Showing papers by "Marie-Laure Ryan published in 1991"

Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typoloty of Fiction

Abstract: In recent years the semantics of possible worlds and literary theory have enjoyed a promising cross-fertilization. While philosophers have invoked the concepts of "book" and of "story" to explain what a possible world is (Adams 1979 [1974]; Plantinga 1979 [1976]), literary theorists (among them Dolezel 1976; Vaina 1977; Eco 1979; Maitre 1983; Pavel 1986) have developed a textual semantics based on the idea that the semantic domain projected by the literary text is a nonactual possible world or an alternative possible world (henceforth abbreviated as APW). This assimilation satisfies our intuition that a text of literary fiction refers to nonexisting objects located in imaginary worlds, but the question of the possibility of these worlds remains problematic, since "everything goes" in a fiction. If everything goes, there is no such thing as an impossible world, and the use of the conceptual framework of possible-worlds semantics in literary theory becomes rather superficial. To avoid this trivialization we must address the question of what makes a world possible by exploring the various types of accessibility relations through which APWS may be linked to the actual world or AW. The purpose of this paper is to develop the concept of "accessibility relation" into a system of semantic classifications which should be relevant to the question of genre.