On speakers in narrative fiction

Abstract

The paper investigates aspects of the contribution of indexicals to sentence meaning when the context, specifically the speaker, is unknown. One typical instance is the interpretation of the first person pronoun I in anonymous messages, another case are first and second person indexicals in narrative fiction. Whereas the speaker of an anonymous message can be found out, first speaker protagonists in fiction are a priori elusive. The paper argues that the meaning of indexicals in fiction and in anonymous utterances should be captured by forming the union over possible utterance contexts. It defines the subjective meaning for the hearer/reader as an appropriate level of semantic representation.