Death on the Freeway: Imaginative resistance as narrator accommodation

We propose to analyze well-known cases of ‘imaginative resistance’ from the philosophical literature as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable,irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant ‘first person’ narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, ‘effaced’ narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two independently motivated linguistic mechanisms: accommodation of a discourse referent and ‘cautious’ updating as a model of non-cooperative information exchange.