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<Paper uid="C88-2099">
  <Title>Discontinuities in Narratives</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="468" end_page="468" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4. An Example.
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This section of the paper applies the above heuristics to the initial fragment of Joyce's &amp;quot;Clay' '. The fragment falls into three DSs: sentence 1 (DS1), sentences 2-6 (DS2), and sentences 6-12  cut them herself.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> 6. Maria was a very, very small person indeed but she had a very  long nose and a very long chin, 7. She talked a little through her nose, always soothingly: Yes, my dear, and No, my dear. 8. She was always sent for when the women quarrelled over their tubs and always succeeded in making peace. 9. One day the matron had said to her:--Maria, you are a veritable peace-maker! 10. And the sub-matron and two of the Board ladies had heard the compliment. 11. And Ginger Mooney was always saying what she wouldn't do to the dummy who had charge of the irons if it wasn't for Maria. 12. Everyone was so fond of Maria.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 13. The women would have their tea at six o'clock and she would be able to get away before seven.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The transition from sentence 1 to 2 is very similar to the transition from (a) to (b) in example (1): it is a shift from figure to ground marked primarily by tense and aspect changes and a shift from temporal to spatial/visual material. The change in time and space scales is not as dramatic here, but there is the t'II~esc intuitive divisions, two of which correspond to Joyce's paragraph breaks, have been Confirmed by one of the experiments reported in Reynolds and Nakhirnovsky (in preparation).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> sane arrangement of nanated events that are prior to the Temporal Focus (&amp;quot;The matron had given her leave...&amp;quot;) and anticipated events that are in the future with respect to the Temporal Focus (the women's tea, Maria's evening out). This sets up expectations suspended by the visual matedM and stative verbs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Sentence 5, by using an action verb and the past-perfect tense, return to the time scale and the temporal a~rangernent of sentence 1.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> The transition from 5 to 6 (paragraph break) is characterized by a shift ia time scale and a topic re-introduction. The material is a (back)ground character description: 'Maria is such that...' The hegira,Aug of&amp;quot; DS3.1 is signaled by a well-known clue phrase One day and by the past-perfect tense. Note that the material is still gronnd ('Mmia is such that...'). &amp;quot;the precise relationship between I)S3 and DS3.1 is at this p~fint ambiguous: they cmt be siblings, a ltd they wouM be if sentences 11 and 12 were dropped fi'om the nmxafive. Howevcr~ sentence 11 clearly signals a returu to the material of sentences 6-8: the tense changes back from past perfect to past (past progressive, presumably for a sharper contrast with the perfect), and the adverb always, used in sendeg tences 7 and 8, reappears again. 'Ibis establishes that DS3.1 is, indeed, embedded in DS3; note that it bears no relation to DS1, and, in pmticular, the pastq~erfect events of sentences 9-10 are much fm'ther in the past (on a different time scale) than the past perfect events of sentence 1.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> The tJ ansition from 12 to 13 (the next paragraph break) is a retina to the event sequence of senteuce 1. The position of the TF, amt the entire deictic center is indicated by the future-in-the~ past tense. Note that it is essential to retrieve the entire deictic center, and not just the 'I'I,', because the WHO-point is also restored: the she in 13 does not evoke Maria of sentence 12 or any other sentence in DS 2 and 3 presented from the perspective of the implied narrator. Rather, this pronoun is a quasi-indexical (Rapaport 1986) that replaces the first-person singular I of Maria's fit, mghts and expectations, signaled by Maria looked forward in sentence 1.t</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="4" start_page="468" end_page="468" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
5. Future research.
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> There: are several directions in which we are proceeding.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Wiebe &amp; Rapaport (1988) and Wiebe (in progress) present an outline of a detailed computational investigation of narrative perspecfive and reference. Reynolds &amp; Nakhimovsky (in preparation) will report on several psychological experiments designed to obtain empirical data on how people segment narratives in the process of reacting, and how they are segmented when recalled.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The deictiC/ center project (Bruder et at. (1986)) contains both a linguistic t;tudy of the role of indexicals in narrative segmentation 1In contrast to the naive children's story of Example 1, it is difficult to make definite starements about the narrative perspective in Joyce.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Even his early stories, anticipating the incoming medenfism, deli.berately and skillfully blend the character's perspective with the implied ruartator's, so that even a descriptiou of Maria uses colloquial vocabulary and syntax that suggest a hum,'m voice that could l~e ouly Mafia's.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> and a computational project that will test all the diverse segmentation he~wisties within the unifoma system of belief representa-. tion.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Acknowledgments.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> This research was supported in part by NSF Grant No. IR18610517. We are grateful to Mary Galbraith and Janyce M.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Wiebe for comments on an earlier version, and to Bonnie Webber and Rebecca Passonneau for discussions of related work.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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