Factors That Affect Crossover Between Multiple Worlds Within a Narrative

Traditionally, most approaches to stylistic analysis are not related to cognitive processes by which readers are engaged and conceptualized to a particular point of view while reading a text. Against this account , emerged through 1980s and 1990s, various stylistic models for identifying categories of point of view in fiction, and this brings a cognitive perspective in analysis of narrative stylistics. Deictic shift theory is an act to demonstrate how readers are completely engaged in narratives, to a degree that they interpret events in narrative as if they were experiencing them from a position within the story world. According to Segal(1995,p15),deictic shift theory (henceforth DST) means that '' the reader often takes a cognitive attitude within the world of narrative and interprets the text from that perspective' 'and this happens as a result of deictic shifts within the narratives that change the deictic center from which the sentences of the text are interpreted. It follows that such changes in the deictic center across the course of a text will result in changes in the point of view that readers will be exposed to(Mclntyre,2006,p92).The present study aims to investigate the role of deictic shift theory as a cognitive perspective to point of view effects in the selected poem written by Seamus Heaney in his famous poem '' Mossbawn'' . The emphasis will be shifted away from narrative techniques towards theconceptual framework that tackles the cognitive processes of both reading and interpretation. However, the study will show how applying DST is an indispensable in tackling stylistic analysis to point of view which develops our understanding of the construction of viewpoints in language.The analysis has shown that the cognitive work of DST is used as a device in the poem in order to arrive at the comprehensive meaning of text. The poet uses different deictic shifts and projection of viewpoints of personal pronoun, locational, and temporal deixis and references which are interrelated between the fictional text world of the poem and the real central world of the reader. Also, it is seen that in cognitive terms there is a shift between the past and the present, a rapid back and forth shift of deictic center and field which is tackled by the reader's perspective

Milan Kunderas novel, Life Is Elsewhere, narrates the entire life of the protagonist from pre-birth to death. The author constructs a realistic world of here in contrast to a dreamlike world of elsewhere in the novel, setting up two homologous narrative worlds that finally drift into an irreconcilable separation and opposition. Cognitive narratologys focus on narrative worldmaking provides the readers with a pathway to analyze the dual narrative worlds in the text, creating double-scope stories represented by the personae of Jaromil and Xavier. The discrepancy between the two worlds runs throughout the narrative, and the relationship between the two independent yet mirroring worlds is evident from the beginning of their worldmaking. The implied distinction between here and elsewhere in Life Is Elsewhere is a metaphor for the unity of opposites in these two story worlds. The storyteller guides the interpreters reading activity through narration.

Terms like “possible worlds”, “erzählte Welten”, “fiktive Welten” are nowadays frequently used as substitutes for Gérard Genette´s term “diegesis”. What one could call “world theory” (by subsuming the fairly different attempts to think story worlds since the emergence of Possible Worlds Theory) has maintained close ties to other branches of research, especially the theory of fictionality. In posing four crucial questions that concern the narratological use of the concept “world”, the paper tries to point out new territories which further discussions about narrative worlds could expand on. In doing so, the paper also gives hints for theoretical revisions or designates areas in which a change in function of the concept “world” could proof useful or is apparently already about to emerge.

Even though there is extensive research on absorbing experiences with narrative media, an instrument able to measure different aspects of absorption in the story world of a textual narrative has yet to be developed. Such an instrument should be able to predict different evaluative responses while at the same time being sensitive to various stimulus materials, because it could help further the research into the relationships between narrative texts, absorbing experiences and entertainment outcomes. This paper develops such an instrument through a literature review, interview study, pilot study, and exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Attention, transportation, emotional engagement and mental imagery were found to be dimensions of story world absorption. The final scale is reliable, sensitive to different stimulus materials and able to predict two different evaluative responses: enjoyment and impact. It is argued that the text a reader reads determines the particular evaluative response to a story world absorption experience.

Reading time evidence for enriched composition

Focus on Authors

From One Medium to the Next: How Comic Books Create Richer Storylines

Recent research on bilingualism has shown that lexical access in visual word recognition by bilinguals is not selective with respect to language. In the present study, the authors investigated language-independent lexical access in bilinguals reading sentences, which constitutes a strong unilingual linguistic context. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performing a 2nd language (L2) lexical decision task were faster to recognize identical and nonidentical cognate words (e.g., banaan-banana) presented in isolation than control words. A second experiment replicated this effect when the same set of cognates was presented as the final words of low-constraint sentences. In a third experiment that used eyetracking, the authors showed that early target reading time measures also yield cognate facilitation but only for identical cognates. These results suggest that a sentence context may influence, but does not nullify, cross-lingual lexical interactions during early visual word recognition by bilinguals.

Recent research in sentence comprehension suggests that lexically specific information plays a key role in on-line syntactic ambiguity resolution. On the basis of an analysis of the local NP/S-ambiguity, the present study offers a corpus-based approach to sentence processing that supports this view. However, it is proposed that the relevant information used to recover the syntactic structure of an incoming string of words is not retrieved from individual verbs but from a more fine-grained level of form-meaning pairings that distinguishes different verb senses. The investigation proceeds in two steps: First, verb-general and sense-specific preferences for nominal and sentential complementation are induced from corpus data and compared using odds ratios as a measure of association. Second, correlation analyses are performed that relate the computed coeffcients of association to reading time latencies from a recent self-paced moving window experiment (Hare et al. 2003). The results corroborate the view that individual verb senses, rather than individual verbs, guide initial parsing decisions.

Recent research has provided evidence that the information provided before a story—a spoiler—may increase the enjoyment of that story, perhaps by increasing the processing fluency experienced during reading. In one experiment, we tested the reliability of these findings by closely replicating existing methods and the generality of these findings by using different stories. We also examined the role of processing fluency in the effect of spoilers by measuring reading time. Finally, we examined the influence of spoilers presented mid-story, after a reader has had a chance to get invested in the story. We found that spoilers presented before a story reduced enjoyment, whereas those presented mid-story had no discernable effect. The difference between our findings and those in the literature are discussed with respect to types of spoilers as well as potentially critical methodological factors.