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Part of
Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life
Edited by Vera da Silva Sinha, Ana Moreno-Núñez and Zhen Tian
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts 13] 2020
► pp. 227–248

Chapter 11
Cultural and cognitive aspects of narrative

A cross-linguistic study

| University of Maine
| North China Electric Power University

This article proposes an integrated cognitive-cultural approach to conducting narrative analysis that not only accounts for the ways speakers perceive, construe and structure narrative, but also explores constraints and motivations underlying the narrative process. The approach is exemplified by using data elicited from native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and American English, who produced narratives after watching the same short film and under the same conditions. The results have given evidence to narrative as a complex process motivated and governed by the cognition-culture-language interaction, as reflected in cross-linguistic characteristics of narrative structure and organization on the one hand, and culture-specific differences in lexical choice, event coding, and degree of objectivity and empathy on the other.

Keywords: narrative discourse, cross-linguistic study, cognitive aspects, cultural characteristics, linguistic coding
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Prior research on narrative theory and structure
  • An integrated approach to narrative analysis
  • The empirical study
    • Stimulus material
    • Episodes
    • Participants and procedure
    • Results and discussion
    • Cognitive basis and linguistic coding
    • Cultural dimension and linguistic coding
  • Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 30 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.13.11pu
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