Two kinds of perspective taking in narrative texts
In this talk, I argue for the existence of two distinct kinds of protagonists? perspective taking in narrative texts. The first, Free Indirect Discourse (FID) involves context-shifting, i.e. all context-sensitive expressions with the exception of pronouns and tenses are interpreted with respect to the fictional context of some salient protagonist (Schlenker 2004, Sharvit 2008, Eckardt 2014). The second, which I dub viewpoint shifting (VS), does not involve context-shifting. Rather, a situation is described as it is perceived by a salient protagonist or in a way that reflects the doxastic state of such a protagonist, not with respect to the Common Ground (CG) of narrator and reader. Crucially, FID is only available at the root level (cf. Banfield 1982), while VS is available at the level of finite clauses that are contained in larger sentences.
