»Wer hat das gesagt?«

Abstract

AbstractPrevious discussions of the author have almost fully disregarded the fact that language, and, consequently, the role of »sender«, and thus also the narrator of a literary work, are anchored in the functional contexts of evolution. The sender is not only a byproduct of language, but an essential part of information. In the first part of the article, four innate tools are examined which can count as prerequisites of existing narrative works: a sender detector, which prompts us to look out for the sender of all kinds of verbal or otherwise speech-like communication; the ability to provide linguistic information with meta-level source-tag indicating scope and reliability; the capability of relating others’ action to their mental states (»theory of mind«); and the transmission of social knowledge (»gossip «). The last two paragraphs describe the role these dispositions play in the game of literature. The study is located in the overlapping area of biopoetics, pragma-linguistics, and cognitive poetics.