Korpuslinguistische Zugänge zur nicht-fiktionalen Rede

Corpus Linguistic Approaches to non-fictional speech

by Luisa Gödeke
Doctoral thesis
Date of Examination:2024-12-13
Date of issue:2025-06-24
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Anke Holler
Referee:Prof. Dr. Anke Holler
Referee:Prof. Dr. Sonja Zeman
Referee:PD Dr. Benjamin Gittel
Sponsor:VolkswagenStiftung
Sponsor:Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Persistent Address: http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-11338

 

 

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Abstract

English

Fictional narratives pose challenging questions for semantic and pragmatic theories because fictional statements have no direct reference to reality and are not considered to be genuine assertions. However, it is known from research in philosophy of language and literary studies that fictional texts can also contain 'factual discourse' or 'genuine assertions' (Searle, 1975; Konrad, 2014, 2017). Konrad (2017: 56) claims that certain linguistic markers of factuality indicate that a sentence is factual rather than fictional. This thesis systematically investigates the semantic features and pragmatic factors that contribute to the identification and characterisation of non-fictional speech (nfs). The corpus MONACO, which consists of 22 annotated German fictional texts, was analysed using a corpus-based mixed-methods approach. The microstructural (i.e. semantic) analysis shows that, in particular, generic and all-quantified generalisations and changes from past tense to present tense are significant indicators of nfs. However, nfs cannot be defined by these linguistic features alone. The macrostructural (i.e. pragmatic) analysis deals with the embedding of nfs in the narrative structure and shows that nfs also occurs in character speech (‚fictional-factual speech‘ in Konrads (2017) terminology), making it difficult to clearly distinguish it from the narrated world. Furthermore, the frequency of nfs varies considerably between the texts analysed, suggesting narrator and focalisation perspective effects. Special attention is given to the question of attribution: while within the fictional world nfs can be attributed to characters or the narrator, its real-world proposition implies an attribution to a non-fictional instance, e.g. the respective authors. Overall, the results underline that nfs is a dynamic and context-dependent phenomenon that cannot be defined by rigid linguistic features, but must be understood in the interplay of attribution, narrative perspective and genre. The study thus provides a linguistic foundation for nfs but also opens up new perspectives for interdisciplinary research on factual and fictional language use patterns.
Keywords: Corpus Linguistics; Speaker Attribution; Annotation; Fictionality
Schlagwörter: Korpuslinguistik; Sprecherattribution; Annotation; Fiktionalität
 
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