| In first-person narratives, the narrator's subjectivity---consciousness, thoughts, feelings, and state of mind---plays a crucial role in designating a perspective from which story events are viewed and presented. It is also important to the reader's story construal since readers locate themselves with the narrator in the process of reading and comprehending the story. This subjectivity and its role in narrative are explained in relation to the structures of narrative by Fleischman's notion of grounding (1990) and Deictic Shift Theory (Duchan, Bruder, and Hewitt 1995), two cognitively-based theoretical frameworks which complement each other. A combination of these frameworks reveals that a foregrounded segment is most likely to coincide with an element that signals a shift of the deictic center. This challenges the fundamental findings derived from the traditional notion of grounding as proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1980). Unlike the morpho-syntactic driven notion of grounding that they proposed---which was based on the verbal transitivity, it is found in the present study that low transitive linguistic elements, such as perceptual and mental predicates, can be foregrounded, enabling readers to access the narrator's consciousness without mediation.; The composite framework is first applied to Japanese first-person fictional narratives of two contemporary writers, Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, and then to an American short story by Raymond Carver to test the cross-linguistic validity of the framework. The analysis of the Japanese narratives reveals that (1) the narrator organizes the story around events that he/she considers significant, (2) the significance of such events is manifested by particular linguistic elements revealing the narrator's subjectivity, and foregrounded, and (3) those linguistic elements range from perceptual and mental predicates to gender-specific styles. Gender-specific styles are especially significant; they are the telltale insignias revealing the narrator's gender, language style and attitudes. They signal a shift of the WHO (story participant) and are always foregrounded.; The analysis of the Carver story reveals the similarity in the basic workings between the Japanese narratives and their English counterpart. It also suggests that the composite framework is cross-linguistically applicable. |
