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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The pragmatic context split approach to Free Indirect Discourse
- 3.The discourse structure of reporting constructions
- 3.1Basic SDRT and discourse relations
- 3.2The discourse structure of speech and attitude reports
- 4.The discourse structure of FID reports
- 5.The experiment: Discourse relations in FID and ID
- 5.1Methods
- 5.1.1Participants
- 5.1.2Materials and design
- 5.1.3Predictions
- 5.1.4Results
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Abrusán, Márta
2023.
Plural and Quantified Protagonists in Free Indirect Discourse and Protagonist Projection.
Journal of Semantics 40:1
► pp. 127 ff.
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