Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805814639 ISBN 13: 9780805814637

Publisher: Psychology Press, 1995

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

The book is well-organized, and does not suffer from incoherence....this is accomplished, on the one hand, by the editors, who have written an instructive preface in which they glue the chapters together, and, on the other hand, by the authors, who have taken much effort to explain why their work fits into this particular volume. The latter becomes clear, for instance, by frequently occurring references to work by the other authors....the chapters provide much insight into how narrative works, especially in ways that an author can lead readers through the story world, in terms of space, time, and the experience of subjectivity.
—Computational Linguistics

The book is a valuable contribution the understanding of deixis and narratives. There is no doubt that it is of interest to linguists interested in discourse analysis.
—The Phonetician

About this edition

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0805814639
• ISBN 13: 9780805814637
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 542
• Editor: Duchan Judith F., Bruder Gail A., Hewitt Lynne E.