Abstract The issue of dual voice or perspective, central to a conceptualization of FID, is highly controversial in the literature. An explicit formulation of what is involved semantically might clarify the grounds of dispute. While Doron (1991) has ad- dressed the question from within situational semantics, the present article furnish- es evidence of the dual voice associated with FID from the point of view of mod- el-theoretic semantics and possible world semantics. 1. Introduction This article proposes an account within a framework of model-theoretic seman- tics, a type of truth-conditional semantics, of the dual voice or perspective asso- ciated with free indirect discourse (FID), a discourse mode used especially in lit- erary narrative prose for the representation of verbal events, and of verbal or non-verbal mental events. 1 This issue, which is closely related with the conceptu- alization of FID (see McHale 1978; Oltean 1993), implies a referential side, since, if FID is not single-voiced, if it also undergoes a marking for the narrator in addition to a marking for the character, then it is about two worlds: a world compatible, e.g., with what the character says, thinks, imagines, etc. (see below), and a world where what the narrator says is actualized. While this topic has been debated in the literature, except for Edit Doron (1991) the “dual voice position” has not received an explicit formulation. Now the present article proposes a for- mulation of this aspect from the point of view of model-theoretic semantics, which has possible world semantics as an ingredient. As compared to other modes of speech or thought representation, FID dis- plays a “blended” nature (Kuno 1986), preserving the original syntax of direct discourse (DD) (it is “free,” showing signs of syntactic autonomy, as illustrated in [1] by the subject/auxiliary-verb inversion), but being also constrained by person and tense agreement like indirect discourse (ID) (past-tense verb forms, On the bivocal nature of free indirect discourse S ¸TEFAN OLTEAN JLS 32 (2003), 167–176 0341–7638/03/032– 167 © Walter de Gruyter Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries Authenticated Download Date | 5/24/15 11:43 PM