Processing narrative texts
-
Berry Claus
Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the mental representation of temporal information in narrative comprehension. Psycholinguistic findings suggest that comprehenders’ representations of described event sequences capture the narrated flow of time. However, this seems to be bound to a specific condition. Only when the events are described without temporal gaps, does the representation mimic the temporal structure of the events in the described world but not when the event description contains a forward time shift. The chapter first gives an overview on recent research on this issue. Then, two novel experiments are reported that address the issue whether and how the temporal information of a time shift matters in narrative comprehension.
Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the mental representation of temporal information in narrative comprehension. Psycholinguistic findings suggest that comprehenders’ representations of described event sequences capture the narrated flow of time. However, this seems to be bound to a specific condition. Only when the events are described without temporal gaps, does the representation mimic the temporal structure of the events in the described world but not when the event description contains a forward time shift. The chapter first gives an overview on recent research on this issue. Then, two novel experiments are reported that address the issue whether and how the temporal information of a time shift matters in narrative comprehension.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Introduction 1
- Processing narrative texts 17
- Through narrative planning towards the preverbal message 45
- Bridges between events 77
- The semantics of French continuative rises in SDRT 109
- Coherence structure and lexical cohesion in expository and persuasive texts 137
- Complex connectives in German 165
- Differential properties of three discourse connectives in Turkish 183
- Appositive relative clauses and their competing allostructures in English 207
- Index 227
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Introduction 1
- Processing narrative texts 17
- Through narrative planning towards the preverbal message 45
- Bridges between events 77
- The semantics of French continuative rises in SDRT 109
- Coherence structure and lexical cohesion in expository and persuasive texts 137
- Complex connectives in German 165
- Differential properties of three discourse connectives in Turkish 183
- Appositive relative clauses and their competing allostructures in English 207
- Index 227
