Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper explores a phenomenon, metalepsis, that hasn’t been discussed in linguistics until only recently, but is important because it sheds new light on the semantics of fiction and paradoxical statements. We focus on a particular instance of metalepsis, namely the following sentence from Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval: ‘While the coach is making its way up to the hills, let us piece together the memories of the days when I often visited these parts.’ This sentence exemplifies a temporal paradox since the narrator asks the narratee to join him in doing something that had already happened. Previous analyses of metalepsis have focused on third-person examples, leading to incorrect predictions for such first-person examples. We propose a novel analysis that accounts for both first- and third-person uses, while also accounting for a potential difference in aesthetic import between the two cases.
DOI: 10.3765/trr78b56
Authors: Dag Trygve Truslew Haug, Daniel Altshuler
Institutions: University of Oslo, University of Oxford
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4407980779