Time, space, and action: Exploring the narrative structure and its linguistic marking

In a highly specific field of the study of discourse, two experiments were conducted to analyze the principles that determine the structure of narratives and the use of elements that highlight that structure. In both, subjects received ordered lists of statements that described a person's activities during an afternoon. In the first experiment, groups of subjects performed one of four tasks using these lists. Some subjects rated the similarity of two activities described in consecutive statements, others indicated the natural hierarchical divisions in the activities and then carried out a forced‐choice task to select several connectives, and still others rewrote the statement list with punctuation and connectives. Comparison of these tasks showed that the similarity ratings were highly correlated with the hierarchical divisions, and that divisions which were high up in the hierarchy were relatively likely to be marked by time‐anchoring phrases (“at 2 o'clock”). In the second study, major or minor changes in location were introduced into the statement lists prior to either a deep or a shallow break. The subjects first indicated the hierarchical divisions within the sequences and then chose among alternative temporal connectives. The hierarchical judgments were affected by the place changes. However, the locations of the most important breaks as identified in the first study did not change. Linguistic marking was more sensitive to the changes in location. All in all, this study showed that it is possible to empirically isolate the parameters that determine the structure of a discourse and its marking.