Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective - Hardcover

Emmott, Catherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198236492 ISBN 13: 9780198236498

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 1997

Synopsis

Despite the current explosion of interest in cognitive linguistics, there has so far been relatively little research by cognitive linguists on narrative comprehension. 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 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.

The book begins with a summary of current issues in text-processing theory and a discussion of the methodological importance of recognizing the hierarchical structure of discourse. The core of the book explores the significance of contextual monitoring in narrative comprehension and looks particularly at the cognitive demands placed on readers by flashbacks. Later chapters examine the implications of contextual monitoring for reference theory and for a literary-linguistic model of narrative text types. The study focuses on anaphoric pronouns in narratives, assessing the accumulated knowledge required for readers to interpret these key grammatical items.

About this title

Review

A major advance in narrative analysis ... the book will be an invaluable resource for discourse analysis, cognitive scientists, and narrative theorists alike. (David Herman, Language)

... Emmott's book makes an important contribution to the study of how readers understand narrative texts. Her view of the reading process as the dynamic construction and updating of mental representations is an advance over static constructions of text representation. Her focus on narrative discourse and real texts is an advance over the study of processing of sentence parts in isolation or artificial laboratory texts./ Tom Trabasso, Dept of Psychology, The University of Chicago, in Journal of Pragmatics, vol 30, 1998.

a new contribution to the study of narrative which makes an explicit attempt to join some of these traditions on a new middle ground, the one of discourse./ I ... can heartily recommend it to researchers from both traditions, Gerard Steen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, Language and Literature, 1999, Vol 8, no1

About the Author

Catherine Emmott is at University of Glasgow.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198236492
• ISBN 13: 9780198236498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336