Abstract

This book straddles the border between linguistics and philosophy to address, on a sound interdisciplinary basis, the narrative-theoretical issue of proximal vs. distal stance adoption. In languages with no grammaticalized evidential systems, the epistemological structure of discourse underlying perspectival oppositions is heavily dependent on the self-expression of language-using personae and must thereby be inferred from a well-defined set of surface markers. For that matter, the book provides an in-depth formal semantic account of tense, aspect and Aktionsart, supported by the cognitive processes inherent in eventuality-description types.