The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production

The study of narrative discourse, as exemplified in the essays in this book, treats the unfolding of narrative and the expression of this unfolding narrative in words.1 The opening scene is set, characters and objects introduced, and events described, as the narrative shifts from scene to scene. In approaching this phenomenon, one may choose to examine the portioning of narrative content into discourse units (Chafe, Chapter 1), the selection of a prominent referent to take on the role of subject in a clause (Bernardo, Chapter 6), or the influence of the larger cultural context on the expression of events and evaluations (Tannen, Chapter 2). Or, one may focus on a phenomenon of narrower scope: the verbalization of characters and objects within the discourse. This is the domain of the essays that Downing and Clancy contributed to this book and of the present chapter. Though apparently narrow, the topic has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, one may consider the static aspect of nominal verbalization. The speaker is confronted by an object whose semantic substance requires expression. He must draw on his cultural knowledge and his understanding of his addressee in order to decide what is salient and hence worthy of verbalization, and he employs his semantic knowledge in the expression of the appropriate categorization. Downing deals with this facet ofthe problem. But