Pronoun use in metalepsis

This talk explores a phenomenon, metalepsis, that hasn’t been discussed in linguistics until only recently but is important because it sheds new light on the semantics of fiction and paradoxical statements. We focus on a particular instance of metalepsis, namely the following sentence from "Sylvie" by Gérard de Nerval: ‘While the coach is making its way up to the hills, let us piece together the memories of the days when I often visited these parts.’ This sentence exemplifies a temporal paradox since the narrator asks the narratee to join him in doing something that had already happened. Previous analyses of metalepsis have focused on third-person examples, leading to incorrect predictions for examples with first person pronouns. We propose a novel analysis that accounts for both first- and third-person uses, while also accounting for a potential difference in aesthetic import between the two cases. (Joint with Dag Haug.)