Taking the perspective of narrative characters

DOI

An ongoing debate in the interpretation of referring expressions concerns the degree to which listeners make use of perspective information during referential processing. We aim to contribute to this debate by considering perspective shifting in narrative discourse. In a web-based mouse-tracking experiment in Dutch, we investigated whether listeners automatically shift to a narrative character’s perspective when resolving ambiguous referring expressions, and how different linguistic perspective-shifting devices affect if and when listeners switch to another perspective. We compared perspective-neutral, direct, and free indirect discourse, manipulating what objects are visible to the character. Our results do not show a clear effect of the perspective shifting devices on participants’ eventual choice of referent, but our online mouse-tracking data reveal processing differences that suggest that listeners are indeed sensitive to the conventional markers of perspective shift associated with direct and (to a lesser degree) free indirect discourse.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/5KHVJV
Related Identifier IsCitedBy https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00054.vog
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/5KHVJV
Provenance
Creator Vogels, Jorrig (ORCID: 0000-0001-6698-504X); Bimpikou, Sofia ORCID logo; Kapelle, Owen; Maier, Emar ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Groningen Digital Competence Centre; DataverseNL
Publication Year 2023
Funding Reference NWO 275-89-0360 ; NWO 276-80-004
Rights CC-BY-4.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
OpenAccess true
Contact Groningen Digital Competence Centre (University of Groningen)
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
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Version 1.0
Discipline Humanities