Linguistic viewpoint in a mental health context

Research on oral stories in the domain of mental health points towards a variety of distinctive phenomena in the linguistic representation of perspective. A study on autobiographical narratives told in psychoanalytic therapy by patients suffering from ‘neurotic illnesses’, for example, demonstrated how linguistic phenomena such as tense shifts and mental verbs distance the current speaker’s perspective to a greater or lesser extent from the speaker’s past perspective (Habermas, 2006). This resulted in gaps in autobiographical narratives in terms of the narrator’s stating and inducing of perspectives, and a lack of alignment between speaker and hearer, as compared to narratives told by neurotypical people. Another study found differences between the life narratives of depressed patients and non-depressed controls. Specifically, people suffering from depression were found to deviate more strongly from a linear ordering of events and employed mostly a past rather than a present perspective in telling their life stories (Habermas et al., 2008).

Focusing specifically on people with a schizophrenia diagnosis, several studies have analyzed writing samples, first person illness narratives and (clinical) interviews. Such studies found anomalies in both language production as well as comprehension (for reviews, see DeLisi, 2001 and Kuperberg, 2010, for example). Several computational studies found that the language of people with a schizophrenia diagnosis displays lower sentence complexity and coherence (for example, see Willits et al., 2018; Elvevåg et al., 2007; Saavedra, Cubero and Crawford, 2009), as well as lower narrative coherence (Allé et al., 2015; Lysaker et al., 2002; Holm, Thomsen and Bliksted, 2016), compared to the language of neurotypical people. A study of interviews with youths with high risk for psychosis showed that it is possible to accurately predict the development of psychosis by assessing the semantic coherence and syntactic marking of speech complexity (Bedi et al., 2015).

Other studies have found anomalies in the use of pronouns and other referential expressions, which both play a crucial role in narrative viewpoint navigation and pragmatics (Van Krieken, Hoeken and Sanders, 2017). Patients with ‘Formal Thought Disorder’ (FTD), a term which refers to problems in the ability to sustain coherent discourse and is one of the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, were for example found to display significantly more instances of ‘unclear reference’ (Rochester and Martin, 1979; Harvey, 1983; Chaika and Lambe, 1989). Referential mistakes in the use of demonstrative and personal references were also found to correlate with FTD (Barch and Berenbaum, 1996). Remarkably, word counting studies of pronoun use in schizophrenia seem to show a hybrid picture: people with a schizophrenia diagnosis were found to make more (Hong et al., 2015; Buck & Penn, 2015) or rather less (Deutsch-Link, 2016) use of self-referential pronouns (‘I’) than people without the diagnosis. Other studies found more use of the pronoun ‘you’ by people with a schizophrenia diagnosis as compared to individuals without the diagnosis (e.g. Watson et al., 2012), whereas Buck et al. (2015) found that lower social cognition measures, which are theorized to be characteristic of schizophrenia (Brüne, 2005; Langdon and Ward, 2009), were significantly correlated with less second-person pronoun use, as well as the overall use of pronouns.

The sum of these findings suggests that linguistic manifestations of perspective in stories by people diagnosed with a mental disorder tend to show atypical patterns. From the linguistic phenomena it appears that there are generic deviancies regarding perspectivization, but much remains unclear about their exact (cognitive) nature and origin. Studying these linguistic phenomena and their patterns is relevant for two reasons: first, it may further advance our understanding of the language of perspective by pinpointing in what different ways successful viewpoint building and navigation in stories is achieved, and how it might go wrong. Second, it may help to gain insight into the nature of schizophrenic symptoms of perspectivization by relating linguistic to cognitive and experiential aspects of perspective (see Van Schuppen, Van Krieken and Sanders, 2019). This study attempts to attain both of these aims by analyzing a variety of viewpoint phenomena in narratives of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. In doing so, we apply a qualitative methodology that may be used in future quantitative studies as well.

Viewpoint navigation and the domains of storytelling

Stories, or narratives, are fundamental to and ubiquitous in social interaction. In narratives, speakers present historical or imaginative events and situations from the viewpoint of a particular person: a narrative subject. Narrative discourse is characterized by the interplay between two contexts: the Speech Act Domain, representing the here-and-now of the speaker and the (actual or implied) addressee, and the Narrative Domain, representing the there-and-then of the story world and its characters (Sanders, Sanders and Sweetser, 2012).² Both speaker and addressee are required to continuously navigate between these two domains to mentally construct the viewpoint from which the story at each given moment is to be represented.

The meaning of deictic elements, such as this, there, then, I, you, here, there, depends on whether they refer to persons or objects in the Speech Act Domain or in the Narrative Domain. Consider, for example, the following sentences: (1) Come here, I have to tell you something/(2) I was shopping in a new convenience store yesterday and, looking around, I wondered ‘why are there so many pillows over here’?/(3) I asked the cashier: “Do you know anything about these pillows?” The adverb ‘here’ in (1) is to be interpreted from the situational context of the conversation in which the story is told in the here-and-now, i.e. the Speech Act Domain, while in (2) the same adverb ‘here’ is to be interpreted from the situational context of the Narrative Domain, i.e. the store. Likewise, the pronoun ‘you’ in (3) does not refer to the addressee in the Speech Act Domain but to a character in the Narrative Domain. This can be explained through a process of origo shifting: the origo (a subject in its immediate environment; Bühler, 1934/1982) shifts from the here-and-now of the conversation to the there-and-then of the narrated event, anchoring all deictic expressions to the time and place to which the origo has shifted (Duchan, 1995).

Distinguishing between these domains of storytelling facilitates the analysis of (problems with) viewpoint navigation in stories. In particular, the current analysis of domains of storytelling in narratives by people with a schizophrenia diagnosis aims to elucidate how perspectivization issues might manifest i) in the construction of a Narrative Domain, ii) in the maintenance of the Speech Act Domain as basis for the conversation and iii) in the navigation between the two domains (Van Schuppen, Van Krieken & Sanders, 2019). The study has an exploratory aim, explicating a range of linguistic viewpoint phenomena in retellings of a short film by people with a schizophrenia diagnosis. In doing this, specific attention will be paid to diversity between subjects and to anomalies, emphasizing the implications of these forms of perspective-taking for the relation between speaker and hearer. The film retelling format enables us to scrutinize referential phenomena and embedded perspectives, and also viewpoint phenomena at the (meta)discourse level, such as interactive framing, evaluation, story plot construction and causal coherence (Chafe, 1980). Analyzing these viewpoint phenomena in people with hypothesized perspective-taking problems allows us to demonstrate how a large range of different linguistic and narrative phenomena can be brought together under the umbrella of viewpoint navigation, and might enable future studies to be more precise in their assertions about the cognitive perspective-taking abilities of people with certain mental health diagnoses.

Interactive Framing

Regarding the viewpoint on the narrative as a whole, some participants seemed to recount the Pear Film story in a factual, neutral manner, whereas others seemed to focus on telling the addressee an engaging narrative, containing assertions about the intentions and actions of the characters, and even personal evaluations and attempts to capture ‘the moral of the story’. These differences make sense from the perspective of the analysis of ‘interactive frames’, as introduced by Bateson (1972: 177–193) and later Goffman (1974; 1981), a term that refers to the kind of activity that people think they are engaging in when telling a story, for example, a memory task, film review or narrating a tellable story. These frames reflect the narrator’s expectations of the interaction, the way in which she perceives her own role in the interaction and the way that she wishes to present herself, among other things. In her analysis of several Pear Stories, Tannen (1982, 1993) makes use of the concepts of the ‘film-viewer frame’ and the ‘storytelling frame’. She suggests that the participants who assume a ‘film-viewer frame’ approach the activity with the aim of correctly recounting the film as they perceived it, whereas other people take position from a viewpoint within the story, not making their role as a viewer or narrator/‘recounter’ explicit, but presenting the story as an engaging narrative. This distinction between interactive frames seems at least in part culturally driven (Blackwell, 2009; Tannen and Wallat, 1987), but it is also shaped by individual preferences and backgrounds (Blackwell, 2009). In our collected stories, we made a similarly hybrid observation. Some participants seem to be occupied with providing an accurate reproduction of the events, mentioning more details, emphasizing camera angles, and thereby anchoring themselves actively to the Speech Act Domain during the entirety of the retelling (for example, see the story of participant 004 in the section ‘Illustration of interactive frames, evaluations, causal connections’), whereas others assume the here-and-now setting of the interaction to be common ground and position their narrator viewpoint more within the Narrative Domain, also including more (moral) evaluations and cultural referents (for example, see the story of participant 001 in the section ‘Illustration of interactive frames, evaluations, causal connections’) telling a story without talking about the film as a film.

Evaluations

With regards to viewpoint in terms of interpretations of the content of the narrative, it seems that participants greatly varied in their evaluation of specific situations and events in the Pear Film. Some of the participants deviated from the ‘facts’ in the story.⁶ For instance, several participants did not talk about pears, but about apples, and one of the participants told a story about oranges. There were also deviations regarding the description of the story events. One of the participants said, for example, that a girl was ‘looking for oranges’ (see the section ‘Story plot construction’ below for more details). In addition, there were some anomalies that were not ‘factual’, like variations in the chronology. In those cases, the narrators recounted an earlier event at a later point in the story, correcting themselves. Some participants omitted more events than others, in a few cases making it difficult for the hearer to follow the gist of the narrative.

In addition to these discrepancies, some participants posited facts, sometimes with great confidence, that were not inferable from the film, for example about the story’s setting (e.g. ‘in Mexico’), but that were not altogether impossible (the story could have been set in Mexico). In addition, some participants verbalized what the people in the film were thinking at particular points in the story. This is another example of ‘dressing up’ the story rather than factual inaccuracy. The confidence with which these facts and thoughts were added to the story at times seems to indicate a lack of distance between the narrator as interpreter and the factual events in the film. Whereas some narrators emphasized their role as detached observer (‘then you see… happening’), described above as illustrative of a ‘film-viewer frame’, others seemed to deny their own role as observer, instead telling the story as if they were present when the events in the film happened, described above as illustrative of a, rather internal, ‘storytelling frame’. The latter seemed to make more use of evaluative expressions than the former (for an example, see the analysis of the stories of participants 001 and 004 in the section ‘Illustration of interactive frames, evaluations, causal connections’).

Participants also showed large differences in the use of quotation. Labov and Waletzky (1967) explain how evaluations in the form of represented speech and thought strengthen the emotional and moral impact of the narrated events and are, as such, an essential element of interactive storytelling. Note that in the wordless Pear Film, verbal evaluations are lacking in the sense that protagonists do not explicitly state their comments on the narrative events and the protagonists’ body postures and facial expressions are relatively neutral. Nonetheless, some participants presented elaborate character evaluations of the events, in some cases taking up large parts of their narrative; in a few cases, participants inserted protagonists’ speech or thought in the direct mode. Such speech and thought reports require the construal of an embedded Speech Act Domain, nested within the Narrative Domain. Other participants, by contrast, used no evaluative devices at all.

Thus, participants showed great differences in the amount of viewpoint navigation between the Narrative and Speech Act Domains that was required in order to adequately interpret and evaluate their version of the events and their evaluations thereof. There seems to be a broad variability in the degree to which the narrators ‘adopted’ the narrative as their own, inserting their voice and their interpretative viewpoint into the story. The extent to which they did was largely intertwined with the interactive frame that they were assuming, for example with the ‘storytelling frame’ often coinciding with an increased use of evaluative devices. In the next section, we will focus on the event structure of the narrative and its relation to viewpoint representation.

Story plot construal

Regarding the viewpoint on the narrative’s constitutive elements, participants showed both differences and agreement on the Pear Film’s story plot. In recounting the film to the researcher, not all participants mentioned the same events. As described above, we distinguished 18 different events in the film.⁷ In order to categorize the elements in the narrative structure of the oral retellings, we present a Labovian analysis (Labov and Waletzky, 1967) of the film story in Table 1. Applying categories from the oral narrative basic structure, the story plot findings can be summarized as follows.

Generally, most Pear film retellings start with an orientation in which speakers clarify the setting of the story in terms of place and time (Chafe, 1980). In the data reported here, eight of the 11 narratives start with the introduction of the man who is picking the pears, and two start with a description of the landscape. One person starts by giving an external evaluation: a comment about how there are no judgements in the movie and nobody speaks. The orientation is followed by a ‘triggering event’, in this case the boy stealing a basket of pears, after which a series of complicating actions leads to a critical event, the ‘crux’ around which the story revolves. The critical event is followed by a resolution, during which the problem at hand is dealt with, and a coda, rounding up the story and making a connection to the here-and-now of the storytelling context.

Interestingly, not all of the participants’ stories follow a Labovian plot structure, sometimes resulting in a story line that is slightly chaotic and difficult to follow. In some cases, the orientation is, for example, very brief, whereas in others there is an alternative narrative event structure, such as in the case of participant 007 who seems to make up a new story altogether. His Pear Story is relatively short, with 15 clauses, and the girl on the bike arrives only at the end of the story, ‘also looking for oranges.’ The three boys are introduced as two children, and at the end of the story, the participant seems to conflate one of the (originally) three with the protagonist boy on the bike, stating that ‘he remains with the other two boys’. In Table 2, an overview is presented of the participants’ mentioning of the various story plot events in their retellings.

From Table 2 it becomes clear that events close to event-boundaries (Sanders, 1990), such as events 4, 7, and 12, are mentioned relatively often, as well as event 18 (the coda), which is necessary for the transition between the Narrative Domain and the Speech Act Domain. In addition, all participants mention at least one part of the story’s critical event (10–11 [the boy falls and the pears are on the ground]). Nine out of 11 of these descriptions are composed of an actively phrased description of the boy’s fall in the present tense (also nine of 11), after which the pears lying on the ground is passively described. Apparently, the crucial event in the story plot is relatively resistant against variation in story retelling. Yet when comparing the representations of the critical event structure with narrative-internal viewpoints, variations in the construction of causal coherence between the crucial events come to the surface.

Causal coherence

Regarding the narrative-internal viewpoint, participants varied in their characterization of the causal connections between crucial events in the Pear Film story. According to Chafe (1980), the falling boy and spilled pears – in Labovian terms the story’s critical event – were included in the film in order to prompt causal descriptions of events by the narrators. In the film, the causal chain leading up to the critical event can be understood as follows: the boy with the stolen basket of pears on his bicycle rides away; a girl passes the boy, which causes the boy’s hat to fall off and him being distracted, resulting in the boy hitting a stone with his bike and falling, causing the pears to fall on the ground. In narrating this chain of events, the characters’ perspectives can be presented in the story in addition to the perspective of the narrator. Consequently, two causal event chains can be discerned, one from the boy’s personal viewpoint (being distracted by the girl and by the falling hat à hitting the stone); the other from an impersonal viewpoint that registers the three crucial events as cause-consequence constellations without any involved person’s conscious action (bike hitting the stone à the boy/bike falling à the pears falling). These two causal event chains make for a comparison that is relevant in the context of viewpoint navigation. Taking into account that causal connectives communicate information about the viewpoint from which the chain of events is construed (Pit, 2003; Verhagen, 2005; Sanders, Sanders and Sweetser, 2012), and considering the fact that the critical event is mentioned in some way by all participants, analyzing the ways in which participants construe the boy’s fall might elucidate the role of viewpoint in the construal of cause-consequence sequences in narrative.

In our sample, approximately half of the participants make the causal connection between events explicit by the use of a causal connective like ‘doordat’ (‘because of the fact that’), ‘waardoor’ (‘which caused’), ‘dus’ (‘so’) or ‘omdat’ (‘because’), whereas the other half only describes the events chronologically without making explicit causal claims. Notably, Dutch causal connectives distinguish the causal relationship between factors in a more fine-grained way than the English language provides for. Rather than an overall causal marker like ‘because’, Dutch has a subgroup of causal connectives that construe the causal relationship as being objective, relating to the external world, like ‘doordat’ and ‘daardoor’, and a subgroup of connectives that indicate more subjective relationships like ‘want’, ‘dus’ and ‘omdat’, relating to the world of thought. The latter group of connectives might indicate that there is a certain reason for what is happening and that something is part of, or the outcome of, an epistemic or intentional process, rather than a cause-consequence chain involving an external force as explanation. Subjective and objective connectives often cannot be switched randomly without changing the meaning of what is being expressed (Pit, 2003; Verhagen, 2005; Sanders, Sanders and Sweetser, 2012), the former group locating the truth-criteria for an expression within a subject, the latter in the relationship between objects. In what follows, we will explore some examples of the role that causal connections play in the construal of the critical event.

Reference: introducing and shifting character viewpoints

The Pear Film revolves around four central characters, or rather, narrative subjects: the pear-picking man, the boy on the bicycle, the girl crossing on a bicycle, and the three walking children (essentially acting as one character). In most retellings, the introduction of these characters is – as expected (Ariel, 1991) – established by means of an indefinite reference (“a man”, “a boy”), in some cases accompanied by descriptive details (“a man with a moustache”). The girl, who merely passes by in the film, seems to represent a more problematic introduction, since two narrators do not mention her at all. In addition, four participants introduce her not as a girl but as “a nasty person” (001), “someone else” (002), “an Indian” (007) or “someone coming the other way” (105).

The re-introduction of the boy on the bike after the other boys find his hat stands out as well. In two cases, a reference is missing (for example in 106: “a few boys who helped him took the apples, and eh – rode on”), whereas in three other cases, a pronoun is used while a full noun would have been more appropriate (105: “then there were three children in the neighbourhood who helped him pick up his stuff and his bike and hat and then he gave them three pears”) (Prince, 1981; Ariel, 1991). Note, in addition, how the use of ‘dan’/‘then’ expresses a temporal connection that enables the introduction of a new character; this can be seen in clauses (a) and (e) of the excerpt from 007 that was discussed above, where then demarcates the entrance of ‘a boy’, and ‘two other children’, respectively:

Participant 007

1. dan komt eh dan komt eh een jongetje op de fiets langs

   then comes er then comes er a boy on a bike

2. ehhmm die moet een mandje op z’n fiets

   errmm he must have [meaning: is obliged to have] a basket on his bike

3. en dan valt ‘ie

   and then he falls

4. omdat ie tegen een steen rijdt

   because he hits a rock

5. dan komt de hulp van twee andere kinderen

   then comes the help of two other children

The temporal connective puts more emphasis on the succession of events than on the causal connectivity between them, and in fact represents an episode shift which indicates a shift in narrative time, place and/or person which often coincides with a viewpoint shift (Duchan, Meth and Waltzman, 1992; Sanders, 1990).

It is important that the speaker teases apart the different subjects in the sentence, to whom different actions and acts of direct speech or thought can be anchored. In re-telling the Pear Story, one of the most complicated parts with regards to the differentiation of the characters is a part where three boys help the protagonist to pick up the pears that fell out of the basket on his bike after a fall. Eight out of 11 of the participants are able to do this, making use of then, singular and plural construal and (possessive) pronouns, sometimes alternated with the introductory terms in order to clarify. Consider for example the following excerpt:

Participant 101

1. en eh hij gevallen

   and er he fell [literally:‘fallen’]⁹

2. en er waren dan drie jongens

   And then there were three boys

3. en die hielpen hem overeind

   And they helped him up

4. en die deden de peren eh weer in de mand

   And they put the pears eh back into the basket

5. en toen ehm reed ‘ie weer verder op z’n fiets

   And then erm he drove on on his bike

6. en toen floten ze hem terug

   And then they whistled at him to come back

7. en toen zeiden ze van

   And then they said like

8. je hoed ligt hier

   Your hat lies here

9. en toen gaven ze die hoed terug

   And then they returned that hat

10. en toen kregen die drie jongens eh ieder een peer van hem

    And then the three boys er each received a pear from him

11. en toen ging hij weer verder

    And then he went on

This is an example of successful navigation between multiple narrative subjects through the use of additive temporal connections (‘and’ & ‘then’), as well as plural versus singular references. Note that the viewpoint in this re-telling lies within the Narrative Domain, skillfully enlivened with a narrative-internal evaluation in (h) in the form of a reconstructed direct speech representation.

However, in other cases, such navigation did not go well; sometimes, then is not helpful in demarcating episode and viewpoint shifts. Consider for example the following clauses:

Participant 001

1. en eh dan vinden die jongens

   and er then those boys find

2. terwijl die jongetje wegfietst

   while that little boy bikes away

3. vindt die z’n hoed nog

   also he finds his hat

4. geeft die hoed

   gives that hat

5. eh geven die hoed terug

   er give that hat back

6. en in ruil krijgen ze ieder een peer eh als dankjewel

   and in return they each get a pear as a thank you

Typical in this excerpt is that the speaker has difficulty in navigating between subjective viewpoints within the narrative. He mistakenly states that the boy finds his hat (clause c), and gives the hat (clause d). Having arrived at that point in the retelling, the participant realizes that it is the group of boys who return the hat, which leads to the correction give the hat (clause e, lit.: give back the hat). Subsequently it is they who receive a pear (clause f), thus completing the now successful viewpoint transfer to another narrative subject.

Problems in navigating between subjective viewpoints are even more severe in the following excerpt:

Participant 002

1. ehhhh op een gegeven moment eh komt er een jongetje langs

   errr at some point er a little boy passes by

2. en die gaat volgens mij ook met een mand met peren eh op de fiets

   and he goes I think also with a basket with pears er on the bike

3. en d’r komt een ander tegen – een ander iemand met de fiets

   and there meets another – another someone with the bike

4. en z’n – z’n hoed eh wordt

   and his – his hat er gets

5. door- doordat iemand langs komt rijden

   because of the fact that someone comes riding by

6. wordt z’n hoed wordt – gaat af – valt af

   gets his hat gets – gets off – falls of

7. en die ander die eh valt daardoor op de grond met al z’n peren

   and that other that er falls because of that on the ground with all his pears

8. en eh of hij valt dan op de grond met al z’n peren

   and er or he then falls on the ground with all his pears

9. dat jongetje helpt hem weer om alles bij elkaar te doen

   that little boy helps him put everything together again

10. nee…eh ja… d’r komen nog wat andere kinderen inderdaad

    no… er yes… there come some other children indeed

11. ehhhhh – ja die andere kinderen helpen hem volgens mij – een groepje kinderen – om eh weer verder te gaan

    errr – yes those other children help him I think – a group of children – to er move on again

12. en op een gegeven moment komt het groepje weer langs die man die aan ‘t perenplukken is

    and at some point the small group passes by that man again who is picking pears

In (a), a boy passes by (viewpoint lies with pear picking man); in (b–c) the viewpoint lies with the boy on the bike, who meets someone else; in (e) again someone comes passing by, the viewpoint is again with the boy on the bike. In (f), the speaker finds it difficult to express causality in the falling of the hat, it is (thrown off?) – goes off – falls off; in (g) the viewpoint is, by indicating the boy on the bike as “this other (one)”, positioned with the person passing by; which is repaired in (h) by “er or he is falling”, indicating that the speaker realizes that the boy on the bike should be perspectivizing subject at the critical event. In (i), again the speaker has difficulty in differentiating between the various characters and their viewpoints: “that little boy” is not the boy on the bike, but one of the group of boys. This is repaired in (j-k). The problems in manifesting and representing viewpoints are explicitly addressed in the Speech Act Domain: “I think” (lit. according to me) in clauses (b) and (k), and by confirmation of the referential repair in (j): “indeed”.

Embedded perspectives

Because the Pear Story is a wordless movie that has no voice-over or any other form of verbal cues, viewers completely rely on their inferences – fed by nonverbal cues, bodily posture, and common knowledge – about the mental states of the characters in order to understand their intentions and actions. Indeed, the retellings of the Pear Story show that narrators sometimes include several of such inferences. Often they are presented in the form of embedded perspectives that explain the story plot to the unknowing conversational partner. These embedded perspectives are interesting because they are not (explicitly) part of the story itself but created in the mind of the narrator and added to the story during the retelling. As such, these perspectives provide insight into the process of aligning the viewpoints of narrator, characters, and addressee. Consider for example the following excerpt, in which the participant narrates about the boy stealing the pears:

Participant 101

1. en die ziet die peren daar

   and he sees those pears over there

2. terwijl hij in die boom zit

   while he is sitting in that tree

3. en dan neemt ie eh… eh…

   and then he takes er… er…

4. eerst dacht ‘ie

   first he thought

5. ik neem er eentje mee

   I take one

6. en toen dacht ‘ie

   and then he thought

7. nah nee ik neem de hele mand mee

   nah no I take the entire basket

In (a), the narrator embeds the perspective of the boy through the use of the perceptual verb sees. He aligns his viewpoint with the character’s viewpoint, and thus invites the addressee to take on this viewpoint as well, which is substantiated by the distal demonstrative those and the distal spatial adverb over there. The narrator then moves on to describe the pear theft from an external perspective (c) but restarts this description from an internal perspective in (d). This internal perspective is established by two consecutive direct thoughts (e and g). Note that in (b), the pronoun he (hij) refers to the man while in (c, d and f), the pronoun he (Dutch: ‘ie’, a reduced conversational form of he) refers to the boy. Use of the same pronominal reference to refer to two different referents causes ambiguity (for examples, see Ariel, 1988; Ariel, 1991); in this specific case, it can be considered as a lack of clear viewpoint distinction within the Narrative Domain.

The following excerpt shows a similar narration strategy, in which the narrator first embeds the character’s perspective by means of the perceptual verb sees (a) in combination with the distal spatial adverb there. Note that in this case the character’s perspective is further elaborated by inclusion of the adjective nice.

Participant 003

1. en die ziet daar ehh lekker fruit staan

   and he sees err nice fruit over there

2. en die neemt niet een eh peertje d’r van

   and he does not take er one little pear of it

3. maar die denkt van

   but he thinks like

4. ik kan wel die hele mand

   I can […] the entire basket

5. want er staan drie manden – twee manden – volle manden met peren – en nog een lege mand

   because [for] there are three baskets – two baskets, baskets full with pears – and another empty basket

6. en die eh probeert ie ehh te gappen

   and er which he tries to er steal

The direct thought in (d) is incomplete: a main verb is missing. In Dutch, this verb would be the final word of the sentence, so it appears that the narrator does not finish the sentence in order to explain the content of the direct thought (d) in the subsequent sentence (e). Thus, the narrator adds an element to the story that is not part of the original story and then realizes that this addition requires an explanation for the addressee to understand it. Notably, in providing this explanation, the narrator switches from the internal perspective of the boy within the Narrative Domain to his own perspective in the Speech Act Domain, which is indicated by the subjective connective want (‘because’; see Sanders, Sanders and Sweetser, 2012).

Next to direct thought reports, several direct speech reports are included in the story retellings. Consider for example the following excerpts:

Participant 101

1. en toen zeiden ze van

   and then they said like

2. je hoed ligt hier

   your hat lies here

3. en toen gaven ze die hoed terug

   and then they gave that hat back

Participant 106

1. en die meneer zei

   and that man said

2. waar [zijn?] me appels

   where [are?] my apples

3. en ehm die jongens liepen gewoon langs

   and erm those boys just walked by

4. en de appels en de mand was weg

   and the apples and basket were [literally ‘was’] gone

In both cases quoted above, the main function of the embedded direct speech reports appears to be to enliven the story; the information expressed in the speech reports is not essential to the plot of the story and to the explanation of the plot to the addressee, and the quoted words are never actually uttered in the wordless film.

This function of enlivening by evaluations is also seen in the following excerpt, which includes a hypothetical speech report, i.e., speech that the narrator says could have been uttered in the story, but was not actually uttered:

Participant 001

1. Het is een beetje een truttig filmpje

   It is a bit of a dowdy movie

2. Eh de moraal van het verhaal is

   The story’s moral is

3. Goede daden worden beloond

   Good deeds will be rewarded

4. Maar kunnen ook uit zichzelf voortkomen

   But they can also can come about out of themselves

5. Zonder dat daar een beloning tegenover staat

   Without that being rewarded in return

6. dus die drie jongens hebben niet gevraagd

   so those three boys have not asked

7. mogen wij een peer

   can we have a pear

8. omdat we je geholpen hebben

   because we have helped you

9. Persoonlijk gewin was niet hun uitgangspunt

   Personal gain was not their point of departure

10. En er zijn dus kennelijk nare mensen en goede mensen

    And so there are apparently nasty people and good people

11. En goede mensen helpen elkaar

    And good people help each other

12. En nare mensen zitten elkaar dwars

    And nasty people bother each other

13. Dat is de moraal van het verhaal- zoiets

    That is the moral of the story – something like that

In this specific case, however, the speech report (evaluations in clauses g–h) also functions to explain the behaviour of the boys within the Narrative Domain to the addressee, and thus contributes to the evaluations about the movie and its message (clauses a–e). Here, the rhetoric message of the speaker is elaborated from the viewpoint within the Speech Act Domain, signalled by the subjective connective dus in clause (f), summarized in an narrative-internal evaluation from the viewpoint of the boys in clause (i) (“Personal gain was not their point of departure”), skilfully closed, as a coda, with a conclusion on the film story’s morale in clauses (j–m) from the viewpoint in the Speech Act Domain which is signalled again by the subjective connective dus (‘so’).