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.

Protagonist projection, character focus, and mixed quotation

This chapter compares two kinds of perspective-shifting language. The first is so-called “protagonist projection” (Holton 1997; Stokke 2013). The second phenomenon is sometimes known as “character focus.” The chapter argues that both protagonist projection and character focus should be analyzed as forms of mixed quotation. Drawing on the work of Potts (2007) and Maier (2014, 2015), mixed quotation is seen as interacting with two dimensions of interpretation, one corresponding to the use component of mixed quotation, the other corresponding to the mention component. It proposes that the mention component of mixed quotation can be interpreted modally. As a result, protagonist projection and character focus can be seen to have the same semantics, while they differ pragmatically. In particular, while protagonist projection pragmatically conveys attributions of beliefs, character focus does not.

A Plea against Monsters

Inspired by Schlenker’s (2003) seminal Plea for Monsters, linguists have been analyzing every occurrence of a shifted indexical by postulating a monstrous operator. The author’s aim in this paper is to show that Kaplan’s (1989) original strategy of explaining apparent shifting in terms of a quotational use/mention distinction offers a much more intuitive, parsimonious and empirically superior analysis of many of these phenomena, including direct–indirect switches in Ancient Greek, role shift in signed languages, free indirect discourse in literary narratives, and mixed quotation.