We are happy to announce a talk by Christopher Saure (Wuppertal) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: February 5, 2026
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: The multiperspectival potential of indirect discourse
Abstract:
There is an overall consensus in the literature on perspectivization in language that indirect discourse (ID) does fundamentally not allow perspective shift of deictic expressions in its scope, which are thus obligatorily interpreted from the speaker’s context (e.g., Schlenker 2004). Consequently, research on perspective shift has been primarily focused on free indirect discourse (FID) for its seemingly unique display of multiperspectivity.
In this talk, I provide theoretical and empirical evidence that this prevalent view of ID does not accurately capture its true perspectival potential. Specifically, I argue that ID allows for the same indexicals to shift to the perspective of the reported utterance’s or thought’s original author as FID, namely spatio-temporal adverbs. Crucially, my proposal entails that perspective shift in ID is only unlocked if certain conditions are fulfilled and that the misconceptions about ID stem from a lack of recognition of these conditions in previous works. I discuss three conditions I deem to be significant for facilitating perspective shift in ID – narrative context, discourse prominence and type of propositional attitude verb – and highlight how these factors are relevant for the interpretation of FID as well. Moreover, I present the results of two experimental studies which show that, by taking into account the aforementioned factors, we can (a) increase the acceptability of shifted ID readings; and (b) significantly affect the interpretation of temporal indexicals in German ID.
Finally, I propose that these findings necessitate a uniform treatment of ID and FID. I briefly discuss which of the popular approaches to explain FID’s multiperspectivity – a double-context account (e.g., Schlenker 2004, Eckardt 2014) or a mixed quotation analysis (Maier 2015) – provides the ideal framework for this task.