Christopher Saure, Stefan Hinterwimmer, Anna Pia Jordan-Bertinelli
{"title":"An experimental investigation of the interaction of narrators’ and protagonists’ perspectival prominence in narrative texts","authors":"Christopher Saure, Stefan Hinterwimmer, Anna Pia Jordan-Bertinelli","doi":"10.1515/zfs-2023-2009","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper, we present the results of an experiment investigating the effect of different narrative situations on the availability of locally prominent protagonists as anchor for Free Indirect Discourse (FID). We created items in three conditions: condition A featured a neutral third-person narrator, condition B a homodiegetic first-person narrator and condition C a prominent, evaluative third-person narrator. Participants read several short text segments all ending with FID and were asked to rate the acceptability of the FID sentence. The results revealed that condition B received significantly lower ratings than the other two conditions, whereas there was no significant difference between conditions A and C. An additional study, in which participants had to choose if the thought expressed by FID belonged to the narrator or the protagonist, showed that there was a strong tendency to choose the protagonist as perspectival center in all three conditions. The results from Exp. 1 prove that while the presence of a homodiegetic first-person narrator strongly constrains a locally prominent protagonist’s availability as anchor for FID, it is not similarly affected by the presence of a globally prominent third-person narrator. This further confirms that narrative texts possess an inherent potential for multiperspectivity.","PeriodicalId":43494,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift Fur Sprachwissenschaft","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Zeitschrift Fur Sprachwissenschaft","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zfs-2023-2009","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract In this paper, we present the results of an experiment investigating the effect of different narrative situations on the availability of locally prominent protagonists as anchor for Free Indirect Discourse (FID). We created items in three conditions: condition A featured a neutral third-person narrator, condition B a homodiegetic first-person narrator and condition C a prominent, evaluative third-person narrator. Participants read several short text segments all ending with FID and were asked to rate the acceptability of the FID sentence. The results revealed that condition B received significantly lower ratings than the other two conditions, whereas there was no significant difference between conditions A and C. An additional study, in which participants had to choose if the thought expressed by FID belonged to the narrator or the protagonist, showed that there was a strong tendency to choose the protagonist as perspectival center in all three conditions. The results from Exp. 1 prove that while the presence of a homodiegetic first-person narrator strongly constrains a locally prominent protagonist’s availability as anchor for FID, it is not similarly affected by the presence of a globally prominent third-person narrator. This further confirms that narrative texts possess an inherent potential for multiperspectivity.
期刊介绍:
The aim of the journal is to promote linguistic research by publishing high-quality contributions and thematic special issues from all fields and trends of modern linguistics. In addition to articles and reviews, the journal also features contributions to discussions on current controversies in the field as well as overview articles outlining the state-of-the art of relevant research paradigms. Topics: -General Linguistics -Language Typology -Language acquisition, language change and synchronic variation -Empirical linguistics: experimental and corpus-based research -Contributions to theory-building