Description
Book SynopsisThe Logic of Narratives is a linguistic study of narrative discourse that contextualizes the ‘logical’ rather than the ‘stylistic’ aspect of narratives within the range of current issues in the interdisciplinary study of narratives being conducted in linguistics, philosophy, literature, cognitive science, and Artificial Intelligence. The book quantitatively analyzes naturally occurring narratives randomly selected from the British National Corpus (BNC) as well as James Joyce’s (1882-1941) The Dead (1914) and Fredrik Backman’s (1981-) A Man Called Ove (2012). Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) formalization (Kamp and Reyle, 1993) is employed and enriched with the representations and interpretations of perspective/point of view, genre differences, coherence relations, and episodes, which are called in the book Perspectival DRT (PDRT).
Table of ContentsList of Figures and Tables Part 1 Foundations 1 Introduction 1 Why the “Logic” of Narratives? 2 An Overview of the Book 2 Narrative Structure 1 Defining Narratives 2 The Temporal Interpretation of Narratives 3 Coherence 3 The Theoretical Toolkit 1 Dynamic Semantics 2 Discourse Representation Theory 3 Perspectival DRT Part 2 Timeline 4 Tense and Aspect 1 Tense in Narratives 2 Narrative Progression and Aspect 3 A PDRT Analysis of Tense and Aspect 5 The Pluperfect 1 Background 2 A Corpus Study of the Pluperfect in Narratives 3 A PDRT Analysis of the Pluperfect 6 The Progressive 1 Background 2 A Corpus Study of the Progressive in Narratives 3 A PDRT Analysis of the Progressive 7 Temporal Adverb Now 1 Background 2 A Corpus Study of Now 3 A PDRT Analysis of Now Part 3 Character 8 Free Indirect Discourse 1 Background 2 An Empirical Study of FID 3 A PDRT Analysis for FID 9 Indexicals 1 Background 2 An Empirical Study 3 A PDRT Analysis of Indexicals 10 Definite NP s 1 Background 2 An Empirical Study 3 A DRT Analysis of Definites 11 Expressives 1 Background 2 An Empirical Study of Expressives 3 A PDRT Analysis of Expressives 12 Conclusion 1 Summary 2 Linguistic Study of Narratives and Its Implications Appendix: Episode Structure of The Dead References Index
