The Language of Fiction

This volume brings together new research on fiction from the fields of philosophy and linguistics. Fiction has long been a topic of interest in philosophy, but recent years have also seen a surge in work on fictional discourse at the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. In particular, there has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective that is informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. Following a detailed introduction by the editors, The Language of Fiction contains 14 chapters by leading scholars in linguistics and philosophy, organized into three parts. Part I, 'Truth, Reference, and Imagination', offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, 'Storytelling', deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, 'Perspective Shift', focuses on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, namely how we get access to the fictional characters' inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see. The volume will be of interest to scholars from graduate level upwards in the fields of discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, cognitive science, and literary studies.

1 - Introduction
2 - Fictional reference as simulation
3 - Sharing real and fictional reference
4 - Fictional truth: In defense of the reality principle
5 - On the generation of content
6 - Do the imaginings that fictions invite have a direction of fit?
7 - In search of the narrator
8 - Extracting fictional truth from unreliable sources
9 - Narrative and point-of-view
10 - A puzzle about narrative progression and causal reasoning
11 - Isomorphic mapping in fictional interpretation
12 - Metalinguistic acts in fiction
13 - Computing perspective shift in narratives
14 - Derogatory terms in free indirect discourse
15 - Protagonist projection, character-focus, and mixed quotation

Emar Maier is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen, affiliated with both the Philosophy and Linguistics Departments. After receiving his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Nijmegen in 2006, he led an ERC Starting Grant project (2011-2016) on quotation. He is currently leading an NWO VIDI project, investigating the semantics of imagination and fiction, combining topics and insights from philosophy (e.g. mental files, imaginative resistance) and linguistics (e.g. dynamic semantics). His research interests include fiction and imagination; pictorial semantics and 'superlinguistics'; attitude ascription and quotation; and reference and indexicality Andreas Stokke is a docent and senior lecturer in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University, and a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. He has previously held positions at New York University and the University of Oxford. His research is mainly in the fields of philosophy of language and epistemology, but he has also worked on ethics and the philosophy of action. He has published extensively on topics including lying and insincerity, protagonist projection, and dynamic semantics, and he is the author of the OUP volumes Lying and Insincerity (2018) and Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics (co-edited with Eliot Michaelson; 2018).