Traveling through narrative time: How tense and temporal deixis guide the representation of time and viewpoint in news narratives

Abstract

This study examines the linguistic construal and cognitive representation of time and viewpoint in the genre of news narratives. We present a model of mental spaces that involves a News Space in which the deictic center is construed of the news actors at the time the newsworthy events took place, and a Reality Space in which the deictic here-and-now center of journalist and reader is construed. This model explains how the dynamic representation of narrative news discourse, characterized by shifts in time and viewpoint, is steered by linguistic devices. An analysis of Dutch news narratives shows that temporal adverbs such as yesterday and shifts from present tense to past tense may signal a move forward in narrative time, to a viewpoint in the future relative to the narrative now-point, rather than backward. These atypical time shifts can be accounted for by presupposing an Intermediate Space located at a point in time between the News Space and the Reality Space where the progression of narrative time comes to a halt and experiences are rather relived than reported. The salience of the Intermediate Space may be signaled by quotative conditionals reflecting the viewpoints of implicitly quoted sources. These results clarify how tense and temporal deixis steer the linguistic construal of time and viewpoint in news narratives, demonstrating that time and viewpoint are closely linked in the cognitive representation of these narratives.

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

“…The three main spaces collaboratively fulfil the communicative functions of news narratives: the Reality Space represents narrative information that informs the reader about the current state of affairs; the News Narrative Space represents the reconstruction of events and situations that engages the reader; and the Intermediate Space convinces the reader about the truthfulness of the narrative reconstruction, for quoting from communicative events legitimizes the narrative reconstruction of the newsworthy events in two ways. First, such quotes demonstrate the truthfulness of the narrative reconstruction and, second, their dramatic effect underscores the narrative's tellability (Sanders andVan Krieken 2018, Sanders andVan Krieken 2019; for demonstrative function see Clark and Gerrig 1990, for tellability see Labov and Waletzky 1967). Figure 1 also depicts that, together, the News Narrative Space and the Intermediate Space represent the actual "Narrative Space" in the news narrative; representing the news events requires readers to project their deictic center (depicted by a visor) along with the news character's viewpoint through narrative time and continuously shift it along with the alternating salience of the different mental spaces (Sanders and Van Krieken 2019).…”

“…Dancygier 2012). Applied to the specific genre of news narratives, this approach leads to insights into the relation between the communicative functions of narratives and their mental space structures as well as developments in these structures over historical time (Van Krieken and Sanders 2016;Sanders and Van Krieken 2019). Building on this line of research, the present study adopts a mental space approach to further elucidate the relation between the linguistic and cognitive representation of narrative discourse, focusing on news narratives as a developing genre.…”

“…News narratives thus differ from straight news reports in style as well as communicative function, and they differ from fictional narratives in that they report on events that are both factual and newsworthy instead of imaginary. Consequently, news narratives share a unique construal of multiple distinctive spaces, even though not each space needs to be made salient in each news narrative (Van Krieken and Sanders 2016; Sanders and Van Krieken 2019). Each space hosts a number of latent viewpoints that can be selected as the (temporary) vantage point of narration.…”

“…Scenes and events in news narratives can thus be narrated from a variety of viewpoints. These viewpoints can be conceptualized as a network of mental spaces, with each viewpoint anchored to one of three distinctive host spaces: The Reality Space, Intermediate Space, and News Narrative Space (Sanders and Van Krieken 2019). The Reality Space represents the conceptual domain of narrator (here: journalist) and addressee (here: reader), where their viewpoints in the present are located and which is most closely connected to the ground, i.e.…”

Exploring Narrative Structure and Hero Enactment in Brand Stories

“…In an embedded narrative, characters refer to themselves and their opinions in interaction with the film maker and/or the viewer ( De Jong, 2014 , p. 4). This indicates that the (most often non-fictional) characters are not separated from, but connected to the viewers’ time line ( Sanders and Van Krieken, forthcoming ). Inserting such film maker- or viewer-directed utterances supports and legitimizes the narrative’s credibility, specifically when evaluations are brought in: moments where characters tell about their thoughts, feelings and strivings.…”