Chapter 5
Can pantomime narrate?
A cognitive semiotic approach
Adopting the conceptual-empirical loop of cognitive semiotics, we define narrative as a three-part
structure consisting of Narration, Story and Event-sequence and primary narrativity as the process of
interpreting a narrative from the former to the latter two. We distinguish between simple narratives with chronological
mappings between Story and Event sequence, and complex narratives, where this is not the case; for example, by beginning the
narration with the final event. Understanding pantomime as a prototype-based concept grounded in iconic gesture, we ask if it
affords primary narrativity, in the case of both simple and complex narratives. We proceed by reviewing and elaborating a
recent experimental semiotic study where communicators inter-semiotically translated three-event stories from language to
pantomime, and interpreters had to match these performances with three-image cartoon strips. The results showed that pantomime
was successful when the narratives were simple, but much less so when they were not. To be able to distinguish between the
two, the participants spontaneously introduced various markers of event order. When they conventionalized
these markers, they introduced elements of protolanguage, thus going beyond the narrative potentials of pantomime.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Narrative, primary vs. secondary narrativity, and different semiotic systems
- 3.Pantomime as a prototype-based concept
- 4.Pantomiming simple and (more) complex narratives
- 5.Summary and conclusions
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
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