Temporal Iconicity in Narrative Discourse

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Katja Jasinskaja
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 559688251

One of the tasks for a theory of discourse semantics and pragmatics is to explain why sequences of clauses as in the famous saying attributed to Julius Caesar "Veni, vidi, vici" / "I came, I saw, I conquered" are understood to present events in a chronological order. It does not say "After that I conquered", yet we understand that the victory happened after the other two events. On the one hand, research in semantics and pragmatics has shown that chronological interpretation is not ubiquitous and can be "cancelled" by contradicting world knowledge and by linguistic cues such as verbal tense and aspect, time adverbials and discourse connectives. On the other hand, it is a popular idea that the chronological interpretation is a manifestation of \emph{iconicity}. Unlike symbolic signs, where the mapping between forms and meanings is arbitrary, iconic signs are characterized by similarity between form and content. "The chain of verbs - Veni, vidi, vici - informs us about the order of Caesar´s deeds first and foremost because the sequence of coordinate preterits is used to reproduce the succession of reported occurrences. The temporal order of speech events tends to mirror the order of narrated events in time..." (Jakobson 1965, p. 27). However, despite its appeal, the idea has never been technically implemented in formal approaches to discourse and it remains unclear how it fits into the complex picture of temporal interpretation. The recent rise of interest in visual communication (sign language, co-speech gesture, pictorial language), where iconic signs are much more common than in spoken and written language, has led to a surge of semantic and pragmatic theory of iconicity. At the same time, there is growing evidence that the iconic aspect of narrative temporality goes beyond the relative order of events, extending to pacing, duration of events, distances between events, as well as absolute alignment of the time of the story with the time of the telling. In light of these new developments, it is time to revisit temporal iconicity in narrative. The goal of this project is to bring new evidence for temporal iconicity and to develop a theory that integrates iconic and symbolic aspects of narrative interpretation. Because of the close relationship between the times of reported events and the times of utterances in narrative, the study of temporal iconicity opens a window on more fundamental questions: What is utterance time? And what characteristics of utterance time are relevant for the interpretation of utterances? Without answers to these questions, this central contextual parameter of linguistic pragmatics cannot be fully understood.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants