COGNITIVE-PRAGMATIC MECHANISMS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF COHERENCE IN LITERARY NARRATIVES
COGNITIVE-PRAGMATIC MECHANISMS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF COHERENCE IN LITERARY NARRATIVES

Summary/Abstract: The article investigates the cognitive-pragmatic mechanisms involved in construing coherence in literary narratives, with a particular focus on flash fiction. Adopting a cognitive-pragmatic and text-linguistic approach, which treats coherence as a cognitive achievement rather than a purely textual property, in contrast to cohesion, which relies on explicit linguistic markers, the study examines how readers integrate explicit and implicit information to build a coherent mental representation of a narrative, drawing on schemata and scenarios. The analysis explores the effects of fragmented plots, referential indeterminacy, narrative situation, and temporal shifts that interweave concurrent and retrospective narration on text coherence. Through detailed analysis of selected textual excerpts, the study investigates how readers infer temporal, causal, and referential relations and reconstruct a coherent scenario of the narrative world. The findings reveal the intricate relationship between textual design, cognitive operations, and reader inference, highlighting the active role of the reader in naturalizing incoherent or minimally coherent narratives, and showing how literary texts exploit deviations from generic norms to engage readers in deep sense-making processes.

• Details
• Contents