Deix i s in Narrative : A Cogni t ive Sc ience Perspect ive

There once was a group of researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo called the Discourse and Narrative Research Group. Contrary to what the prototypical story opening to this review suggests, this group still exists, proof of which is their publishing a book of more than 500 pages (!) on deixis in narrative, studied from the perspective of cognitive science. The book is a collection of 20 separate papers, almost all written by one or more members or former members of the group. The book's central topics are how deixis is used in narrative discourse, in particular, and how it is experienced by the reader. The study of deixis is approached from many different angles, including philosophy, theoretical and empirical linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, literary criticism, and artificial intelligence; in short, at least all the disciplines constituting cognitive science. The book is organized into four parts: Part I: Deictic theory; Part II: Deictic tracking in narrative; Part III: Subjectivity in narrative; and Part IV: Expansions of deictic theory. In Part I, Erwin M. Segal, who is the head of the research group, introduces the theoretical framework, Deictic Shift Theory, that underlies most of the research presented in the rest of the book (Chapters 1 and 3). The main idea behind this theory is that a reader of a narrative is assumed to create a mental model of the "story world," and to imagine locating himself or herself within this world. Thus, the deictic center of the reader is shifted from the real-world situation to an image of himself or herself at a location within the story world. The reader experiences and interprets the story from this deictic center, which may move as the story unfolds. The author of the narrative can manipulate the deictic center of the reader by writing the story using a certain perspective (for instance, first-person narration, or represented speech). Part I also includes studies on deixis from a philosophical approach and a literarycriticism approach, as well as an implementation of Deictic Shift Theory to analyze literary texts (Zubin and Hewitt, Chapter 6). Two other chapters (4 and 5) are devoted to the computational approach of Stuart C. Shapiro, which is based on the SNePS knowledge-representation and reasoning system. Part II contains computational theories, based on SNePS, of time and space in narrative, as well as psycholinguistic studies on the acquisition of deictic terms by children and the comprehension of spatial deictic terms by readers of narratives. Part III comprises chapters about subjective experience in fictional narrative; i.e., the ways in which authors can represent subjective thoughts of characters or make objective statements about the story world. Most of these studies are rather exploratory, in the sense that different types of narrative in different languages are analyzed. In