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.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

The first handbook to survey and expand the burgeoning field of corpus pragmatics, the intersection of pragmatics and corpus linguistics.

Despite the current explosion of interest in cognitive linguistics, there has so far been relatively little research by cognitive linguists on narrative comprehension. Catherine Emmott draws on insights from discourse analysis and artificial intelligence to present a detailed model of how readers build, maintain, and use mental representations of fictional contexts, and how they keep track of characters and contexts within a complex, changing fictional world. The study focuses on anaphoric pronouns in narratives, assessing the accumulated knowledge required for readers to interpret these key grammatical items. The work has implications for linguistic theory since it questions several long-held assumptions about anaphora, arguing for a 'levels of consciousness' model for the processing of referring expressions.

Explains the principles which underlie the structure and appropriate use of sentence in a language.

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.