Smoothly moving through Mental Spaces: Linguistic patterns of viewpoint transfer in news narratives

摘要

This article presents a Mental Space model for analyzing linguistic patterns in news narratives. The model was applied in a corpus study categorizing various linguistic markers of viewpoint transfers between the mental spaces that readers must conceptualize while processing news narratives: a Reality Space representing the journalist and reader's projected here-and-now viewpoint; a News Narrative Space representing the newsworthy events from a there-and-then viewpoint; and an Intermediate Space representing the information of the news actors provided from a temporal viewpoint in-between the newsworthy events and the present. Viewpoint transfers and their markers were examined in a corpus of 100 Dutch crime news narratives published over a period of fifty years. The results reveal clear patterns, which indicate that both linguistic structures and narrative-based as well as genre-based inferences play a role in the processing of news narratives. The results furthermore clarify how these narratives have been gradually crystallizing into a genre over the past decades. These findings elucidate the complex yet fluent process of conceptually moving between mental spaces, thus advancing our understanding of the relation between the linguistic and the cognitive representation of narrative discourse.