תקציר:

Existing semantic theories are charged with oversimplification by identifying point of view with utterance; educated speakers, however, easily interpret free indirect discourse in stream-of-consciousness novels by distinguishing between the narrator's perspective & that of a character despite alternations of perspective within the same paragraph. Free indirect discourse sentences, though unembedded, contain shifted tenses anchored to the narrator while deictic expressions are anchored to the subject of consciousness. Definite descriptions are related to the narrator in referential use & to the subject of consciousness in attributive uses. Free indirect discourse is also characterized semantically by logophoric third person pronouns & stylistically by exclamations typical of direct speech & use of a character's metaphors & speech mannerisms. A formalization of free indirect discourse is developed in the framework of situation semantics to represent the distribution of perspectival sensitivities of deictic elements, including third person pronouns & tenses, & the duality of definite descriptions. 9 References. J. Hitchcock