The Language of Fiction

Description

This volume brings together new research on fiction from the fields of philosophy and linguistics. Fiction has long been a topic of interest in philosophy, but recent years have also seen a surge in work on fictional discourse at the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. In particular, there has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective that is informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. Following a detailed introduction by the editors, The Language of Fiction contains 14 chapters by leading scholars in linguistics and philosophy, organized into three parts. Part I, 'Truth, Reference, and Imagination', offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, 'Storytelling', deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, 'Perspective Shift', focuses on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, namely how we get access to the fictional characters' inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see. The volume will be of interest to scholars from graduate level upwards in the fields of discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, cognitive science, and literary studies. Contents List of contributors 1. Introduction • Emar Maier and Andreas Stokke I. TRUTH, REFERENCE, AND IMAGINATION 2. Fictional reference as simulation • François Recanati 3. Sharing real and fictional reference • Hans Kamp 4. Fictional truth: In defense of the Reality Principle • Nils Franzén 5. On the generation of content • Sandro Zucchi 6. Do the imaginings that fictions invite have a direction of fit? • Manuel García-Carpintero II. STORYTELLING 7. In search of the narrator • Regine Eckardt 8. Extracting fictional truth from unreliable sources • Emar Maier and Merel Semeijn 9. Narrative and point of view • Samuel Cumming 10. A puzzle about narrative progression and causal reasoning • Daniel Altshuler 11. Isomorphic mapping in fictional interpretation • Matthias Bauer and Sigrid Beck III. PERSPECTIVE SHIFT 12. Metalinguistic acts in fiction • Nellie Wieland 13. Computing perspective shift in narratives • Márta Abrusán 14. Derogatory terms in free indirect discourse • Isidora Stojanovic 15. Protagonist projection, character focus, and mixed quotation • Andreas Stokke Index