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Free indirect discourse presents us with the inner world of protagonists of a story. We seem to see the world through their eyes, and listen to their inner thoughts. The present study analyses the logic of free indirect discourse and offers a framework to represent multiple ways in which words betray the speaker's feelings and attitude. The theory covers tense, aspect, temporal indexicals, modal particles, exclamatives and other expressive elements and their dependence on shifting utterance contexts. It traces the subtle ways in which story texts can offer information about protagonists. The study of free indirect discourse has been a topic of great interest in recent years in semantics and pragmatics. In this book, Regine Eckardt proposes a new theory of this domain and applies it to a wide variety of phenomena -- discourse particles, exclamatives, and mood -- in addition to the traditional indexical pronouns and tenses. She situates this project within a larger attempt to extend the tools of semantic analysis to fiction. Most formally oriented semanticists have not paid serious attention to this domain, which has resulted in a major gap in semantic theory; this book is thus a pioneering effort and raises many intriguing points. The total result is an empirically rich and exciting work which will be a profitable read for researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, and formal approaches to literature. Eric McCready, Aoyama Gakuin University
Main description: The author argues for a new, linguistically grounded typology of speech and thought representation in English from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Apart from direct and indirect speech/thought, the types described include the character-oriented free indirect and the narrator-oriented distancing indirect type, and two subjectified types in which reporting clauses such as I think function as hedges.
The chapters in this volume address a variety of issues surrounding quotation, such as whether it is a pragmatic or semantic phenomenon, what varieties of quotation exist, and what speech acts are involved in quoting. Quotation poses problems for many prevailing theories of language. One fundamental principle is that for a language to be learnable, speakers must be able to derive the truth-conditions of sentences from the meanings of their parts. Another popular view is that indexical expressions like "I" display a certain fixity -- that they always refer to the speaker using them. Both of these tenets appear to be violated by quotation. This volume is suitable for scholars in philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics, and for graduate students in philosophy and linguistics. The book will also be useful for researchers in other fields that study quotation, including psychology and computer science.
In recent years, the focus of linguistic research has shifted from sentence to larger units such as text and discourse and accordingly from syntax to semantics and pragmatics. This has led to the development and application of corresponding discourse semantic and pragmatic theories such as, for instance, (S)DRT, Centering Theory, Accessibility Theory, QUD, Generalized Conversational Implicatures, Super Monsters and Gesture Semantics and new empirical approaches in the framework of experimental semantics and pragmatics or corpus linguistic discourse analysis. The contributions to this collected volume build on these developments and investigate the linguistic foundations of narration from various perspectives. The contributions address topics such as speech and thought representation, free indirect speech, information structure, anaphora resolution, co-speech gestures, classifier constructions as well as role shift and constructed action. The volume provides new insights in the linguistic structures underlying narration in written, spoken, and sign languages from an experimental, developmental, historical, typological, and theoretical perspective. The contributions will appeal to theoretical linguists, sign language linguists, typologists, literary scholars, psycholinguists, and philosophers.
This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque.
Monika Fludernik presents a detailed analysis of free indirect discourse as it relates to narrative theory, and the crucial problematic of how speech and thought are represented in fiction. Building on the insights of Ann Banfield's Unspeakable Sentences, Fludernik radically extends Banfield's model to accommodate evidence from conversational narrative, non-fictional prose and literary works from Chaucer to the present. Fludernik's model subsumes earlier insights into the forms and functions of quotation and aligns them with discourse strategies observable in the oral language. Drawing on a vast range of literature, she provides an invaluable resource for researchers in the field and introduces English readers to extensive work on the subject in German as well as comparing the free indirect discourse features of German, French and English. This study effectively repositions the whole area between literature and linguistics, opening up a new set of questions in narrative theory.
This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences.
Free Indirect Style (FIS) is a linguistic technique that defies the logic of human subjectivity by enabling readers to directly observe the subjective experiences of third-person characters. This book consolidates the existing literary-linguistic scholarship on FIS into a theory that is based around one of its most important effects: consciousness representation. Modernist narratives exhibit intensified formal experimentation and a heightened concern with characters’ conscious experience, and this provides an ideal context for exploring FIS and its implications for character consciousness. This book focuses on three novels that are central to the Modernist canon: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and James Joyce’s Ulysses. It applies the revised theory of FIS in close semantic analyses of the language in these narratives and combines stylistics with literary criticism, linking interpretations with linguistic features in distinct manifestations of the style.
The present volume unites 15 papers on reported discourse from a wide genetic and geographical variety of languages. Besides the treatment of traditional problems of reported discourse like the classification of its intermediate categories, the book reflects in particular how its grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic properties have repercussions in other linguistic domains like tense-aspect-modality, evidentiality, reference tracking and pronominal categories, and the grammaticalization history of quotative constructions. Almost all papers present a major shift away from analyzing reported discourse with the help of abstract transformational principles toward embedding it in functional and pragmatic aspects of language. Another central methodological approach pervading this collection consists in the discourse-oriented examination of reported discourse based on large corpora of spoken or written texts which is increasingly replacing analyses of constructed de-contextualized utterances prevalent in many earlier treatments. The book closes with a comprehensive bibliography on reported discourse of about 1.000 entries.
This book considers important aspects of the syntax of sentences and their relation to the extra-sentential context. The relation between a sentence and the context is frequently reckoned to be in some sense "syntax-free", in that it is not syntactically represented but introduced post-syntactically by semantic rules of interpretation. Alessandra Giorgi develops a different perspective through an empirically grounded exploration of temporal indexicality: she argues that the speaker's temporal location is specified in the syntactic structure. She supports her analysis with theoretical and empirical arguments based on data mainly from English and Italian but also considering Chinese and Romanian. Professor Giorgi addresses some difficult and longstanding issues in the analysis of temporal phenomena - including the Italian imperfect indicative, the properties of the so-called future-in-the-past, and the properties of Free Indirect Discourse. She shows that her framework can account elegantly for all of them. Carefully argued, succinct, and clearly written her book will appeal widely to syntacticians and semanticists from graduate level upwards and to linguists interested in the syntax-semantics interface.