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Narrative is a complex and elusive category of cognition, culture, communication and language. An attempt has been made in this article with a large enough theoretical scope to consider the possibility of treating narrative as a radial category. To this end, the definition and characterisation of radiality is provided together with explanation of what it might mean to apply this term to the complex language-discourse unit of narrative. The prototype of this category involves features, functions, and ICMs. It has multiple representations with only family resemblance, involves more obvious exemplars and variable abstract knowledge structures. In particular, section one looks at the radiality question and what it might mean to think of the meaning of narrative in general. Section two focuses on centrality. Sections three to five deal with schematic representations of narrative and provide examples of extending the most subsuming schema of the Action Chain Model from cognitive linguistics and Labov’s Narrative Schema to various other types of conversational narrative, children’s dramatic plays, tactical narratives, story rounds, jokes, poems, current news articles on the Internet, images, and advertisements.

The article presents a study of the process of comprehension of an input joke and its subsequent retelling in writing by Polish advanced students (n=36) of English as a foreign language. The research question was whether people are guided by stereotypical social gender roles and cultural schemata during comprehension and production of a joke involving events that make up a story. The joke included references to female (wife) and male (husband) participants as well as a secretary (gender not specified), names Gloria and Mike and a number of objects such as: violets, chocolates, handbag or laptop. It was predicted that the VM version of the joke (the version with the name Mike, supposedly male secretary) would take the participants more time to interpret as compared to the VF version (with Gloria as a most possible candidate for the secretary role). This hypothesis was indeed confirmed, but the experimental subjects did not take significantly more time to write their versions (VM and VF conditions) of the story. The qualitative analysis demonstrated variable cultural bias during the construction of the participants’ roles and relations, often against or in the absence of clear instructions in the input to do so.

This article discusses the use of different syntactic options in the construal of events. The examples selected for presentation and analysis come from a study by Badio (2014). This work understood construal to be non-linguistic, mental or conceptual, i.e. related to thought, whereas the term coding was reserved for the use of form to signal aspects of a conceptualisation. The present work focuses on demonstrating that if they are prominent, events tend to be coded with finite verb forms (of the superordinate) clause, followed by participial and infinitive constructions. The former contain the full processual profiles when they are used to relate the main participants, the subject and object. Infinitives and participles tend to be less cognitively salient, whereas nominalisations and other non-verbal options background the processual profile of an event. As a consequence, events coded with them are less salient within a clause or a sentence.

The structure of oral narratives, as studied by Labov & Waletzky (1967) involves an abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation and coda. Narratives are presented on TV and radio news, newspapers as well as in everyday conversations (Ervin-Tripp & Küntay, 1997), also during children’s dramatic play (Ervin-Tripp & Küntay, 1997), jokes (Badio, 2020), stories as rehearsal for action (Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak, 2015), stories as background of the meaning of lexical items, e.g. dirty money (Filar, 2015), advertisements and in a great number of other contexts. The different components of narratives as listed by Labov & Waletzky (1967) include the complex category of evaluation. Characterisation and discussion of this unit of narrative constitutes the goal of the present article.

This work provides an analysis of the fictional dialogue of the first chapter of Faith, a novel by the British writer and novelist, Lesley Pearse. The choice of the novel itself is not considered key. It is most important though that it is a recent novel, with up-to-date topics relevant to an ordinary person. The research question that this author attempts to answer is the extent to which the FD (fictional dialogue) of the first chapter of the novel is similar to real talk and conversation. To this end the FD as a mimetic camouflage is discussed against selected cognitive, processing and pragmatic models of speech, talk and discourse. The analysis suggests that in many respects the FD of the first chapter of Faith is indeed a gross simplification of the processes that real talk involves. However, this is only to be expected given the contention that it only constitutes the writer’s construal of a prison conversation between women inmates. The FD contains only selected features of real talk. These, however, suffice for the reader to mentally simulate an entire scene.

Empirical Methods in Language Studies presents 22 papers employing a broad range of empirical methods in the analysis of various aspects of language and communication. The individual texts offer contributions to the description of conceptual strategies, syntax, semantics, non-verbal communication, language learning, discourse, and literature.

The unique strength of the current work is the author’s attempt to create his own framework for investigating construal, (…) drawing on a number of theoretical perspectives that have never before been brought together for this purpose. Thus, the empirical part of the monograph is deeply situated within the field of Second Language Acquisition, with its focus on the processing of language by L2 learners. (…) Since construal as such, the pivotal concept of the monograph, is a notion developed within Cognitive Linguistics, the major theoretical orientation of the book is quite obviously on theories developed within this field, (…). However, the author is not satisfied with such a narrow focus and expands his framework by connecting the concept of construal to the theoretical perspectives developed in other disciplines, such as philosophy, psycholinguistics, or cognitive psychology. An important and innovative approach to the notion of construal proposed in the volume is viewing attention, with its related concept of cognitive salience, as the most superordinate process in construal. This novel approach opens up exciting opportunities for future research projects, which will certainly be stimulated by the many excellent ideas and the sound and logical theoretical framework present in the current work. Reviewer Prof Anna Cieślicka

Contents: Janusz Badio/Kamila Ciepiela: Theoretical Perspectives on Interaction as a Cognitive and Social Phenomenon - Janusz Badio: Quantitative and Qualitative Aspects of Events in Polish-native and English-foreign Verbalizations of a Video Narrative Sequence - Myriam Boulin: Motion in Interaction: a Contrastive Study of French, English and Chinese - Krzysztof Kosecki: Metonymy as a Form of Expressing Identity in Phonic and Signed Languages - Lidia Khesed: Impolite Gesture in Russian Language: Definition, Typology and Cultural Specifications - Paulina Bialy: Sociolinguistic Contexts of Using Diminutives in Polish - Agnieszka Stepkowska: Identity and Language Ideologies: the Swiss Case - Ewa Glapka: Do Girls Just Want to Have Fun? Identities of Teenage Media Consumers in Talk - Kamila Ciepiela/Barbara Frankowska: Performance of Identities in the Queen of England's Public Speeches.