Linguistic Foundations of Narration in Spoken and Sign Languages (Linguistics Today)

Hardcover, xii + 311 pages, NOT ex-library. Light handling wear, book is clean and bright with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Issued without a dust jacket. -- This scholarly collection explores the structural similarities and differences in how stories are told across various modalities. It provides a cross-linguistic analysis of narrative techniques in both vocal and signed communication. The volume investigates the "grammar of storytelling," focusing on how narrators manage time, perspective, and character representation. Multimodal Perspective: It challenges the idea that narration is purely a "spoken" or "written" phenomenon by comparing it directly with Sign Languages (such as German Sign Language, DGS). Point of View and "Role Shift": A major focus is on perspective-taking. In sign languages, this often involves "role shift" (body leaning or eye-gaze changes), which the authors compare to "free indirect discourse" in spoken languages. Tense and Aspect: The chapters analyse how different languages use specific grammatical markers to signal the beginning, middle, and end of a story, and how "narrative time" is constructed. Referential Management: It examines how storytellers keep track of characters (referents) throughout a long narrative without confusing the listener or viewer. The book is highly relevant for researchers in Formal Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Deaf Studies. Journals like Linguist List have noted that the study is pioneering for its "modality-independent" view of narration. Markus Steinbach is a leading professor of German Linguistics at the University of Göttingen and a world-renowned expert on sign language grammar. Annika Hübl is a specialist in the linguistics of narration and discourse.…