Spatial reference in narrative domains

Abstract

This article examines spatial reference in natural-language narratives, highlighting issues central to what has emerged as a vital field of cross-disciplinary research - namely, the field of narrative analysis. Based on a corpus of seventeen ghost stories told by residents of Robeson and Graham Counties, North Carolina, during sociolinguistic interviews designed to gather information about their dialects, the article focuses on how tales of the supernatural provide an ideal laboratory for studying referential processes in narrative. The challenge of tracking the movements of ghostly agents through space is no less demanding than that of establishing reference to such agents to begin with. Thus not just quaint tales about rural areas with a haunted past, the stories under examination provide an important test case for studying how narratives enable 'cognitive mapping', the process by which things and events are mentally modeled as being located somewhere in the world.

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