Deixis In Narrative

This volume describes the theoretical and empirical results of a seven year collaborative effort of cognitive scientists to develop a computational model for narrative understanding. Disciplines represented include artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, communicative disorders, education, English, geography, linguistics, and philosophy. The book argues for an organized representational system -- a Deictic Center (DC) -- which is constructed by readers from language in a text combined with their world knowledge. As readers approach a new text they need to gather and maintain information about who the participants are and where and when the events take place. This information plays a central role in understanding the narrative. The editors claim that readers maintain this information without explicit textual reminders by including it in their mental model of the story world. Because of the centrality of the temporal, spatial, and character information in narratives, they developed their notion of a DC as a crucial part of the reader's mental model of the narrative. The events that carry the temporal and spatial core of the narrative are linguistically and conceptually constrained according to certain principles that can be relatively well defined. A narrative obviously unfolds one word, or one sentence, at a time. This volume suggests that cognitively a narrative usually unfolds one place and time at a time. This spatio-temporal location functions as part of the DC of the narrative. It is the "here" and "now" of the reader's "mind's eye" in the world of the story. Organized into seven parts, this book describes the goal of the cognitive science project resulting in this volume, the methodological approaches taken, and the history of the collaborative effort. It provides a historical and theoretical background underlying the DC theory, including discussions of deixis in language and the nature of fiction. It goes on to outline the computational framework and how it is used to represent deixis in narrative, and details the linguistic devices implicated in the DC theory. Other subjects covered include: crosslinguistic indicators of subjectivity, psychological investigations of the use of deixis by children and adults as they process narratives, conversation, direction giving, implications for emerging literacy, and a narrator's experience in writing a short story.

This volume presents some new work on deixis and, in particular, deixis in narrative and literature. Deixis has long held fascination for both philosophers and linguists alike, and increasingly it is seen as a fundamental element of discourse in works of a more literary-linguistic or stylistic nature. The aim of this book has been to gather and present material on deixis which is often referred to but has hitherto not received the space it warrants. The collection will be of interest to anyone working in linguistics and literary studies. There are essays on deictic processing, non-egocentricity, deictic worlds and the deictic categories. The more literary material focuses on modernist aesthetics, the poetic deictic persona, pronouns and narrative voice, and the problematic deixis of Keats's Odes.

This volume describes the theoretical and empirical results of a seven year collaborative effort of cognitive scientists to develop a computational model for narrative understanding. Disciplines represented include artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, communicative disorders, education, English, geography, linguistics, and philosophy. The book argues for an organized representational system -- a Deictic Center (DC) -- which is constructed by readers from language in a text combined with their world knowledge. As readers approach a new text they need to gather and maintain information about who the participants are and where and when the events take place. This information plays a central role in understanding the narrative. The editors claim that readers maintain this information without explicit textual reminders by including it in their mental model of the story world. Because of the centrality of the temporal, spatial, and character information in narratives, they developed their notion of a DC as a crucial part of the reader's mental model of the narrative. The events that carry the temporal and spatial core of the narrative are linguistically and conceptually constrained according to certain principles that can be relatively well defined. A narrative obviously unfolds one word, or one sentence, at a time. This volume suggests that cognitively a narrative usually unfolds one place and time at a time. This spatio-temporal location functions as part of the DC of the narrative. It is the "here" and "now" of the reader's "mind's eye" in the world of the story. Organized into seven parts, this book describes the goal of the cognitive science project resulting in this volume, the methodological approaches taken, and the history of the collaborative effort. It provides a historical and theoretical background underlying the DC theory, including discussions of deixis in language and the nature of fiction. It goes on to outline the computational framework and how it is used to represent deixis in narrative, and details the linguistic devices implicated in the DC theory. Other subjects covered include: crosslinguistic indicators of subjectivity, psychological investigations of the use of deixis by children and adults as they process narratives, conversation, direction giving, implications for emerging literacy, and a narrator's experience in writing a short story.

In a diary-like stream of image, impression, expression and experience, this book catalogues the mundane agony of the poor Irish child confronted at every turn with abundant opportunities for a sensational, scandalous and steadfast descent into eternal fire and damnation.

This book engages with deictics ('pointing' words like here/there, this/that) of space. It focuses on texts by Donne, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Wroth in particular, relating their forms of deixis to cultural and generic developments; but it also suggests parallels with both iconic and neglected texts from a range of later historical periods.

In the dynamic interchange between authors, texts, and readers that occurs during the reading process, readers are stimulated by the author to create complex inner representations of the reality presented in a text. The cognitive linguistic approach outlined in the first part of Inner Worlds offers a set of analytical tools that can be instructively applied to the book of Jonah to examine how the text presents its own reality to the reader. Retranslated with an eye to the distinct nuances in the Hebrew, the text of Jonah reveals a range of suggestive dynamic patterns that show the irony of Jonah’s limited perspectives on his misfortunes compared with the transcendent perspective of a gracious God.

Featuring a major synthesis and critique of interdisciplinary narrative theory, Story Logic marks a watershed moment in the study of narrative. David Herman argues that narrativeøis simultaneously a cognitive style, a discourse genre, and a resource for writing. Because stories are strategies that help humans make sense of their world, narratives not only have a logic but also are a logic in their own right, providing an irreplaceable resource for structuring and comprehending experience. Story Logic brings together and pointedly examines key concepts of narrative in literary criticism, linguistics, and cognitive science, supplementing them with a battery of additional concepts that enable many different kinds of narratives to be analyzed and understood. By thoroughly tracing and synthesizing the development of different strands of narrative theory and provocatively critiquing what narratives are and how they work, Story Logic provides a powerful interpretive tool kit that broadens the applicability of narrative theory to more complex forms of stories, however and wherever they appear. Story Logic offers a fresh and incisive way to appreciate more fully the power and significance of narratives.