Then as an indicator of deictic discontinuity in adults' oral descriptions of a film.
An analysis of film descriptions of 20 normal-language adults revealed the adults' selective and systematic use of the word then. Then served to indicate an upcoming shift in discourse deixis. It occurred in clauses that told of a shift to a different discourse frame (conversation vs. story world of the film), to a new scene location, to a different character, and a shift in who was doing the viewing. The regularity in the use of then is taken to be evidence that speakers conceptualize their descriptions as being located in a variety of related frames, all having to do with the perspective taken on the current talk. A conceptual model underlying the speakers' use of then would need to include distinctions between the conversational and story world, the various scenes in the objective world of the story, and various subjective views that different observers can have when experiencing the described events. The results are taken as support for viewing discourse discontinuity as an important factor in discourse analysis.
Duchan
J F
JF
Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, State University of New York, Buffalo.
Meth
M
M
Waltzman
D
D
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013060:Speech; D014825:Vocabulary