The Prominence Value of the Temporal Anchor of Free Indirect Discourse: A Comparison with the Perspectival Center

Abstract

Free indirect discourse (FID) is a kind of speech or thought representation that lacks specific marking. The entity to whom the speech or thought is attributed (the perspectival center) has been shown to be a contextually available prominent protagonist (see Hinterwimmer, 2019). A shortcoming of the literature is that it ignores the problem of the temporal anchoring of FID events. The present article is dedicated to such anchors. It focuses on their prominence value and discusses their relevant properties. It shows that FID has a strong tendency to be temporally anchored to a prominent time point. Thus, the protagonist and the anchor time point share the trait of prominence.