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

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF

Changing perspectives

Something old, something new

ORCiD logo with link | University of Namur (NALTT institute) & KU Leuven (FunC research group)
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 12 March 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18046.van
Abstract
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.
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
References (71)
Example sources
Banville, John. 1998 [1989]. The Book of Evidence. London: Picador.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eugenides, Jeffrey. 2012 [2011]. The Marriage Plot. London: Fourth Estate.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Forster, E. M. 1976 [1908]. A Room with a View. Hardmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lawrence, D. H. 1971 [1920]. Women in Love. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Macdonald, Helen. 2014. H is for Hawk. London: Vintage Books.Google Scholar logo with link to 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 logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005 [1979]. The Ghost Writer. London: Vintage Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Ali. 2011 [2006]. The Accidental. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
St Aubyn, Edward. 2012 [1992]. Never Mind. London: Picador.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Woolf, Virginia. 1964 [1927]. To the Lighthouse. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in association with The Hogarth Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1965 [1937]. The Years. London: The Hogarth Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
References
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. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing Noun Phrase Antecedents. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Banfield, Ann. 1982. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie, Rochelle Lieber, and Ingo Plag. 2013. The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bergen, Benjamin K. 2012. Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bray, Joe. 2007. “The ‘Dual Voice’ of Free Indirect Discourse: A Reading Experiment.” Language and Literature 16 (1): 37–52. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clark, Eve V. 1997. “Conceptual Perspective and Lexical Choice in Acquisition.” Cognition 64 (1): 1–37. Google Scholar logo with link to Google 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. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara. 2005. “Blending and Narrative Viewpoint: Jonathan Raban’s Travels through Mental Spaces.” Language and Literature 14 (2): 99–127. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012. The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser. 2005. Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barbara Dancygier, and Eve Sweetser (eds). 2012. Viewpoint in Language: A Multimodal Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google 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. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara, and Lieven Vandelanotte. 2016. “Discourse Viewpoint as Network.” In Dancygier, Lu, and Verhagen (eds), 13–40.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(eds). 2017a. Viewpoint Phenomena in Multimodal Communication. Special issue of Cognitive Linguistics 28 (3).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017b. Internet memes as multimodal constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 28 (3): 565–598. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davidse, Kristin, and Lieven Vandelanotte. 2011. “Tense Use in Direct and Indirect speech in English.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (1): 236–250. Google Scholar logo with link to Google 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 logo with link to Google Scholar
Ehrlich, Susan. 1990. Point of View. A Linguistic Analysis of Literary Style. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to 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 logo with link to 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 logo with link to 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 logo with link to Google Scholar
Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1988. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to 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. Google Scholar logo with link to Google 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 logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuno, Susumu. 1987. Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse, and Empathy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McGregor, William B. 1997. Semiotic Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mey, Jacob L. 1999. When Voices Clash: A Study in Literary Pragmatics (Trends in Linguistics 115). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Milner, Ryan M. 2016. The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google 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 logo with link to Google Scholar
Nikiforidou, Kiki. 2012. “The Past + Now in Language and Literature.” In Dancygier and Sweetser (eds), 177–197.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Palmer, Alan. 2004. Fictional Minds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar logo with link to 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 logo with link to 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 logo with link to Google Scholar
Sotirova, Violeta. 2004. “Connectives in Free Indirect Style: Continuity or Shift?” Language and Literature 13 (3): 216–234. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. “Reader Responses to Narrative Point of View.” Poetics 34 (2): 108–133. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 1st ed. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to 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 logo with link to Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah. 1989. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vandelanotte, Lieven. 2004a. “Deixis and Grounding in Speech and Thought Representation.” Journal of Pragmatics 36 (3): 489–520. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004b. “From Representational to Scopal ‘Distancing Indirect Speech or Thought’: A Cline of Subjectification.” TEXT 24 (4): 547–585. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. Speech and Thought Representation in English: A Cognitive-functional Approach. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google 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 logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. “Viewpoint.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Barbara Dancygier, 157–171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google 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 logo with link to 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 logo with link to 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. Google Scholar logo with link to Google 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. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zribi-Hertz, Anne. 1989. “Anaphor Binding and Narrative Point of View: English Reflexive Pronouns in Sentence and Discourse.” Language 65 (4): 695–727. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

Dancygier, Barbara & Lieven Vandelanotte
2025. Embodiment and simulated interaction in online stance expression. Frontiers in Psychology 15 DOI logo
Vandelanotte, Lieven
2023. Constructions of speech and thought representation. WIREs Cognitive Science 14:2 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
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
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 29 november 2025. 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.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue