Who Perceives? Who Thinks? Anchoring Free Reports of Perception and Thought in Narratives. Issue 2 (23rd July 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Bimpikou, Sofia
• Is Part Of: Open library of humanities. Volume 6:Issue 2(2020)
• Publication Date: 2020-07-23
• DOI: 10.16995/olh.484
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2056-6700

Abstract

This paper reports the results of four experiments that investigate how readers determine the perspective holder for free reports in narratives. Free reports can be interpreted as descriptions of someone's perceptions or thoughts. I tested the effect of the following factors on how free reports are anchored: narration type (first-person vs. third-person), local prominence (whether or not a character has just been explicitly mentioned as a perceiver or thinker), global prominence (whether a character is the discourse topic), and type of free report (perception vs. thought). The findings suggest that readers tend to ascribe free reports to the locally prominent character and are more likely to do so in third-person narratives compared to first-person ones. Speaker preference is in general strong when there are multiple locally prominent characters. In that case, the globally prominent character is more likely to be preferred as an anchor for free thought reports in third-person stories. Overall, free thought reports were not found to be different from free perception reports. Based on the present findings, the following anchoring hierarchy is hypothesised: locally prominent character > narrator > globally prominent character, where the most plausible anchor is the character mentioned to be the experiencer of an event.