17 - 18 September 2018, Workshop "Once upon a time... Semantic approaches to fiction, literature, and narrative", Groningen, the Netherlands

We seem to approach a text that we know to be a work of fiction rather differently than a newspaper article, or a conversation about the weather. An influential view in philosophy is that fictional narratives are prescriptions for the reader to imagine some fictional world, while regular assertions are proposals to update the common ground. But whatever the eventual diagnosis, the (apparent) difference between the interpretation of fiction and of non-fiction already raises interesting linguistic questions: How does a reader even know that a text is fiction? Are there linguistic clues an author may leave that mark a given text as such? And is our formal semantic toolkit, developed for dealing with assertions in every day communication, suitable and sufficient for dealing with the peculiarities of narrative fiction and literary style?

In this workshop we want to bring together linguists and philosophers interested in applying formal semantic tools to linguistic phenomena characteristic of fiction/narrative.