Computing Perspective Shift in Narratives
Marta Abrusan
October 2020 

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 \emph{free indirect discourse} (FID). 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 paper reviews these proposals, adds a few observations of my own about the importance of rhetorical structure and proposes to incorporate all the previous insights into one unified framework.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005859 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	to appear in E. Maier & A. Stokke (eds.), The Language of Fiction, OUP
keywords:	perspective shift, free indirect discourse, fiction, protagonist projection, semantics
Downloaded:	373 times

 

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