Title

<ballanty@hawaii.edu>

Department of Linguistics
University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Immersion in the Storyworld: Foregrounding and Backgrounding in Yapese Narrative

Zwaan's (2004) Immersed Experiencer Framework claims that the comprehension of narrative emerges from the concatenation of perceptual symbols to give rise to a vicarious experience of the narrative world. In this talk, I integrate experimental findings from a discourse processing approach with insights from the textlinguistic tradition which has focused on the analysis of properties of form and structure. 

I show that Yapese narrators press the tense-aspect system of the language into service to signal variations in narrative foregrounding and backgrounding, and that furthermore, the most highly prominent and foregrounded clauses are marked by tense-aspect combinations which most closely index the perception of real-world events. 

The majority of narrative clauses in Yapese are zero marked, which conventionally indicates that the clauses are sequential and iconic. Laboratory findings indicate that narrative events delivered in iconic order give rise to processing advantages. Two further options are available to increase the foregrounding of a clause. The first of these is the use of the marker nga, 'inceptive' which has additional semantic overtones of result and of purpose. Experimental evidence suggests that goal-satisfaction and cause-and-effect chains are typically processed more easily in narrative and it has been argued that this because such chains index the perceptual experience of real-world events. Finally, the most prominent events in Yapese narrative may be signaled by the non-present perfect ka qu. I argue that this is an instance of Fleischman's (1990) notion of "pragmatic reversal" at narrative peak. 

My analysis additionally accounts for a split between two classes of Yapese tense-aspect markers with regard to their patterning with pronouns. 

References

FLEISCHMAN, SUZANNE. 1990. Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press.

ZWAAN, ROLF A. 2004. The Immersed Experiencer: Toward an Embodied Theory of Language Comprehension. In Brian H. Ross (ed) The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory. 44. San Diego: Elsevier: 35-63.