This paper reports the results of four experiments that investigate how readers determine the perspective holder for
Consider the two passages below:
(1) | The first speaker was her Uncle Tom. She knew the naive candour covering the girding and savage misery of his soul. Who was the other speaker? Whose voice ran on so easy, yet with an inflamed pulse? ( |
(2) | She gazed back over the sea, at the island. But the leaf was losing its sharpness. It was very small. ( |
The final sentences in (1) and (2) are most naturally inferred to be reports of a fictional character’s consciousness: in example (1) they are interpreted as the character’s thoughts, whereas in example (2) they are understood as representing the character’s (visual) perceptions. The two examples illustrate two different levels of representation that are ubiquitous in narratives. One concerns the representation of speech, i.e., a linguistic object, be it an actual utterance or thought/inner speech. The other involves the representation of low-level, non-linguistic mental states, such as perceptual experiences. Crucially, the final sentences in both examples lack an overt embedding construction that would clearly indicate who the thinker/perceiver is (as in ‘She wondered who the other speaker was’ or ‘She saw the leaf losing its sharpness’). Because such a cue is absent, these passages are, in principle, ambiguous: they can be attributed to a story character and therefore receive a ‘shifted’ interpretation, or they can take the standard, speaker-oriented interpretation according to which they are attributed to the narrator, the ‘speaker’ of the story (no actual shifting is involved in this case).
Even though explicit cues about whose perspective is expressed are often lacking, readers constantly make inferences while engaging with fiction and are able to make sense of a story. How do readers then determine whose consciousness is being reported in such ambiguous statements in narratives and what are the textual and/or pragmatic cues that they rely on during this process?
This paper presents four experiments that explore certain discourse- and narrative-related factors that potentially influence the perspectivisation process in narrative texts. Such factors include different kinds of protagonist prominence, as well as different kinds of narration that are associated with differences in the narrators’ epistemic access. Exploring these factors can give us a better view of the constraints and possibilities of perspective taking in narrative discourse.
Earlier studies in literary research like Brinton (
(3) | a. | And on the station platform was Clifford on crutches. |
b. | And on the station platform — Oh God! — was Clifford on crutches? ( |
While (3a) can be read as a description of what a protagonist saw on the station platform, the exclamation and question that are present in example (3b) can only be interpreted, according to Banfield, as the protagonist’s inner speech.
Instances of represented thought like (1) and (3b) illustrate the phenomenon of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) which has been the object of extensive study in narratology and linguistics. FID is a vivid style of reporting a character’s thoughts that combines grammatical features of both direct and indirect discourse. More specifically, pronouns and tenses are interpreted relative to the context of utterance, i.e., the narrator’s context, while temporal and locative adverbials indicate the character’s spatio-temporal location. This is shown in example (4), where the indexical adverb
(4) | The reflections did not fade and he looked and looked until a distant noise brought him back to his senses. He couldn’t stay here, he had to find his way back to bed. ( |
Similarly, the character’s perspective is reflected in all other expressions and constructions used in FID that are also found in direct discourse: subjective expressions, questions, exclamations, interjections, idiolects and incomplete sentences (for an exhaustive discussion on the linguistic characteristics of FID, see
Unlike in literary theory where FID is often taken as a special stylistic device of reporting a character’s consciousness in general, be it speech, thoughts, emotions or perceptions, semanticists usually discuss FID as a form of reported (inner) speech.
(5) | When Mary stepped out of the boat, the ground was shaking beneath her feet for a couple of seconds. ( |
The second clause represents what Mary sensed when she got out of the boat, without it being necessarily interpreted as a report of her inner thoughts. If readers do not accept that the ground was actually shaking in the story, then the content of the related proposition receives a shifted interpretation: it is interpreted as true only with respect to the protagonist’s mental state.
Importantly, Hinterwimmer argues that Viewpoint Shifting and FID are not only conceptually but also grammatically different. First, he argues that in Viewpoint Shifting non-pronominal indexicals do not shift to the character’s context as is the case in FID. Second, he argues that unlike FID, Viewpoint Shifting is available within the sentence: for instance, in (5), Viewpoint Shifting is introduced after a
(6) | *When Mary heard a song by Kendrick Lamar that she liked on the radio on her way home, she would buy his new album tomorrow. ( |
Viewpoint Shifting and FID are licensed pragmatically, via the accommodation of a related event (perceiving event or speech/thought act for Viewpoint Shifting and FID, respectively) on the part of the reader/hearer. According to Hinterwimmer, data like the above motivates the need for two distinct semantic analyses of the two phenomena (see also
Abrusán (
It is important to note that FID and Viewpoint Shifting are discussed in semantics as perspective shifting phenomena and concern cases where speech/thought and perception representations take shifted, character-oriented interpretations. However, as mentioned in the Introduction, speech and perception representations that occur unembedded admit multiple interpretations in terms of perspective. As I am interested not only in shifted, but also in standard, speaker-oriented interpretations, I will use the more straightforward and general term ‘free report’.
Speech and perception reports have also been investigated empirically in narratological and linguistic research. FID has received special attention (
Given that free reports are abundant in narratives and that it is often left unspecified as to whose perspective is expressed, it is natural to ask what cues there are in a text to guide readers’ interpretations as to who the perspectival centre for a statement is. Who do readers take to be the thinker of an utterance or the perceiver of a perceptual description?
Hinterwimmer (
(7) | Susan looked at George hatefully. | |
a. | The dumb jerk had managed to make her look like an idiot at the meeting yesterday. | |
b. | #The mean old hag had managed to make him look like an idiot at the meeting yesterday. ( |
The second condition that makes a protagonist prominent as perspectival centre for free thought reports is global prominence. A protagonist is said to be globally prominent if (s)he is the discourse topic. In (8), George is made globally prominent by virtue of being mentioned in the opening sentence, which makes him available as the anchor for the last sentence.
(8) | George entered the room and looked around cautiously. Susan was sitting at a table in the corner with her best friend. Susan looked at George hatefully. The mean old hag had managed to make him look like an idiot at the meeting yesterday. ( |
The prediction that follows from Hinterwimmer’s proposal is that if both a globally and a locally prominent protagonist are present, a free thought report could be ambiguous, as it could be anchored to either protagonist.
The question that arises is whether, in cases of such ambiguity, there is a stronger preference for either globally or locally prominent protagonists as anchors for a free report. Let us first discuss free perception reports. The most natural prediction is that they are anchored to the experiencer of the perceiving event mentioned or accommodated in the discourse (
Attributing an expression or a statement to some entity is sensitive to additional factors. In a study that investigated the strength of different viewpoint markers (i.e., expressions indicating a character’s perceptual or mental state), Van Krieken (
In a different study, Kaiser (
(9) | When I came into the room, Eliza put/saw/smelled/tasted the muffin on the platter. It was/looked/smelled/tasted disgusting. |
She found that readers were significantly more likely to pick the character as the judge of a predicate of personal taste when a sensory modality was specified, that is, when the character was mentioned as the experiencer of the relevant perceiving event, compared to the baseline category where no such modality was explicitly involved. Additionally, the kind of sensory modality also affected who would be chosen as the attitude holder. Overall, the above-mentioned findings underline the importance of the local prominence of a character (as defined in
One additional factor that can affect how the perspectival centre for free reports is determined is the type of narration. For instance, a story can be told from a first- or a third-person point of view. Previous studies have explored questions related to how narrative mode affects engagement with a story, for instance, what effects first- and third-person narration have on the way that readers empathise with a story character (see background discussion and experiments in
(10) | When Eliza came into the room, she smelled the muffin on the platter. It smelled disgusting. |
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
(11) | I gave a start: the lights had gone on, activated by a photo-electric relay; the sun had set. What would happen next? I was so tense that the sensation of an empty space behind me became unbearable. ( |
However, I am not aware of studies investigating specifically whether FID can occur in first-person narratives to signal the thoughts of a character that is different from the narrator.
Based on the above studies, the following questions will be explored. First, how does the type of narration affect how free reports are anchored? Second, do free perception and thought reports differ in the extent to which they trigger shifted interpretations? Third, what role do global and local prominence play when determining the epistemic anchor of free reports?
Regarding the first question, I hypothesise that the type of narration affects how free reports are anchored. Overall, a stronger preference for speaker-oriented interpretations in first-person narratives is expected, as well as a preference for shifted interpretations in third-person narratives with one or multiple salient protagonists. As noted previously, at least in semantics, FID and free perception have been mainly discussed in the context of third-person narratives, i.e., narratives with an impersonal narrator that is not a character in the story and does not participate in the narrated events (for instance, see J.K. Rowling’s
The second question has to do with whether free perception and free thought reports differ as to which perspectival centre they are anchored to in different types of narrative. As mentioned above, questions and exclamations occur in FID passages in third-person narratives and can trigger shifting to a character’s perspective. Importantly, according to Banfield (
As for perception descriptions, the following assumption is made, in line with Kaiser (
Concerning the third question, I aim to investigate if global or local prominence has a stronger effect on readers when they identify the anchor for a given statement, and also what role narration type plays. For instance, if a character other than the narrator is globally salient in a first-person narrative, does this salience override the general preference to take the speaker as the anchor for speech acts or perspective-sensitive expressions? In first-person narratives, when two characters are locally prominent in terms of both being perceivers (e.g., ‘We looked at the floor’), the preferred anchor is predicted to be the narrator, given the general speaker-bias. In third-person narratives with two perceivers (e.g., ‘They looked at the floor’) and an impersonal narrator, the anchor is expected to be the globally prominent character instead, given that the effect of local prominence in this case is ‘neutralised’.
Four forced-choice task experiments tested the effect of different factors on readers’ perspectivising free reports. All experiments were made in Qualtrics and had a 2x2 within-subject design. Participants received the same instructions in all experiments. Data was analysed with generalised mixed-effects logistic regression models in R 3.6.1 (
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?
The design consisted of the factors Narration Type (First-person/Third-person) and Report Type (Free Perception/Free Thought). The experiment used a two-alternative forced-choice task. In the instructions, participants were told that they would read short passages of fictional stories and that after reading each passage they would have to answer a question related to whose opinion they thought was expressed in a given statement: the narrator’s or the character’s. A test item is shown in (12). The statement in question contained a predicate of personal taste which was included in the free report mentioned in the story.
(12) | The whole house was empty and silent. |
Fred looked at the food that was left on the tables. | |
Whose opinion is it that the food on the tables looked disgusting? | |
– The narrator’s | |
– Fred’s |
The items consisted of 3 to 7 sentences, and had a similar discourse structure as Kaiser (
For the Free Perception condition simple indicative sentences were used. The Free Thought condition included various FID cues: mainly questions (22 items) and exclamation marks (10), and in fewer cases, expressives (‘Damn’), interjections (‘No’, ‘Wow’) and ellipses.
A third option indicating that a certain opinion is shared by both the narrator and the character was deliberately not provided in any of the experiments, so that participants had to make a particular choice. A ‘both’ response would be hard to interpret. Although it could mean that both characters are taken as anchors, it could also be a participant’s quick choice in case of uncertainty. Furthermore, even if participants actually have a stronger preference about who the anchor is, they may accept that a different interpretation is also possible. As a result, they may be tempted to choose both the narrator and the character as anchors. However, in this case this choice would not reflect participants’ real preference, which is the point of interest.
A Latin Square design was used to distribute the items over four lists. Participants saw eight target items in each of the four conditions resulting in 32 target items. Ten control items were also used to check participants’ attention. The controls were first-person stories where it was unambiguous whose opinion was expressed: the narrator and the other character held different opinions. Half of them were supposed to elicit
Data from 28 participants (11 female, mean age 38.6, age range 24-62) were analysed. Twelve participants were excluded from the analysis as more than 25% of their responses to controls were incorrect. Figure
The best model was determined via backward stepwise comparison and included Narration Type as fixed factor, by-subject random slopes for Narration Type and random intercepts for items. A main effect of Narration Type was found (β = 3.0683,
In line with the predictions, the results show that participants were significantly more likely to choose the character as the perspectival centre of a free report when they read third-person narratives (they chose the character 95% of the time in the Third-person narration condition). This was expected, given the assumption about the narrator’s more backgrounded, less salient status in third-person narratives and the character’s overall prominence. The FID cues in the Free Thought condition in third-person narratives did not increase the likelihood of shifting to the character’s perspective. In general, reading a sentence in the Free Perception or Free Thought condition made no difference as to how readers perspectivised the relevant statements, contrary to what was expected. For both perception and thought reports in first-person narration, readers chose the character approximately 70% of the time (intercept: First-person, β = 1.0764,
For the Free Perception condition such findings were expected in both kinds of narrative, given similar results in Kaiser (
Experiment 2 was conducted as a follow-up based on the findings of experiment 1 for the first-person narration condition and tested the effect of local prominence and speaker preference on shifting: if the narrator and the character are both mentioned as agents of a perceiving event, hence if they are equally locally prominent, will readers ascribe the relevant statement to the narrator instead?
The design consisted of the factors Report Type (Free Perception/Free Thought) and Experiencer (Character/Narrator and Character). I used the items from the first-person narration condition of experiment 1 and varied the subject of the perception verb: it was either the character or both the character and the narrator. An example is shown in (13). Data from 38 English native speakers were collected. Participants were compensated with $1.50 for their participation.
(13) | The whole house was empty and silent. Fred and I stepped into the kitchen. |
Whose opinion is it that the food on the tables looked disgusting? | |
– The narrator’s | |
– Fred’s |
The analysis included results from 26 participants (12 female, mean age 43.5, age range 28–72). Twelve participants were excluded as more than 25% of their responses to controls were incorrect. Figure
The optimal model was determined via backward stepwise comparison and included the fixed factor Experiencer, by-subject random slopes for Experiencer and random intercepts for items. No interaction between Experiencer and Report Type was found. Report Type did not significantly improve model fit and was removed. There was a main effect of Experiencer (β = –4.2051,
The mean rates of
The percentage of
The percentage of
To see what strategy led to this pattern of mixed responses, we visualised the mean rates of
Mean rates of
The findings of experiment 2 give rise to the following question: will the preference for the narrator be as strong if the other protagonist has a more prominent status in the story, i.e., if the other protagonist is globally prominent? What about third-person narratives with an impersonal narrator and both a globally prominent and a secondary, less salient character? These questions are investigated in experiments 3 and 4 that were conducted in Greek. The experiments were run simultaneously over the internet. Each participant was randomly assigned to either experiment 3 or experiment 4 so that no participant did both experiments.
Given that Amazon Mechanical Turk is sometimes considered a ‘noisy’ tool, experiments 3 and 4 were conducted in Greek mainly because we expected to collect more reliable responses with approximately the same or greater number of participants. This was indeed the case as only two participants were excluded from experiment 3 on the basis of their responses to controls, and none from experiment 4.
Experiment 3 tested the effect of global prominence on perspectivisation in first-person narratives. The goal was to explore if global prominence of another character would suppress speaker preference and if that effect would differ in perception and thought reports.
The design consisted of the factors Report Type (Free Perception/Free Thought) and Global Prominence (Global Narrator/Global Character). In all conditions local prominence was kept constant: both the narrator and the character were the agents of the perceiving event in question (looking (12 items), hearing (8), smelling (4)). We manipulated who the globally prominent character (
Items consisted of six to 11 sentences. Participants saw six items in each of the four conditions resulting in 24 target items, as well as 16 controls. The free report contained a copula verb in 19 items because in Greek it sounds much more natural compared to perception verbs. The total of 40 items were presented to participants in random order. (14) is an example of a target item. Responses were collected from 27 participants.
(14) | |
Στην κουζίνα υπήρχε μια έντονη μυρωδιά. Κοιτάξαμε τον νεροχύτη και το πάτωμα. | |
Επιπλέον η βρύση έτρεχε και το νερό είχε φτάσει μέχρι και το πάτωμα. | |
Σύμφωνα με ποιον/-α ήταν αηδιαστικό το θέαμα στην κουζίνα; Σύμφωνα με τον/την αφηγητή/-τρια/την Ντίνα | |
Figure
The percentage of
The optimal model was determined via forward stepwise comparison and included Report Type as a fixed factor and random intercepts for subjects and items. A main effect of Report Type was found (β = 1.1892,
In this experiment I tested the effect of local prominence in third-person narratives with two protagonists while maintaining the status of global prominence constant.
The design consisted of the factors Report Type (Free Perception/Free Thought) and Experiencer (Both Characters/Secondary Character) and used a three-alternative forced-choice task. The items of experiment 3 were converted to third-person stories: first-person pronouns were removed and a proper name was used for the second character. One of the characters was globally prominent across conditions (
(15) | Η Ντίνα ξύπνησε πολύ νωρίς εκείνη την ημέρα. Δεν είχε κοιμηθεί καλά όλο το βράδυ, είχε πολύ άγχος όλη την εβδομάδα και δεν μπορούσε να ησυχάσει. Ξύπνησε τον Μιχάλη, καθώς ήθελε παρέα για να πάρει το πρωινό της, και κατέβηκαν στην κουζίνα. Υπήρχε μια έντονη μυρωδιά. |
Επιπλέον η βρύση έτρεχε και το νερό είχε φτάσει μέχρι και το πάτωμα. | |
Σύμφωνα με ποιον/-α ήταν αηδιαστικό το θέαμα στην κουζίνα; | |
Σύμφωνα με τον/την αφηγητή/-τρια/την Ντίνα/τον Μιχάλη | |
Data was collected from 32 Greek native speakers (23 female, mean age 33.5, age range 24-54).
We estimated separate models for each binomial contrast (
With respect to the first contrast (
As for the second comparison (
Similarly, for the third comparison (
Figure
The percentage of
For the Both Characters condition, significantly more
For the Secondary Character condition, significantly more
I presented four experimental studies in which I explored the effect of different pragmatic factors on perspectivising free reports in narratives, i.e., stretches of discourse interpreted as reports of someone’s perceptions or thoughts that are unmarked with respect to whose perspective is expressed. Taken together, the present findings point to the following tentative hierarchy of perspectival centres in narrative discourse which is illustrated in (16):
(16) | locally prominent character (experiencer) > narrator > globally prominent character |
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 (
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).
This also stresses the importance of local prominence on the perspectivisation of free reports, in line with Hinterwimmer’s (
In third-person narratives with two explicit, equally prominent local experiencers, free reports are attributed to the narrator in most of the cases, which suggests that no actual ‘shifting’ occurs, maybe partly due to both protagonists being equally plausible anchors. However, the presence of FID cues raises the chances to shift to the globally prominent character’s perspective (experiment 4). This supports the generally accepted observation that FID markers trigger shifting to a character’s perspective and corroborates previous findings (
Except for this case though, no supporting evidence was found that free perception and thought reports are anchored differently. One possible explanation is that the two reports may indeed not differ significantly from each other in this respect. The alternative explanation is that this null finding is due to the experimental items. Questions and exclamations were used in order to trigger an inner speech/thought report reading (
A more robust possible means to differentiate thought from perception reports would be the addition of indexical expressions like temporal or locative adverbials. Compare passages (17) and (18):
(17) | Fred looked to the right. The envelope was on the table. |
(18) | Fred looked to the right. The envelope was on the table yesterday. |
On an FID reading,
Another possible limitation of the experiments presented here is the use of the binary forced-choice task. As mentioned earlier, free reports are in principle ambiguous. In many cases it is important for the reader to disambiguate these reports and resolve whose perspective they express as this aids them to make sense of the story and draw the right inferences. If such information cannot be resolved immediately, the reader can proceed and use additional information from later discourse. But it is also possible that such information does not really have to be resolved if it is not purposeful in some way. In other words, in some cases the reader may not need to determine such information in order to make sense of a story. An anonymous reviewer points out that in the items used here there was no particular necessity for the reader to decide upon whose perspective is expressed in each case. Consequently, the particular task may not have captured the readers’ actual interpretations of free reports who, in the actual process of reading, could simply process this information without having to make a choice. Perhaps an additional option such as “I don’t know” would have been useful in this case, as well as an option like “both the narrator and the character/both characters” since in many cases the content of the report could in fact be attributed to both. A direction for future research would be to use stories where, for example, resolution of perspective would be crucial for the correct interpretation of the story. Finally, the question of whether readers determine an anchor at all should also be addressed, albeit with a different methodology. A good starting point would be to look at experimental studies on the closely connected topic of ambiguous pronoun resolution (see, for example,
Related to the above point, although forced-choice tasks have been employed in similar studies on perspective taking (e.g.,
In general, readers are willing to assign the content of a statement to an entity other than the narrator, which is in line with research on the availability of non-speaker-oriented interpretations (e.g.,
The notion of the ‘narrator’ as used here refers to the teller, or the voice of the story, who is part of the fictional world and as such should not be confused with the actual author of the narrative.
In literary studies, perception representations have been studied under different terms as well, such as ‘narrated perception’ (
In what follows, for reasons of simplicity I will refer to FID as a form of ‘reported speech’. By ‘speech’ I also refer to inner speech, i.e., thought. The notion of ‘speech’ is therefore contrasted with non-linguistic states like perceptions.
Abrusán uses the term ‘Protagonist Projection’ instead of ‘Viewpoint Shifting’, but she refers to the same phenomenon, namely, the type of shift that occurs when a sentence is interpreted as a representation of a protagonist’s perceptual state rather than the speaker’s.
The term ‘report’ is used here in a broader sense: it will cover not only descriptions about the speech, thoughts and mental states of an individual that is different from the speaker, but also of the speaker herself. For instance, a sentence like “I feel cold” is taken as a report made by the speaker about her own sensory experience.
Kaiser (
However, see Nielsen’s (
As mentioned earlier, FID can be found in first-person narratives when the narrator relates her past thoughts in FID mode. However, as here I am interested in whether FID can indicate a shift to the perspective of a character other than the narrator, I will not refer to the above case further on.
However, the distinction between first- and third-person narration does not reduce to the presence/absence of first- and third-person pronominal reference. For more discussion, see
Sanford, Clegg, and Majid (
The experimental items used in all four experiments can be found here:
Questions were considered stronger indicators of reported thought, which is why they were added in most cases. A reviewer remarks that the items in the Free Thought condition seem to be a combination of a free perception and a free thought report. This potentially problematic issue is discussed in section 5.
An anonymous reviewer points out that the use of a perception verb in the free report might have created an additional bias for ascribing the free report to the previously mentioned experiencer because these verbs clearly ‘connect’ the two sentences semantically (
A well-known example of a peripheral narrator is that of Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel
This research is part of the project
The author has no competing interests to declare.