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6 - Narrative and Point of View

from Part III - Narrating and Structuring

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2022

By
Pranav Anand  and
Maziar Toosarvandani
Edited by
Daniel Altshuler
Daniel Altshuler
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

We examine a previously undiscussed interaction between tense and predicates of personal taste (PPTs). While disagreements involving delicious or fun are generally considered faultless – they have no clear fact of the matter – we observe that, in joint oral narratives, this faultlessness varies with tense: if the narrative is told in the historical present, disagreements involving a PPT are not faultless. Drawing on narrative research in psychology and discourse analysis, we propose that this contrast reflects a pragmatic convention of the narrative genre that participants construct a consensus version of what happened from a unitary perspective. To link this pragmatics with the semantics, we adopt a bicontextual semantics, where the perspectival parameters for both PPTs and tense are located in a context of assessment (and not context of utterance). We show that when these contextual parameters are constrained by the unitary perspective of narratives, the present tense leads to nonfaultless disagreements, as its semantics tightly binds the temporal location of an event to the parameter relevant for appraisal. The past tense, by contrast, enables both faultless and nonfaultless disagreements. We derive this flexibility by revising the existing semantics for past tense, engendering a new perspective on crosslinguistic variation in tense usage.

Keywords

narrativediscourse structureperspectivedisagreementtensepredicates of personal tasterelativismbicontextualism
Type
Chapter
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Linguistics Meets Philosophy , pp. 176 - 214
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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