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This thesis is a linguistic/ontological inquiry into narrative dynamics. Particular attention is drawn to elucidating the mechanism for recognising story events as one reads narrative discourse. The overall discussion is a criticism of formal approaches to narrative dynamics which tend to make observations on the assumption that there is a fixed relation between language form and meaning (e.g. the distinction between events and non-events in narrative circumstances). As two possible factors responsible for preventing formal analysts from taking an elastic view of story-event structure in narrative, I point out overly metalinguistic and metatemporal attitudes held by many narrative poeiticians, grammarians and formal semanticists. The recognition of narrative dynamics is primarily concerned with our concept of time, so that this thesis focuses a good deal of attention on explicating how time can be conceptualised in narrative. The basic component of the argument, therefore, is made up of ontological observations concerning time, event, and change, which are mainly made in Chapters 3 and 5. This thesis concludes that overly metalinguistic and metatemporal approaches to narrative dynamics tend to be fallacious, and that it is the commonsensical view that counts in the recognition of the event structure in narrative discourse. A hypothetical stance I adopt in constructing a narrative theory is the viewpoint of the ordinary reader of narrative fiction who is not formally trained, and therefore, does not necessarily respond to narrative texts in a highly metalinguistic or metatemporal way. The importance of assuming the ordinary reader's viewpoint for the proper recognition of the story-event structure of narrative is referred to in many different respects throughout the thesis.

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Understanding the temporal relations which hold between situations described in a narrative is a highly complex process. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the factors we have to take into account in order to determine the temporal coherence of a narrative discourse. In particular, aspectual information, tense, and world and context knowledge have to be considered and the interplay of all these factors must be specified. German is aspectually speaking an interesting language, because it does not possess a grammaticalised distinction between a perfective and imperfective aspect. In this thesis I examine the German aspectual system and the interaction of the factors which have an influence on the derived temporal relation for short discourse sequences. The analysis is carried out in two steps: First, the aspectual and temporal properties of German are investigated, following the cross-linguistic framework developed by Carlota S. Smith. An account for German is given which emphasises the properties which are peculiar to this language and explains why it has to be treated differently to, for example, English. The main result for the tense used in a narrative text—the Preterite—is that information regarding the end point of a described situation is based on our world knowledge and may be overridden provided context knowledge forces us to do this. Next, the more complex level of discourse is taken into account in order to derive the temporal relations which hold between the described situations. This investigation provides us with insights into the interaction of different knowledge sources like aspectual information as well as world and context knowledge. This investigation of German discourse sequences gives rise to the need for a time logic which is capable of expressing fine as well as coarse (or underspecified) temporal relations between situations. An account is presented to describe exhaustively all conceivable temporal relations within a computationally tractable reasoning system, based on the interval calculus by James Allen. However, in order to establish a coherent discourse for larger sequences, the hierarchical structure of a narrative has to be considered as well. I propose a Tree Description Grammar — a further development of Tree Adjoining Grammars — for parsing the given discourse structure, and stipulate discourse principles which give an explanation for the way a discourse should be processed. I furthermore discuss how a discourse grammar needs to distinguish between discourse structure and discourse processing. The latter term can be understood as navigating through a discourse tree, and reflects the process of how a discourse is comprehended. Finally, a small fragment of German is given which shows how the discourse grammar can be applied to short discourse sequences of four to seven sentences. The conclusion discusses the outcome of the analysis conducted in this thesis and proposes likely areas of future research.

Some String or Another: Fiction and Nonfiction Stories of Connection, a creative thesis, explores patterns of change in stories from the perspective of connection and disconnection. The preface examines the effects of temporal disconnection, the relationship of conflict and connection to narrative rhythm, and the webs of connection formed during the process of creation. Included in the body of the work are six fiction stories, one metafiction story, and two nonfiction essays.

The re-creation of a holistic narrative that integrates the pre- and post-injury self is integral to recovery following acquired brain injury (ABI). However, individuals may struggle with deficits in linguistic skills required for narrative, along with reduced functioning, feelings of grief, difficulties with cognition, and other communicative challenges. This mixed-methods study analyzed data gathered from six non-aphasic adult participants with ABI during semi-structured interviews and through assessments. Thematic analyses showed that individuals experience a change in their sense of self prevs. post-injury, reflected in their self-narratives, and that even clinically undiagnosed changes in speech, language, and communication are impactful. Results from linguistic analysis and assessments suggest a relationship among a person’s cognitive capacity, his/her sense of loss, and pre- vs. post-injury narrative of self speech rates. Participants spoke comparatively slower about their post-injury self, with those participants with higher feelings of loss showing a reduction in their speech rates comparatively more. / Graduate / 0290 / 0460 / 0382 / bje@uvic.ca