Linguistic perspective in short news stories *

Textual perspective is the introduction of a subjective viewpoint that restricts the validity of the presented information to a particular person in the discourse. Strong perspective is accomplished through quotation and focalization, that is, presentation of narrative material through a character’s discourse or consciousness. Subtle perspective that introduces an implicit viewpoint, is accomplished by a variety of linguistic features such as tense shifts and marked choices of referring expressions. The effect of the two kinds of perspective on readers’ appreciation of news texts and stories was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 1, news text and story versions with subtle and strong perspective were presented along with neutralized versions. Focalization made news text versions unacceptable, but was unproblematic in story versions, Text versions with focalization were judged as more subjective, more suspenseful, and livelier than versions without perspective. The failure of subtle perspective alone to show reliable effects in this experiment may have been due to the presence of the unacceptable focalized versions. Those versions were excluded from Experiment 2, where versions with subtle perspective were compared to neutralized versions. This restricted comparison yielded a positive effect of subtle perspective on acceptability and affective judgments.