Linguistic Foundations of Narration in Spoken and Sign Languages

Book excerpt: In recent years, the focus of linguistic research has shifted from sentence to larger units such as text and discourse and accordingly from syntax to semantics and pragmatics. This has led to the development and application of corresponding discourse semantic and pragmatic theories such as, for instance, (S)DRT, Centering Theory, Accessibility Theory, QUD, Generalized Conversational Implicatures, Super Monsters and Gesture Semantics and new empirical approaches in the framework of experimental semantics and pragmatics or corpus linguistic discourse analysis. The contributions to this collected volume build on these developments and investigate the linguistic foundations of narration from various perspectives. The contributions address topics such as speech and thought representation, free indirect speech, information structure, anaphora resolution, co-speech gestures, classifier constructions as well as role shift and constructed action. The volume provides new insights in the linguistic structures underlying narration in written, spoken, and sign languages from an experimental, developmental, historical, typological, and theoretical perspective. The contributions will appeal to theoretical linguists, sign language linguists, typologists, literary scholars, psycholinguists, and philosophers.