Facilitating Discourse Comprehension Through Analysis Of Narrative Time: An Experimental Study

Temporal information is ubiquitous in narrative discourses. Temporal information can be expressed not only in every sentence but also in every major word class in a narrative discourse. Obviously, time and narrative are correlative. Because of the close relationship between time and narrative, during the discourse comprehension time is one significant cue to construct comprehenders' mental representation of the state of affairs described in a discourse or is a segmentation marker to signal a temporal gap or a topic shift in a discourse. Some expressions may not be properly comprehended without understanding the characteristics of narrative time. Generally speaking, temporal relation, the location process and temporal direction always characterize a discourse. A temporal relation communicates the simultaneity or ordering in time of events or states. Temporal location operation aims to anchor the event to the time axis. In order to give locative indications it is necessary to choose an evaluation time belonging to the same discourse. However, the temporal location of a situation is not always stated explicitly in discourses. At this time, comprehenders often depend on iconicity assumption. Namely, comprehenders assume that the order in which events are reported in language matches their chronological order. When iconicity assumption on comprehension is violated, comprehension may be...