them imposes constraints on the underlying theory of derogatory terms.

Computing perspective shift in narratives

Natural language allows changing the point of view in narrative texts without overt perspective-shifting operators. A well-known example of such a perspective shift is free indirect discourse. But how do hearers (readers) know that they need to change the point of view in the first place? And when there are reasons to believe that the point of view is not that of the narrator, how do they know whose perspective is being developed? These questions have been rarely addressed in the literature, with the notable exceptions of Wiebe (1990, 1994) and Hinterwimmer (2019). This chapter reviews these proposals, adds a few new observations about the importance of rhetorical structure, and proposes to incorporate all the previous insights into one unified framework.

Narrative and point of view

This chapter launches a simultaneous investigation of the conventions of temporal progression and subjective point of view in narratives. Historically, the two have been seen as mutually exclusive, as in Plato’s opposition of diegesis and mimesis, and Benveniste’s of histoire and discours. More recently, Mimo Caenepeel proposes, in the same vein, that subjective clauses of free indirect discourse do not (generally) advance narrative time, and suggests that this is because stative aspect, which does not (generally) induce a temporal update, is obligatory for clauses with a subjective point of view. The chapter will critically examine this interesting proposal.

Perspective Shift Across Modalities

Languages offer various ways to present what someone said, thought, imagined, felt, and so on from their perspective. The prototypical example of a perspective-shifting device is direct quotation. In this review we define perspective shift in terms of indexical shift: A direct quotation like “Selena said, ‘Oh, I don't know.’” involves perspective shift because the first-person indexical ‘I’ refers to Selena, not to the actual speaker. We then discuss a variety of noncanonical modality-specific perspective-shifting devices: role shift in signed language, quotatives in spoken language, free indirect discourse in written language, and point-of-view shift in visual language. We show that these devices permit complex mixed forms of perspective shift which may involve nonlinguistic gestural as well as visual components. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Tense Alternation in Japanese Literature: Translating Free Indirect Discourse and Focalization in Kashimada Maki’s Meido meguri

This paper examines the phenomenon of tense alternation in Japanese literary narrative, making specific reference to Kashimada Maki’s (鹿島田 真希) novella Meido meguri (冥途めぐり Touring the Land of the Dead, 2012) as a case study. It argues that tense alternation in sentence‑final predicative verbs should be regarded a stylistic technique that serves as an indicator of free indirect discourse and of focalization through a central character, and that it moreover establishes an opposition between external narration and internal focalization. It then illustrates how this dynamic is employed in Meido Meguri to create a contrast between a mode suggesting narrative distance and another suggesting mental interiority. This paper thus highlights a significant linguistic difference in the construction of free indirect discourse in Japanese and English narratives.

Transition and Translation of Free Indirect Discourse in Chinese Literature

Free indirect discourse (FID) is a discourse presentation pattern of third-person narration, and it is often employed as a common narrative strategy to present characters’ consciousness in literary works. Given its ambiguous link with both the narrator’s and character’s discourse, we may feel confused about how to distinguish FID from other discourse when reading a text. After introducing the basic definition of this notion, this paper will interpret several signals which can help to distinguish FID passages in the text. Most importantly, this paper will look at how FID passages in Western literary works were translated into Chinese in early works, and then explore the development of FID in early Chinese fiction, investigating the transition of FID in Chinese.

Los de abajo. Mitificación y metalepsis

The study of narrative resources such as free indirect discourse and narrated monologue, in Los de abajo, although it has been clearly pointed out by critics such as Mansour, Escalante and St. Ours, is scarce in comparison with the works on the Mexican Revolution and the controversy over the ideological position of its author, Mariano Azuela. In the present work, an approach to these resources is made, following the precepts of narratology, starting from the relationship between the narrative voice and the figural discourse, and between the discourses of the characters; that is, from the citation processes. Specifically, an approach is made to the way in which Demetrio Macías recounts his exploits by repeating the speech of Alberto Solís, shaped, in turn, by other anonymous speeches. The relevance of self-narrating in this way is such that it implies a radical change in the personality and destiny of Demetrio Macías.