Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An analysis of the structure of sentences found in fictional text, and the interpretation that one gives to them has led to the proposal that all fictional text is written from a perspective within the fictional world of the story. In a like manner, readers read the story from a similar perspective. The author "pretends" that he is in the story by locating an image of herself somewhere within the space-time of the story (even at times within characters of the story) and creates the sentences from that vantagepoint. The story and its sentences must contain cues so that readers can use the text to discover the perspectival sources of the sentences. They can then pretend that they are "in" the story and can read it from those perspectives. The perspective from which the sentences are read is called the "Deictic Center." This proposal is associated with ongoing research to implement a cognitive model which reads fictional text according to these principles.