Abstract
AbstractThis article presents a Mental Space model for analyzing linguistic patterns in news narratives. The model was applied in a corpus study categorizing various linguistic markers of viewpoint transfers between the mental spaces that readers must conceptualize while processing news narratives: a Reality Space representing the journalist and reader’s projectedhere-and-nowviewpoint; a News Narrative Space representing the newsworthy events from athere-and-thenviewpoint; and an Intermediate Space representing the information of the news actors provided from a temporal viewpointin-betweenthe newsworthy events and the present. Viewpoint transfers and their markers were examined in a corpus of 100 Dutch crime news narratives published over a period of fifty years. The results reveal clear patterns, which indicate that both linguistic structures and narrative-based as well as genre-based inferences play a role in the processing of news narratives. The results furthermore clarify how these narratives have been gradually crystallizing into a genre over the past decades. These findings elucidate the complex yet fluent process of conceptually moving between mental spaces, thus advancing our understanding of the relation between the linguistic and the cognitive representation of narrative discourse.
Highlights
A considerable proportion of human communication takes place in narrative formats (Bruner 1991)
The model was applied in a corpus study categorizing various linguistic markers of viewpoint transfers between the mental spaces that readers must conceptualize while processing news narratives: a Reality Space representing the journalist and reader’s projected here-and- viewpoint; a News Narrative Space representing the newsworthy events from a there-and- viewpoint; and an Intermediate Space representing the information of the news actors provided from a temporal viewpoint in-between the newsworthy events and the present
More than half of the sentences were anchored in the News Narrative Space; a third was anchored in the Intermediate Space; and about one eighth was anchored in the Reality Space
Summary
A considerable proportion of human communication takes place in narrative formats (Bruner 1991). Kobie van Krieken and José Sanders moving through time and space while experiencing one or more events. Processing such narratives requires readers to construct a mental model of the story world in which these aspects – characters, time, space, events – are represented (Zwaan and Radvansky 1998). This model can be conceptualized as a network of mental spaces “through which we move as discourse unfolds” (Sweetser and Fauconnier 1996: 11). Mental space networks typically consist of multiple interconnected spaces, each filled with information that is bound to a specific subject and that may be hypothetical, counterfactual, or contrastive with information anchored in other spaces; all spaces are at least related to each other by their connection to the “ground” of commonly shared knowledge about the world and the discourse context (Sweetser and Fauconnier 1996; Oakley and Coulson 2008)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
