Narration Without Narrating

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of how to account for the distinction between narrator-creating and narrator-neutral narration from a linguistic perspective. I first take issue with the approach by Eckardt (2015), according to which narrator-neutral narration is due to a lack of knowledge about the narrating situation; specifically, I raise an existence problem, an anthropomorphism problem, and a tense problem. Second, combining ideas of the Institutional Theory of Fiction as described by Walton (1990) and Köppe/Stühring (2011) and formal tools of Attitude Description Theory as developed by Maier (2017), I propose an imagination-based alternative account of narrator-neutrality. According to this, the distinction between narrator-creating and narrator-neutral narration is captured by optional existential binding of a narrating situation and a narrator in an imagination component of an interpreter’s mental state. Particular attention is paid to the semantics of the German preterit in fictional narratives. On the one hand, I confirm the famous hypothesis by Hamburger (31977) and her successors in German linguistics that the preterit licenses an atemporal reading and thus an interpretation that eliminates the grammatical need for a narrating situation within the fiction. On the other hand, I reject the prevailing assumption that the preterit in its atemporal reading marks the fiction as such. In lieu thereof, the preterit is argued to instruct interpreters to imagine the story from the perspective of a distant observer.