Title:
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Reading between the lines : building a Comprehensive model of participant reference in real narrative
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This thesis looks at the mental stores created in reading
real, full, narratives. It concentrates on how we utilise these
stores when interpreting pronouns and other reference items.
Initially we work within a traditional anaphoric framework,
seeing how far this can account for how a reader establishes a
link between pronoun and antecedent in real text. Character
constructs, equivalent to Brown and Yule's mental
representations, are later built into the model and the role of
the antecedent is reconsidered.
It is then argued that to understand reference in narrative we
need to consider how narrative is structured. This leads us to
postulate the frame, a contextual construct which monitors which
characters are together in which place at what time. Contextual
information is rarely specified fully in any one sentence but an
awareness of it is essential for an understanding of the action.
We consider how we may modify frames, switch from one frame to
another and reactivate earlier frames.
The frame is first used to explain examples where there is no
antecedent in the near environment of a pronoun. It is then built
into a model of reference which is anticipatory rather than
anaphoric.
The frame also leads us to consider the nature of character
constructs and to postulate narrative enactors. Finally we draw a
distinction between framed text and unframed text, arguing that
this distinction is necessary to understand how a reader
interprets reference items in real narrative examples.
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