Cover not available
Article published In:
Irregular perspective shifts and perspective persistence: Discourse-oriented and theoretical approaches
Edited by Caroline Gentens, María Sol Sansiñena, Stef Spronck and An Van linden
[Pragmatics 29:2] 2019
► pp. 170–197

Changing perspectives

Something old, something new

ORCID logo | University of Namur (NALTT institute) & KU Leuven (FunC research group)
This paper investigates questions of perspective shift or non-shift against a background of a basic deictic-cognitive divide in our understanding of what comes under the linguistic notion of perspective. In differentiating ‘distancing’ from ‘free’ indirect speech/thought in narratives, it proposes a new lens through which to reconsider a class of examples controlled in curious ways by the narrator’s deictic and cognitive perspective. Turning to a newer mode of communication – that of Internet memes combining set phrases and images in one multimodal package – the paper shows that despite this novelty, unusual uses of quotation in memes in fact join the ranks of existing non-quotative uses of quotation to express a stance rather than genuinely shift to a different discourse source. The paper also touches on the question of the constructional status of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ phenomena investigated.
Keywords: be like , deixis, distancing indirect speech/thought, fictive interaction, Internet memes, perspective, quotation, viewpoint
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Dividing perspectives: Deictic and cognitive perspective shifts
  • 3.Representing speech and thought, with a difference
  • 4.Non-quotative uses of direct speech representation in Internet memes
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Example sources
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 12 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18046.van
References

Example sources

Banville, John
1998 [1989] The Book of Evidence. London: Picador.Google Scholar
Eugenides, Jeffrey
2012 [2011] The Marriage Plot. London: Fourth Estate.Google Scholar
Forster, E. M.
1976 [1908] A Room with a View. Hardmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Lawrence, D. H.
1971 [1920] Women in Love. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Macdonald, Helen
2014 H is for Hawk. London: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Ralph, Devlin Garrett
2012 “ ‘I Love Your Crocs’ – Nobody.” Picture taken on 24 February 2012 at OCAD University in downtown Toronto. Published on Flickr at: [URL]. Reproduced by permission.
Roth, Philip
1994 [1967] Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Vintage International.Google Scholar
2005 [1979] The Ghost Writer. London: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Smith, Ali
2011 [2006] The Accidental. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
St Aubyn, Edward
2012 [1992] Never Mind. London: Picador.Google Scholar
Woolf, Virginia
1964 [1927] To the Lighthouse. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with The Hogarth Press.Google Scholar
1965 [1937] The Years. London: The Hogarth Press.Google Scholar
Adamson, Sylvia
1995 “From Empathetic Deixis to Empathetic Narrative: Stylisation and (De-)Subjectivisation as Processes of Language Change.” In Subjectivity and Subjectivisation. Linguistic Perspectives, ed. by Dieter Stein, and Susan Wright, 195–224. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ariel, Mira
1990 Accessing Noun Phrase Antecedents. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Banfield, Ann
1982 Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie, Rochelle Lieber, and Ingo Plag
2013 The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bergen, Benjamin K.
2012 Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Bray, Joe
2007 “The ‘Dual Voice’ of Free Indirect Discourse: A Reading Experiment.” Language and Literature 16 (1): 37–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Eve V.
1997 “Conceptual Perspective and Lexical Choice in Acquisition.” Cognition 64 (1): 1–37. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cukor-Avila, Patricia
2002 “ She Say, She Go, She Be Like: Verbs of Quotation Over Time in African American Vernacular English.” American Speech 77 (1): 3–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara
2005 “Blending and Narrative Viewpoint: Jonathan Raban’s Travels through Mental Spaces.” Language and Literature 14 (2): 99–127. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser
2005 Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barbara Dancygier, and Eve Sweetser
(eds) 2012 Viewpoint in Language: A Multimodal Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara, Wei-lun Lu, and Arie Verhagen
2016 Viewpoint and the Fabric of Meaning: Form and Use of Viewpoint Tools across Language and Modalities. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara, and Lieven Vandelanotte
2016 “Discourse Viewpoint as Network.” In Dancygier, Lu, and Verhagen (eds), 13–40.Google Scholar
(eds) 2017a Viewpoint Phenomena in Multimodal Communication. Special issue of Cognitive Linguistics 28 (3).Google Scholar
2017b Internet memes as multimodal constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 28 (3): 565–598. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davidse, Kristin, and Lieven Vandelanotte
2011 “Tense Use in Direct and Indirect speech in English.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (1): 236–250. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dillon, George L., and Frederick Kirchhoff
1976 “On the Form and Function of Free Indirect Style.” A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature (PTL) 11: 431–440.Google Scholar
Ehrlich, Susan
1990 Point of View. A Linguistic Analysis of Literary Style. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner
2002 The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Fludernik, Monika
1993 The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction. The Linguistic Representation of Speech and Consciousness. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Galbraith, Mary
1995 “Deictic Shift Theory and the Poetics of Involvement in Narrative.” In Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective, ed. by Judith F. Duchan, Gail A. Bruder, and Lynne E. Hewitt, 19–59. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Genette, Gérard
1980 Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
1988 Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gentens, Caroline, María Sol Sansiñena, Stef Spronck, and An Van linden
This issue. “Irregular Perspective Shifts and Perspective Persistence: Discourse-oriented and Theoretical Approaches.”
Hough, Graham
1970 “Narration and Dialogue in Jane Austen.” The Critical Quarterly 121: 201–229. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Janzen, Terry
2012 “Two Ways of Conceptualizing Space: Motivating the Use of Static and Rotated Vantage Point Space in ASL Discourse.” In Dancygier and Sweetser (eds), 156–174.Google Scholar
Kuno, Susumu
1987 Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse, and Empathy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W.
2008 Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lou, Adrian
2017 “Multimodal Simile: The “When” Meme in Social Media Discourse.” English Text Construction 10 (1): 106–131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McGregor, William B.
1997 Semiotic Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Mey, Jacob L.
1999 When Voices Clash: A Study in Literary Pragmatics (Trends in Linguistics 115). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milner, Ryan M.
2016 The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Niederhoff, Burkhard
2009 “Focalization.” In Handbook of Narratology, ed. by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert, 115–123. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Nikiforidou, Kiki
2012 “The Past + Now in Language and Literature.” In Dancygier and Sweetser (eds), 177–197.Google Scholar
Palmer, Alan
2004 Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Pascal, Roy
1977 The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in The Nineteenth Century European Novel. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Sandler, Sergeiy, and Esther Pascual
This issue. “In the Beginning There Was Conversation: Fictive Direct Speech in the Hebrew Bible.”
Shifman, Limor
2014 Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sotirova, Violeta
2004 “Connectives in Free Indirect Style: Continuity or Shift?” Language and Literature 13 (3): 216–234. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006 “Reader Responses to Narrative Point of View.” Poetics 34 (2): 108–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson
1986 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 1st ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Si, Aung, and Stef Spronck
This issue. “Solega Defenestration: Underspecified Perspective Shift in an Unwritten Dravidian Language.”
Sweetser, Eve
2012 “Introduction: Viewpoint and Perspective in Language and Gesture, from the Ground Down.” In Dancygier and Sweetser (eds), 1–22.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah
1989 Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vandelanotte, Lieven
2004a “Deixis and Grounding in Speech and Thought Representation.” Journal of Pragmatics 36 (3): 489–520. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004b “From Representational to Scopal ‘Distancing Indirect Speech or Thought’: A Cline of Subjectification.” TEXT 24 (4): 547–585. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 Speech and Thought Representation in English: A Cognitive-functional Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 “ ‘Wait Till You Got Started’: How to Submerge Another’s Discourse in Your Own.” In Dancygier and Sweetser (eds), 198–218.Google Scholar
2017 “Viewpoint.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Barbara Dancygier, 157–171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Forthcoming. “Clearer Contours: The Stylization of Free Indirect Speech in Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” In Speech Representation in the History of English ed. by Peter Grund, and Terry Walker Oxford Oxford University Press
Vandelanotte, Lieven, and Barbara Dancygier
2017 Multimodal Artefacts and the Texture of Viewpoint. Special issue of Journal of Pragmatics 1221.Google Scholar
van der Voort, Cok
1986 “Hoe vrij is de vrije indirecte rede? [How free is free indirect discourse?]” Forum der Letteren 41: 241–255.Google Scholar
Van Duijn, Max, and Arie Verhagen
This issue. “Language, Intersubjectivity, and Recursive Mindreading.”
von Roncador, Manfred
1988 Zwischen direkter und indirekter Rede: Nichtwörtliche direkte Rede, erlebte Rede, logophorische Konstruktionen und Verwandtes (Linguistische Arbeiten 192). Tübingen: Niemeyer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zeman, Sonja
This issue. “The Emergence of Viewpoints in Multiple Perspective Constructions.”
Zenner, Eline, and Dirk Geeraerts
2018 “One Does Not Simply Process Memes: Image Macros as Multimodal Constructions.” In Cultures and Traditions of Wordplay and Wordplay Research, ed. by Esme Winter-Froemel and Verena Thaler, 167–193. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zribi-Hertz, Anne
1989 “Anaphor Binding and Narrative Point of View: English Reflexive Pronouns in Sentence and Discourse.” Language 65 (4): 695–727. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

de Vries, Clarissa, Bert Oben & Geert Brône
2021. Exploring the role of the body in communicating ironic stance. Languages and Modalities 1 ► pp. 65 ff. DOI logo
Gruber, Helmut
2022. When invoked voices blame real politicians. Pragmatics and Society 13:5 ► pp. 793 ff. DOI logo
Su, Danjie
2022. Factuality lens. Chinese Language and Discourse. An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 13:2 ► pp. 242 ff. DOI logo
Vandelanotte, Lieven
2023. Constructions of speech and thought representation. WIREs Cognitive Science 14:2 DOI logo
Xie, Chaoqun, Francisco Yus & Hartmut Haberland
2021. Introduction. In Approaches to Internet Pragmatics [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 318], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Zeman, Sonja
2020. Parameters of Narrative Perspectivization: The Narrator. Open Library of Humanities 6:2 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.