Fiction without Fictional Characters: An Anti-Realist Account
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Jansan Favazzo
Abstract
This paper outlines a semantic analysis of fictional discourse alternative both to fictional realism and fictional fictionalism. The core idea is that competent speakers use fictional proper names in order to talk about certain pluralities of fictional depiction tokens rather than exotic entities such as Anna Karenina and Clarissa Dalloway. In order to corroborate this intuition, I propose an account of fictional proper names based on a Goodmanian notion of secondary extension and a model for the theory built upon negative free logic and plural quantification. Such a model aims to offer an anti-realist translation for three classes of problematic data: paratextual sentences, metatextual sentences, and negative existentials.
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See Orilia (2010: 79).
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