The Phantasmatic "I". On Imagination-based Uses of the First-person Pronoun across Fiction and Non-fiction

Abstract

Traditional accounts regard the first-person pronoun as a special token-reflexive indexical whose referent, the utterer, is identified by the linguistic rule expressed by the term plus the context of utterance. This view falls short in accounting for all the I-uses in narrative practices, a domain broader than fiction including storytelling, pretense, direct speech reports, delayed communication, the historical present, and any other linguistic act in which the referent of the indexical is not perceptually accessible to the receiver. I propose a model for the reference of “I” based on the distinction between three functions carried out by indexicals in communication, namely, the anaphoric, perceptual, and phantasmatic functions. The referential mechanism of the phantasmatic “I”, that is, the “I” used in phantasmatic function, is understood as an instance of imagination-oriented pointing exploiting the phantasmatic context, and not the perceptual context relevant in perceptual uses of indexicals. The rule for “I” is revised in light of the perceptual vs. phantasmatic deixis distinction; the resulting rule governing the reference of the phantasmatic “I” allows for a homogeneous treatment of ‘I’-tokens in narrative practices spanning the spectrum from fiction to non-fiction.

Keywords

• First-person Pronoun
• Context
• Imagination
• Fiction
• Indexicals
• Narration