Narrative comprehension
Subtitle: a discourse perspective
By: Catherine Emmott.
Publisher: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Oxford [England]; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
Subjects: Discourse analysis -- Psychological aspects.; Discourse analysis, Narrative.; Comprehension.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [276]-310) and indexes.
Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.)