Second-Person Narratives in Persian

Making a story world, narrative texts also contextualize it in the real world. Such an ontological projection, called in this article the context dependency of narrative discourse, is the topic of the present pragmatic study which examines second person pronoun as one of the most significant linguistic features of narrative texts. First a number of narratological concepts required for the pragmatics of narrative texts are discussed. Then, some specific linguistic insights about deictic expressions are studied in 2nd-person sample narratives. Based on the results of the study, five referring functions are recognized for 2nd-person pronouns particularly used in Persian to put literary fictions in their wider readerly contexts. This article, in a more explicit term, concludes that in addition to their only application ever known to linguists (i.e. addressing the participants in face to face conversations), 2nd-person pronouns are applied in Persian contemporary narratives for undermining -rather than underlining- the ontological boundaries between the real and the fictive.