To be an actor or to be an observer? A semiotic typology of narrator roles in written discourse

Using a semiotic approach, the article proposes a typology of roles available to the narrator of non-fictional texts. By focusing on the semantic category of 'distance' versus 'immersion', the article demonstrates how the writer's style creates a narrator-image and 'colors' the text, thereby guiding audience response. In contrast to the pragmatic-rhetorical approach, commonly used to analyze text-reader communication, the article concentrates on the relations between the writer and the text, and provides the groundwork for a meta-language that describes the resources writers can use to project an image or 'persona' favorable to their message. The four roles identified in the typology, observer, actor, witness, and judge, reflect the different attitudes that a narrator may adopt in relation to the information s/he presents.