Regarding free thought reports, to my knowledge there have been no empirical studies taking into account FID in first-person narratives. FID is usually discussed as a phenomenon occurring mainly in third-person narratives and this is also observed in empirical studies on the processing of FID which use third-person stories in their experimental setting or, at least, items where the speaker is not explicitly referred to (see Bortolussi and Dixon, 2003; Bray, 2007; Kaiser, 2015; Salem, Weskott, and Holler, 2017; Salem, Weskott, and Holler, 2018; and Sotirova, 2006). However, FID can also occur in first-person stories, when the character-narrator narrates personal experiences and her corresponding thoughts and reflections as these occurred in some past moment (for more discussion, see Cohn and Cohn, 1978; Fludernik, 2003; Nielsen, 2004; and Stanzel, 1986). See example (11) for an illustration:
stanzel theory of narrative pdf free
Experiments 1 and 2 were conducted in English and were run on Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing platform. Experiment 1 tested the following questions: do free thought and free perception reports differ with respect to triggering readings in which the character is the anchor? Does this difference depend on the kind of narration in which the story is written, that is, on whether the story is a first-person or a third-person narrative?
Overall, the present study suggests that once a plausible anchor is determined, readers will attribute ambiguous reports of both perception and thought to that entity, usually the character that is mentioned to have the related sensory experience in the preceding discourse, supporting Hinterwimmer (2017a). Given that perception and thought descriptions often intermingle in narratives and thoughts are causally connected to perceptions, it should not be so surprising that free reports are uniformly perspectivised in this way.
Narration type was shown to have a quite robust effect (experiment 1). It was shown that reading third-person narratives, as opposed to first-person narratives, increases the chances of choosing the character as the anchor of free reports as opposed to the narrator, suggesting that the protagonist has a more prominent status in third-person stories, at least when (s)he is the only locally prominent character. Since the manipulation of narration type consisted in the absence/presence of first-person indexicals, these results suggest that at least when first-person indexicals are present, the speaker-narrator becomes more foregrounded and is more likely to serve as perspectival centre. This speaker preference is robust when the narrator is also explicitly mentioned as the experiencer of a perceiving eventuality (experiments 2, 3).
If the four maxims, proposed by Grice, are examined in detail it is clear that the notion of relevance is of great importance to all of them. The flouting of the maxims produces implicatures precisely because some utterances appear to be irrelevant in a given context. Some linguists have therefore argued that the maxim of relation (be relevant) overrides Grice's other maxims. Sperber and Wilson's (1995) relevance theory replaces Grice's cooperative principle with the principle of relevance6. The degree of relevance of a communicated sentence or text is dependent on two factors: context and processing effort. The optimally relevant interpretation, as defined by Sperber and Wilson, will be the least costly one in terms of processing effort and the most extensive one in the range of its cognitive and contextual effects (Sperber and Wilson, 1995, p. 125). Relevance theory rightly claims to be able to account more satisfactorily for a wider range of communication than much other modern pragmatics does. The reason for this is that it offers a psychologically valid account of the mechanisms involved in language understanding. What is psychologically realistic in this account is the acceptance that the two critical notions for relevance, context and processing effort, are psychologically motivated notions: they reflect each participant's individual and subjective assumptions about the world and the given context, not some objective, represented and pre-given versions of it. Relevance theory also emphasizes the importance of motivation, of identifying the communicator's intention, for meaning construal. At the same time, a fundamental problem for relevance theory with respect to narrative understanding is again the absence of consideration of the relational nature of that process, or, in other words, of omitting the interactional aspect of it. In assuming a single, optimally relevant and complete interpretation for all readers and all readings, relevance theory thus fails to account for the interactive, dynamic, and changeable processes of meaning construal that different readers or even the same reader engage in at different times and in different contexts7.
To bring the discussion back to narrative understanding, and specifically narrative understanding achieved through the medium of language, we need to address again the nature of linguistic meaning, but this time take into account the enactive view, as introduced above, and explore its implications for language. Particularly, it is important to look at how the inevitability of a co-evolving meaning change in any linguistic encounter can modify long-entrenched ideas about language and its nature. As shown above, traditional forms of linguistics adopt the same ontological assumption about meaning as traditional computational approaches to thought processes, namely that it is possible to analyze the world in terms of context-free data. In relation to language, this view is summed up in semantic descriptions of linguistic units as sets of fixed and independent elements, termed concepts or symbols. Pragmatics, as I have shown, attempts to override the inefficiencies of this description by postulating various contextually implied meanings, but still suffers from the assumption of a transfer model of communication between individual minds, and the accompanying assumptions of fixed predetermined meanings that require decoding. For that reason, in some accounts written and spoken language have been treated as two distinct modes of language behavior (Chafe, 1994), the former characterized as a formal system of symbols and rules; the latter, as the pragmatic use of these forms and rules in everyday speech. 2ff7e9595c
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