Cover not available

In:Exploring Discourse Strategies in Social and Cognitive Interaction: Multimodal and cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Manuela Romano and M. Dolores Porto
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 262] 2016
► pp. 245–272

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

A text-world account of temporal world-building strategies in Spanish and English

 | University of Huddersfield
Published online: 31 March 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.262.10lug
Text World Theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007) is a cognitive stylistic model that aims to describe how discourse participants create a mental representation of language in use. First designed for the analysis of individual texts, this chapter demonstrates how it can also be used in the cross-linguistic analysis of narrative strategies. This chapter is based on a wider research project which applied Text World Theory to a comparable corpus of ‘frog story’ narratives revealing differences between the ways in which Spanish and English speakers construct the ‘same’ narrative text-world. The focus here is on the narrators’ temporal world-­building strategies only, as choices in tense were fundamental in laying the foundations for other world-building strategies. The results reveal interesting cross-­linguistic and dialectal differences in temporal world-building strategies and point to uses of tenses for non-temporal means.
References (82)
References
Anthony, Laurence. 2004. “AntConc: A Learner and Classroom Friendly, Multi-Platform Corpus Analysis Toolkit.” Paper presented at IWLeL: An Interactive Workshop on Language e-Learning.
Aske, Jon. 1989. “Path Predicates in English and Spanish: A Closer Look.” Paper presented at Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Bamberg, Michael. 1985. Form and Function in the Construction of Narratives: Developmental Perspectives. Berkeley, CA.: University of California. Unpublished PhD thesis.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bennett-Kastor, Tina. 2002. “The ‘Frog-Story’ Narratives of Irish-English Bilinguals.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 5: 131–146. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Berman, Ruth A. and Dan I. Slobin. 1994. Relating Events in Narrative: A Cross-Linguistic Developmental Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bernárdez, Enrique. 2005. “Social Cognition: Variation, Language, and Culture in a Cognitive Linguistic Typology.” In Cognitive Linguistics: Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction, ed. by M.S. Peña Cervel and F.J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, 191–224. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 1993. “Representativeness in Corpus Design.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 8: 243–257. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
CHILDES. 2015. Child Language Data Exchange System. [URL]. Last accessed 23/09/2015.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cook, Guy. 1994. Discourse and Literature: The Interplay of Form and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cruickshank, Tracy and Ernestine Lahey. 2010. “Building the Stages of Drama: Towards a Text World Theory Account of Dramatic Play-Texts.” Journal of Literary Semantics 39: 67–91. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara. 2008. “The Text and the Story.” In Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction, ed. by T. Oakley and A. Hougaard, 51–78. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Beaugrande, Robert-Alain. 1980. Text, Discourse, and Process. Advances in Discourse Processes. Vol. IV. ed. by R.O. Freedle. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Beaugrande, Robert-Alain and Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler. 1981. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Emmott, Catherine. 1997. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1994. “Frames of Reference: Contextual Monitoring and Narrative Discourse.” In Advances in Written Text Analysis, ed. by M. Coulthard, 157–166. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1992. “Splitting the Referent: An Introduction to Narrative Enactors.” In Advances in Systemic Linguistics: Recent Theory and Practice, ed. by M. Davies, M. Coulthard and L. Ravelli, 221–228. London: Pinter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Giles. 1994. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. New York: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles. 1985. “Frames and the Semantics of Understanding.” Quaderni de Semantica 6: 222–254.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1982. “Frame Semantics.” In Linguistics in the Morning Calm. ed. by The Linguistic Society of America, 111–137. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Company.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1977. “Scenes-and-Frames Semantics.” In Linguistic Structures Processing, ed. by A. Zampolli, 55–82. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London & New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gavins, Joanna. 2013. Reading the Absurd. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. “(Re)Thinking Modality: A Text-World Perspective.” Journal of Literary Semantics 34: 79–93. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2003. “‘Too Much Blague?’: An Exploration of the Text-Worlds of Donald Barthelme’s Snow White.” In Cognitive Poetics in Practice. ed. by J. Gavins and G. Steen, 129–143. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001. Text World Theory: A Critical Exposition and Development in Relation to Absurd Prose Fiction. Sheffield Hallam University. Unpublished PhD thesis.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2000. “Absurd Tricks with Bicycles Frames in the Text World of ‘the Third Policeman’.” Nottingham Linguistic Circular 15: 17–33.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giovanelli, Marcello. 2013. Text World Theory and Keats’ Poetry: The Cognitive Poetics of Desire, Dreams and Nightmares. Advances in Stylistics. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gutiérrez Araus, María Luz. 1995. Formas temporales del pasado en indicativo. Madrid: Arco Libros.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harris, Martin. 1982. “The ‘Past Simple’ and the ‘Present Perfect’ in Romance.” In Studies in the Romance Verb, ed. by Nigel Vincent and Martin Harris, 42–70. London & Canberra: Croom Helm.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hidalgo Downing, Laura. 2003. “Text World Creation in Advertising Discourse.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 13: 67–88.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002. “Alice in Pragmaticland: Reference, Deixis, and the Delimitation of Text Worlds in Lewis Carol’s Alice Books.” Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada en Comunicación 2.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2000. Negation, Text Worlds and Discourse: The Pragmatics of Fiction. Connecticut: Ablex Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne and Nicholas Smith. 2009. “The Present Perfect in British and American English: HasThere Been Any Change, Recently?” International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English 33.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Institute of Language and Communication (ISK). Visual Interactive Syntax Learning (VISL). [URL]. University of Southern Denmark.
Jakobson, Roman. 2000. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by L. Venuti, 113–118. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kahle, David J., Anoop Kumar, and Ranjani Saigal. 2003. “Visual Understanding Environment.” Paper presented at Syllabus Conference. Cambridge, MA. 8th–10th December.
Kany, Charles E. 1969. Sintaxis hispanoamericana. Madrid: Grecos.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kumar, Anoop and N. Schwertner. 2008. “Visual Understanding Environment.” Paper presented at Third International Conference on Open Repositories 2008. Southampton, UK. 1st–4th April 2008.
Kumar, Anoop and Ranjani Saigal. 2005. “Visual Understanding Environment.” Paper presented at Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Denver, Colorado.
Kumar, Anoop and David Kahle. 2006. “VUE: A Concept Mapping Tool for Digital Content.” Paper presented at Concept Maps: Theory, Methodology, Technology: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Concept Mapping. San José, Costa Rica. 2006.
Labov, William. 1972. “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax.” In Language in the Inner City, ed. by W. Labov, 354–396. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lahey, Ernestine. 2006. “(Re)Thinking World-Building: Locating the Text-Worlds of Canadian Lyric Poetry.” Journal of Literary Semantics 35: 145–164. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 1968. Counterparts, or the Problems of Reference in Transformational Grammar. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lewis, David. 1973. “Possible Worlds”. In Counterfactuals, 84–91. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1968. “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic.” Journal of Philosophy 65: 113–126. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lugea, Jane. forthcoming. World-building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives. London: Bloomsbury.
. 2013. “Embedded Dialogue and Dreams: The Worlds and Accessibility Relations of Inception.” Language and Literature 22: 133–153. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. 3rd Edition. Vol. 2: The Database. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mair, Christian and Geoffrey Leech. 2006. “Current Changes in English Syntax.” In The Handbook of English Linguistics, ed by Bas Aarts and April McMahon, 318–342. Oxford: 
Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mayer, Mercer. 2003. Frog, Where are You? New York: Dial Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meyer, Charles F. 2002. English Corpus Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oakley, Todd and Anders Hougaard. 2008. Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Otaola Olano, Concepción. 2006. Análisis lingüístico del discurso: la lingüística enunciativa. 
Madrid: Ediciones Académicas.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rescher, Nicholas. 1979. “The Ontology of the Possible.” In The Possible and the Actual, ed. by Michael J. Loux, 166–181. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reyes, Graciela. 1990. “Valores estilísticos del imperfecto.” Revista de Filología Española 70: 45–70. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rojo, Guillermo and Alexandre Veiga. 1999. “El tiempo verbal: los tiempos simples.” In Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, ed. by Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Romano, Manuela. 2014. “Evaluation in Emotion Discourse.” In Evaluation in Context, ed. by Geoff Thompson and Laura Alba, 367–386. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (Pragmatics & Beyond Series). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991a. “Possible Worlds and Accessibility Relations: A Semantic Typology of Fiction.” Poetics Today 12: 553–576. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1991b. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schank, Roger C. and Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1981. “Tense Variation in Narrative.” Language 57: 45–62. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Segal, Erwin. 1995. “Narrative Comprehension and the Role of Deictic Shift Theory.” In Deixis in Narrative, ed. by Judith Duchan, Gail Bruder and Lynne Hewitt, 3–17. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Semino, Elena. 2010. “Text Worlds in Poetry.” In Contemporary Stylistics, ed. by Marina 
Lambrou and Peter Stockwell, 116–132. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1997. Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts. London & New York: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 1983. “Tense and Aspect in Oral Spanish Narrative: Context and Meaning.” Language 59: 760–780. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Slobin, Dan I. 2004. “The Many Ways to Search for a Frog: Linguistic Typology and the Expression of Motion Events.” In Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives. Vol. 2, ed. by Sven Strömqvist and Ludo Verhoeven, 219–257. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1996. “Two Ways to Travel: Verbs of Motion in English and Spanish.” In Grammatical Constructions: Their Form and Meaning, ed. by Masayoshi Shibatani and Sandra A. Thompson, 195–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Strevens, Peter. 1972. British and American English. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Strömqvist, Sven and Ludo Verhoeven (eds.). 2004. Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives. Vol. 2. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah. 1979. “What is in a Frame? Surface Evidence for Underlying Expectations.” In New Directions in Discourse Processing, ed. by Roy O. Feedle, 137–181. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. and Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York & London: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Werth, Paul. 1999. Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995a. “How to Build a World (in a Lot Less that Six Days, and using Only what’s in Your Head).” In New Essays on Deixis: Discourse, Narrative, Literature, ed. by Keith Green, 49–80. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995b. “‘World enough, and Time’: Deictic Space and the Interpretation of Prose.” In Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context, ed. by Peter Verdonk and Jean Jacques Weber, 181–205. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1994. “Extended Metaphor: A Text-World Account.” Language and Literature 3: 79–103.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1992. “Support Your Localist Sheriff: Localist Grammar and Deictic Space.” Linguistica Antverpiensia XXVI: 237–269.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1990. “Towards a More Human Linguistics.” Unpublished inaugural lecture given at University of Amsterdam. Held in the Text World Theory special collection. University of Sheffield.
. 1981. “Tense, Modality and Possible Worlds.” Rapport des Activités de l’Institut de Phonetique 16: 17–30.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Lugea, Jane & Brian Walker
2023. Point of View. In Stylistics, ► pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Lugea, Jane & Brian Walker
2023. Worlds. In Stylistics, ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo
Lugea, Jane
2017. The year’s work in stylistics 2016. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 26:4 ► pp. 340 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue