Phantom Sentences: Essays in linguistics and literature presented to Ann Banfield

Ann Banfield – professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley – is best known for her groundbreaking contributions to narrative theory. Working within the paradigm of generative linguistics, she argued that the language of fiction is characterized by two «unspeakable sentences», i.e., sentences that do not properly occur in the spoken language: the sentence of «pure narration» and the sentence of «represented speech and thought» (style indirect libre or erl...