Discourse, Consciousness, and Time

Wallace 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.

Preface

Acknowledgments

Symbols Used in Transcriptions of Speech

1: Introduction

2: Understanding Language and the Mind

3: The Nature of Consciousness

4: Speaking and Writing

5: Intonation Units

6: Activation Cost

7: Starting Points, Subjects, and the Light Subject Constraint

8: Identifiability and "Definiteness"

9: The One New Idea Constraint

10: Discourse Topics

11: Topic Hierarchies and Sentences

12: Another Language

13: Some Alternative Approaches to Information Flow

14: The Flow of Consciousness in Music

15: The Immediate and Displaced Modes in Conversational Language

16: Representing Other Speech and Thought in Conversation

17: Displaced Immediacy in Written First-Person Fiction

18: Representing Other Speech and Thought in First-Person Fiction with

Displaced Immediacy

19: Displaced Immediacy in Written Third-Person Fiction

20: Written Fiction That (Partially) Lacks a Represented Consciousness

21: Written Nonfiction

22: Displacement Integrated with Flow

23: Written Paragraphs and Discourse Topics

24: Epilogue

References

Index