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Part of
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

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

| University of Huddersfield
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.
Keywords: corpus, dialect, English, frog stories, Spanish, spoken narrative, temporality, tense, Text World Theory
Published online: 31 March 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.262.10lug
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