Reporting, telling, and showing dreams

Bibliographic Data

ID17560225
AuthorsEmar Maier (0000-0002-3179-2923, University of Groningen, corresponding author)
Year2026
Volume49
Issue2
Pages279-304
Publication date2026-03-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistics and Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0165-0157 • E-ISSN: 1573-0549
PublisherSpringer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1007/s10988-026-09454-2
OpenAlexW7141019232
LanguageEN
References cited23

Dreams are not real, so when we recount them we prefix an intensional operator like ‘I dreamed that ...’. Linguists will analyze this construction in terms of clausal complementation syntax and possible worlds semantics. But talking about a dream is often more like telling a story, with a potentially complex discourse structure (involving propositional discourse units connected by coherence relations like Narration , Background , and Explanation ) that is hard to fit inside a single syntactically embedded that -clause (or a sequence of independently embedded clauses). I show how we can analyze actual, complex dream report stories using a formal discourse semantics framework. I then explore how to extend this discourse framework to visual dream reporting, like in movies and comics, where it’s not immediately clear that we even have any intensional operators or embeddings to begin with

Dream · Prefix · Syntax · Categorization, perception, and language · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation