Shaping Memory Through Lyric Narration. The Specificity and Scope of Noun Phrases in the Depiction of Past Events

The article fleshes out the concept of lyric narration in the depiction of memories by suggesting that Ronald W. Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar offers a helpful framework for understanding how lyric narration operates on spatiality. Expanding from Werner Wolf’s (2005, 2020) idea of the lyric as a cognitive frame, the paper posits that lyricality may be fruitfully viewed as a quality of narrative texts, particularly in regard to portraying mental processes such as reminiscing. To argue for this view, the paper first outlines characteristics of lyric narration, as well as linguistic features that contribute to a sense that eventfulness is being backgrounded. Here, the discussion is inspired by Paul Simpson’s (2014) stylistically oriented and empirically tested model of narrative urgency, guided by the assumption that reflection on past events constitutes a lack of narrative urgency. Subsequently, since the narration of memories often involves a strong spatial element – the retrieval of autobiographical memories has been linked with scenes (Rubin et al. 2019) – the discussion zooms in on the role of spatially anchored noun phrases in narrated memories. In analysing several extracts from English-language narrative fiction, Langacker’s concepts of specificity and scope (2008, 55–56, 62–63) are employed to explore how noun phrases contribute granularity to memories but also suggest crucial conceptual connections.