Chapter 1. Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet: A case study from Japanese

Parameters of Narrative Perspectivization: The Narrator

“…As such, the narrator is discussed extensively in literary stylistics and narratology, where the close link between narration and perspectivization has always been a central interest. In linguistics, the study of viewpoint in narratives is also not a new topic (for example, see in particular the grounding work by Kuroda, [1973] 2014, and Kuno and Kaburaki, 1977), but has recently become a vital new area of research (see, among others, van Krieken, Sanders and Sweetser (eds. ), 2019; Głaz and Trofymczuk, 2020;Lee, 2020;and Altshuler and Maier, in press).…”

“…), 2019; Głaz and Trofymczuk, 2020;Lee, 2020;and Altshuler and Maier, in press). Despite this increasing interest, the concept of the narrator itself has not been the main focus of the linguistic discussion (also see Eckardt, 2015), and in studies that investigate how narrator's and characters' viewpoints can be shifted and disambiguated (for example, see Kuroda, [1973] 2014; Hinterwimmer, 2017;, the narrator's perspective is often seen as the default case.…”

“…How to define the narrator's perspective in linguistic terms is, however, not a trivial question. First, it is obvious that the narrator is qualitatively different both from the actual "speaker" of a story as well as from characters within the story (for example, see Kuroda, [1973and Cohn, 1978). The asymmetry between narrator and character lets us assume that not every viewpoint indicator is valid for both character and (every kind of) narrator.…”

“…This has grammatical consequences in languages such as Japanese, where there is a grammatical opposition between information that belongs to the territory of the speaker and information that does not. Kuroda ([1973Kuroda ([ ], [1974Kuroda ([ ], [1979 2014), for example, has shown that some grammatical forms are used within narration only, so that "one would be led to conclude that the omniscient narrator uses a special grammar of his own" (Kuroda, [1979] 2014: 81).…”

“…Furthermore, the narrator can be actualized in different forms (for example, see Kuroda, [1973] 2014, on the "omniscient narrator"; and Bimpikou, 2020, on the different prominence status of first vs. third person narrator). Also, not every story has a narrator as an "embodied self" (Stanzel, 2008: 127ff.…”