Een van die fundamenteelste en belangrikste aspekte van 'n roman is die verteller. Die verhouding waarin die verteller tot die verhaalstof staan, die verteller se perspektief op die gebeure, die soort verteller en die manier waarop die verteller sy implisiete leser deur die organisasie van die verhaal definieer en betrek is almal bepalende faktore vir die struktuur, die styl en die ontwikkelingsgang van die roman. Joseph T. Shipley (1966:144) stel die saak so: "In die analysis of a speech or literary composition, nothing is more important than to determine precisely the voice or voices presented as speaking and the precise nature of the address (i.e. specific direction to a hearer, an addressee); for in every speech reference to a voice or voices and implication of address (i.e. reference to a process of speech, actual or imagined) is a part of the meaning, for the interpretation of which it supplies an indispensable control ".

This dissertation examines the rise of first-person fiction in the later Middle Ages, arguing that the modern concept of fiction can to be seen to have emerged during this period. As I show, the Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, the Commedia of Dante, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales each offers a unique response to the question of how truth can be manifested in writing. I analyze key passages of these three poems, as well as earlier writings by Dante and Chaucer – in particular, Dante’s Vita Nuova and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, as well as Chaucer’s other dream-poems – in order to show how the classical, and more specifically Platonic, subordination of fiction to philosophy was challenged and ultimately overturned through French dream-allegory, Dante’s visionary epic, and the general framework to The Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer can be seen to engage both French and Italian predecessors.

Thesis (MA (African Languages))--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / This study explores the theoretical work in articulating the motivations and conditions for account-giving in Isizulu. In this situation, accounts are similar to narratives and can be retained at the level of private reflections or written as diary entries or for others to read and refer to from time to time. The importance of the intelligibility of accounts is established with reference to Schank and Abelson (1977) who contend that people construct accounts based on their knowledge structure approach, causal reasoning and text comprehension. Thus, for an account to be honored, it has to be goal-oriented and coherent. In this study, the social-interactive aspects of account-giving are investigated and it is discovered that severe reproach forms involving personality attacks and derogatory aspects, elicit defensive reactions that result in negative interpersonal and emotional consequences. Narrative accounts based on McIntyre (1981) form the basis of moral and social events and as such, stories have two elements from which they are explored. They are explored firstly in the way in which they are told and secondly, on the way they are lived in the social context. These stories follow a historically or culturally based format and to this effect, Gergen (1994) suggested narrative criteria that constitute a historically contingent narrative form. Narrative forms are linguistic tools that have important social functions to satisfactorily fulfill such as stability narrative, progressive narrative and regressive narrative. According to Gergen (1994), self-narratives are social processes in which individuals are realized on the personal perspective or experience, and as such their emotions are viewed as constitutive features of relationship. The self-narratives used and analyzed in this study portray the contemporary culture-based elements or segments of a well-formed narrative.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Este trabalho tem como tema central autobiografias escritas por indivíduos com autismo. A partir dos enredos que conduzem as narrativas, pretende-se mostrar como elas afetam e contribuem para visões existentes sobre autismo. O traço relevante e singular deste estudo é sua proposta de sublinhar a narrativa em primeira pessoa, as maneiras pelas quais eles se identificam e redefinem as noções existentes sobre autismo como categoria psiquiátrica. O objetivo é compreender as diferentes formas como os autistas se adaptam, negociam, resistem ou até mesmo criam novas normas para lidar com sua condição. Como ferramenta teórica, foram tomadas as ideias do filósofo canadense Ian Hacking, sobre tipos humanos e efeito looping, para analisar como as pessoas classificadas ou autoclassificadas ressignificam, através de suas experiências, as tipificações sobre autismo. As narrativas selecionadas não só permitem que autistas compartilhem suas experiências com o mundo, mas também ampliem os sentidos que atribuímos ao autismo como experiência e como diagnóstico. / The central theme of this work is related to the autobiographies of autistic individuals. Our objective is to demonstrate how these narratives affect and contribute to the current view of autism. The most relevant and unique aspect of this study is to highlight the autistics selfperception and the way in which they identify themselves with prevailing psychiatric notions and many times redefine them. Our objective is to understand the many different ways in which they adapt, negotiate, resist and find new forms to deal with their condition. We use philosopher Ian Hackings theory about human types and looping effect in order to analyze how classified or self-classified individuals through their own experiences give a new significance to the typifications of autism.

English-language news articles are no longer necessarily the best source of information. The Web allows information to spread more quickly and travel farther: first-person accounts of breaking news events pop up on social media, and foreign-language news articles are accessible to, if not immediately understandable by, English-speaking users. This thesis focuses on developing automatic summarization techniques for these new sources of information. We focus on summarizing two specific new sources of information: personal narratives, first-person accounts of exciting or unusual events that are readily found in blog entries and other social media posts, and non-English documents, which must first be translated into English, often introducing translation errors that complicate the summarization process. Personal narratives are a very new area of interest in natural language processing research, and they present two key challenges for summarization. First, unlike many news articles, whose lead sentences serve as summaries of the most important ideas in the articles, personal narratives provide no such shortcuts for determining where important information occurs in within them; second, personal narratives are written informally and colloquially, and unlike news articles, they are rarely edited, so they require heavier editing and rewriting during the summarization process. Non-English documents, whether news or narrative, present yet another source of difficulty on top of any challenges inherent to their genre: they must be translated into English, potentially introducing translation errors and disfluencies that must be identified and corrected during summarization. The bulk of this thesis is dedicated to addressing the challenges of summarizing personal narratives found on the Web. We develop a two-stage summarization system for personal narrative that first extracts sentences containing important content and then rewrites those sentences into summary-appropriate forms. Our content extraction system is inspired by contextualist narrative theory, using changes in writing style throughout a narrative to detect sentences containing important information; it outperforms both graph-based and neural network approaches to sentence extraction for this genre. Our paraphrasing system rewrites the extracted sentences into shorter, standalone summary sentences, learning to mimic the paraphrasing choices of human summarizers more closely than can traditional lexicon- or translation-based paraphrasing approaches. We conclude with a chapter dedicated to summarizing non-English documents written in low-resource languages – documents that would otherwise be unreadable for English-speaking users. We develop a cross-lingual summarization system that performs even heavier editing and rewriting than does our personal narrative paraphrasing system; we create and train on large amounts of synthetic errorful translations of foreign-language documents. Our approach produces fluent English summaries from disdisfluent translations of non-English documents, and it generalizes across languages.

Deictic shift theory (DST) was developed as a model of the construction and comprehension of all types of fictional narrative. With respect to the participant structures of texts, however, DST researchers have focused their attention on deictic shifts in third-person narratives, leaving first-person narratives unanalyzed from this theoretical perspective. As a result, DST in its present form does not adequately account for the variety of manipulations of a range of perspectives that may be achieved in first-person narratives. Nor has DST been systematically applied to texts whose participant structures undergo extensive reorganization as the result of a surprise ending or other narrative twist. By analyzing the deictic and referring expressions that create the participant structure of Chuck Palahniuks novel Fight Club, this thesis tests DSTs potential to account for authors and readers cognitive experiences of first-person narratives with plot twists. The analysis establishes a wider range of linguistic cues that may affect readers mental representations of characters. It identifies interactions between elements in the participant structure, including those that permit the representation of non-narrating characters subjective perspectives, as well as the linguistic features that enable these interactions. The thesis examines the effects of an authors violations of traditional narrative perspective constraints, and it underscores the importance, especially in DST-motivated analyses, of recognizing the potential for interplay between general narrative constraints and the narrative structure of a specific text. The thesis revises DSTs account of the nature and extent of deictic shifts in first-person narratives and describes the role deictic shifts play in fictional narratives that contain plot twists.

Originally presented as the author's Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 238-244).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 260-275).

Thesis (M.S.)--Missouri State University, 2008. / "August 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-88). Also available online.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Este trabalho tem como tema central autobiografias escritas por indivíduos com autismo. A partir dos enredos que conduzem as narrativas, pretende-se mostrar como elas afetam e contribuem para visões existentes sobre autismo. O traço relevante e singular deste estudo é sua proposta de sublinhar a narrativa em primeira pessoa, as maneiras pelas quais eles se identificam e redefinem as noções existentes sobre autismo como categoria psiquiátrica. O objetivo é compreender as diferentes formas como os autistas se adaptam, negociam, resistem ou até mesmo criam novas normas para lidar com sua condição. Como ferramenta teórica, foram tomadas as ideias do filósofo canadense Ian Hacking, sobre tipos humanos e efeito looping, para analisar como as pessoas classificadas ou autoclassificadas ressignificam, através de suas experiências, as tipificações sobre autismo. As narrativas selecionadas não só permitem que autistas compartilhem suas experiências com o mundo, mas também ampliem os sentidos que atribuímos ao autismo como experiência e como diagnóstico. / The central theme of this work is related to the autobiographies of autistic individuals. Our objective is to demonstrate how these narratives affect and contribute to the current view of autism. The most relevant and unique aspect of this study is to highlight the autistics selfperception and the way in which they identify themselves with prevailing psychiatric notions and many times redefine them. Our objective is to understand the many different ways in which they adapt, negotiate, resist and find new forms to deal with their condition. We use philosopher Ian Hackings theory about human types and looping effect in order to analyze how classified or self-classified individuals through their own experiences give a new significance to the typifications of autism.