The ‘telegraphic schizophrenic manner’: Psychosis and a (non)sense of time

This paper reads Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time as stories of deictic temporal crises. It critically examines the texts, exploring their representations of mental time travel (MTT), and places them into dialectic with health sciences research on autonoesis and episodic memory deficits in people with lived experience of mental health disorders, particularly psychosis or ‘schizophrenia’. The paper uses this dialectic to interrogate how atypical MTT is diagnostically and clinically rendered as pathological, and indicative of psychosis in particular. Similarly, it mines these fictional representations for the insights they might provide in attempting to understand the phenomenological reality of temporal disruptions for people with lived experience of psychosis. The paper moves on to incorporate first-person accounts from people with lived experience, and uses these to refine a Deleuzean static synthesis of time constructed around the traumatic Event and the Dedekind ‘cut’. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how the literary texts offer possible insights into the experience of people living with ‘psychotic’ temporal disruptions, and in particular how to re-invest their deictic relations to establish functioning fixity and stability of the self in time.

Genre as a factor determining the viewpoint-marking quality of verb tenses

Verb tenses play an important role in managing deictic relations between the narrator, the audience and the events happening in the story world. Across languages, the Simple Past is considered the conventional story-telling tense, reflecting the prototypical deictic configuration of stories in which the narrator is positioned at some distance from the events unfolding in the story. The Simple Present, on the other hand, is considered a marked option for narration, assumed to automatically result in a shift to a subjective perspective. This paper reports on an analysis of a corpus made up of Dutch fictional short stories, news reports and feature articles. The results suggest that conventions for use and interpretation of verb tenses in narrative contexts are in fact genre-dependent. In the news genres, the Simple Present tense dominated in narration. This did not automatically result in a subjective mode or narration, but was naturally used to express a default narration of story events that temporally overlap with the temporal deictic center of the communicative ground. These findings suggest that previous analyses of verb tenses in relation to narration reflect an over-generalization based on the situational characteristics of prototypical narrative genres such as literary fiction and personal anecdotes.

The expression of path in three satellite-framed languages

Cross-linguistic studies of the lexicalization of motion tend to contrast satellite- with verb-framed languages (e.g. Slobin 1996; 2004; Cardini 2008; Özçalışkan & Slobin 2003; Kopecka 2004; Fargard et al. 2013, etc.) and concentrate less frequently on intra-typological analyses (but cf. e.g. Filipović 2007; Hasko 2010; Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2009; Ibarretxe-Antuñano & Hijazo-Gascón 2012). Even fewer studies contrast genetically related languages (but cf. e.g. Łozińska 2018). The main aim of this study was to establish the path-saliency cline of three satellite-framed languages: Polish, Russian, and English. The analysis was based on elicited data. The overall patterns of expressing the path of motion in the three languages were shown to be caused by their belonging to the same typological category. The differences could be attributed, to a large extent, to differences in the morphological structures and in the lexical repertoires of motion-coding expressions available to the speakers of the three languages. However, the analysis of descriptions of three specific spatial situations (i.e. vertical, boundary-crossing, and deictic relations) pointed to other factors that may influence path coding in the three languages. Thus, despite the satellite-verb character of the languages examined and the morpho-syntactic differences between them, all our participants, who were native speakers of the three languages examined, tended to code vertical relations by means of path verbs. The number of tokens of path verbs used to code this particular spatial relation was found to be higher than the number of tokens of path verbs used to code deictic or boundary-crossing motion.

Syntactic–semantic interface in the acquisition of verb morphology

The purpose of this research was to show how the syntactic and semantic components of the tense–aspect system interact during the acquisition process. Our methodology involved: (1) identifying predicates, (2) finding the initial occurrence of their tense–aspect morphology, and (3) observing the emergence of contrasts. Six children learning Polish and six children learning English, found in the CHILDES archives, were investigated. The average starting age of the children learning English was 1;11, and 1;8 for the children learning Polish. In the first analysis, we traced the same 12 verbs in both languages, and in the second analysis, we contrasted the acquisition patterns for a set of telic versus atelic predicates. We tracked the verbs/predicates from the starting age to 4;11 or the child's final transcript. In English, progressive aspect is the marked form, and in Polish, perfective aspect is the marked form. This typological distinction has a significant effect of the acquisition patterns in the two languages. We argue that children acquire a multi-dimensional system having deictic relations as one of the basic dimensions. This process can be best understood within a functional theoretical framework having a well-defined syntactic–semantic interface.