The Spatio-Temporal Setting in Written Narrative Fiction: A Study of Interaction between Words, Text and Encyclopedic Knowledge in the Creation of Textual Meaning (review)

This very ambitious attempt to apply procedures of linguistic analysis to literary texts is a dissertation written in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The author explores aspects of textual meaning as they arise through the interaction of words, discourse, and encyclopedic knowledge found in the initial fragments of English narratives. The aim of the analysis, based on the beginnings of 150 English novels, short stories, journals, fairy tales, biographies, and other types of narrative text, is to identify the parameters of the narratives’ spatio-temporal settings. The study also explores the spatio-temporal lexicon in the WordNet database. Since it does not make use of psycholinguistic experiments, its orientation is philological rather than cognitive.

Having defined the notions narrative fiction, text, textual meaning, discourse, compositional frame, frame trigger, and setting, the author then examines space-oriented and time-oriented settings, various kinds of layers (the interface between language users and aspects of the world), frame triggers, and what he calls ‘linguistic painting’. Although only a selection of the 150 text beginnings are quoted and directly referred to in the book, they are all cross-classified according to a number of criteria. Indeed, the amount and scope of statistical data presented in dozens of tables throughout the volume is breathtaking. Equally meticulous are the references to existing literature: virtually every concept important for the analysis is shown in a wider context of its use in linguistics. On top of this, there are thirteen appendices with detailed specifications of the corpus used, the textual properties of the settings, variation in their thematic emphases, or the lexicon of space and time, to mention only a few themes.

The greatest value of the work, however, lies in unraveling the multifarious interactions of lexicon, text, and encyclopedic knowledge. For example, one of the many detailed conclusions is an observation that settings that are gradually developed into the story are more frequent than those that are developed separately. The former option is more common with settings concentrating on sociocultural and mental aspects of the world, while the latter is more common with those focused on space or time. Many other observations are offered at various levels of generality.

One cannot help being struck though by the impression that the work’s assets may also be its drawbacks: a more lucid presentation of ideas at the expense of sometimes unnecessary preoccupation with statistics and references would certainly have been beneficial. The statistical counts especially must be accepted with some reservation, since the choice of text beginnings, well-planned and maximally representative as it is, cannot by definition escape a certain measure of arbitrariness. Furthermore, a thematic index would undoubtedly have helped the reader navigate through the volume, theoretically dense and rich in references as it is. Having said this, I readily acknowledge the value of this contribution to linguistic studies of literary texts.