Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and WritingWallace Chafe demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on close analyses of conversational speech as well as written fiction and nonfiction, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination. Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many linguistic phenomena, such as pronouns, tense, clause structure, and intonation, as well as stylistic usages, such as the historical present and the free indirect style. While the book focuses on English, there are also discussions of the North American Indian language Seneca and the music of Mozart and of the Seneca people. This work offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language and consciousness that will interest linguists, psychologists, literary scholars, computer scientists, anthropologists, and philosophers. |
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accent accessible activation cost active consciousness Big Two-Hearted River Chafe clause coherent conscious experience context conversational language creaky voice David Merrick deictic deixis direct discourse displaced immediacy displaced mode distal distinction English environment evaluations event evidence example expressed extroverted consciousness fact fiction first-person focus full noun function Givón historical present idea constraint identifiability illustrated imagining immediate mode importance indirect thought interaction interesting intonation unit introspection introverted kind lexicalized light subject constraint linguistic listener listener's Malin Kundang mind narrative narrator nature ness newsworthiness Nick Nick's nonidentifiable noun phrases observations overt Ox-Bow Incident paragraph participants past tense person pitch point of view pronouns properties prosody question reader referent referential referred-to relation remembering represented consciousness role schema sciousness semiactive consciousness Seneca sentence sequence shared speaker speaking spoken starting point story suggest talk Talmy Givón things tion topic typical unacknowledged understanding verbalized words writing written language