The key to *de dicto* v *de re* is modality: for example, does 'yesterday'
or 'definitely' refer to when or whether I said something or when or to what
extent it was true? There's a similar effect with probability: a 50% chance
of something bad happening doesn't, for example, mean a 100% of something
50% less bad.
UK plumbers make the distinction between the two all too clear. Water is
dripping through your ceiling so you phone the plumber. 'He should be with
you in an hour.' Ho hum. You interpret this *de dicto*, as a qualified
assurance that the plumber is going to come. So an hour later, you phone
again: 'Any news about that plumber?' 'Yes, he should be with you now,' a
*de re* interpretation: after the elapse of one hour there now exists a sort
of qualified presence (a state of I-should-be-thereness) on the plumber's
part; but he still hasn't shown his face.
As to the question,
<snip>
Does one apply more to fiction and the other more to poetry?
<snip>
conventions such as (in English) using the past tense are certainly one way,
by making the _saying_ modal, of rendering what is narrated more immune to
disbelief: these events are not true any more (or not necessarily true),
only *once upon a time*. And that allows for a certain coexistence between
reader (or writer) and what is in the text. When Faulkner writes, 'My mother
is a fish' in *As I Lay Dying* he is creating a problem that gets much worse
in poetry, where the certainty with which things are said and the certainty
with which disparates are yoked together seem to grow in inverse proportion
to the certainty with which the underlying propositions may be read.
Incidentally members of the UK Martian school, just to take a passing swipe,
seem to me to domesticate that rather threatening effect, to say (in effect)
I am looking at reality with this funny pair of glasses rather than, say,
allowing a new reality much more weird (and much more weirdly present) than
they (or the reader) might have expected it to be.
CW
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'What's the point of having a language that everybody knows?'
(Gypsy inhabitant of Barbaraville)
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