Nikolaienko V. Linguo-cognitive analysis of English-language oneiric personal experience narrative

This thesis addresses linguo-cognitive parameters of written English-language dream reports as discursive and narrative entities. The studied corpus consists of 538 English-language dreams reports (157,200 words) collected from online dream journals on the website dreamjournal.net. The study was carried out within the theoretical and methodological framework of modern cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, and cognitive narratology. The present research aims to describe the linguo-cognitive nature of the dream narrativization process and hence focuses on the narrators’ subjective positioning regarding the narrated oneiric experience. In order to account for the genre-specific narrative characteristics of dream reports, the study applies the concept of perspective as a narrative construct that organizes narrative mental spaces of the story and links the perspective to eventfulness. The novelty of this research project resides in its combined methodology and the first detailed study of the discourse and narrative characteristics of the English-language dream reports from the perspective of discourse studies and cognitive narratology. Specifically, the tasks solved for the first time in this study include describing the dream report a separate genre of written narrative; identifying the tendencies of evidential marking of oneiric experience; establishing the comparative frequencies of semantic sensory modes involved in the conceptualization of the dream experience; outlining the tendencies of subjective positioning of narrators in relation to the narrated oneiric experience; modeling the dual functioning of the categories of narrator, focalizer, narrative perspective and point of view in dream stories; revealing the distinctive genre features of the mechanisms of narrativity and meaning-making in the dream reporting narrative. The practical value of the study lies in the possible application of the findings on the oneiric experience conceptualization in optional courses in the discourse theory (genristics), cognitive linguistics (theory of mental spaces), cognitive narratology, quantitative methods in linguistics, and corpus linguistics. The findings of the study can also be used in undergraduate and PhD research. The thesis consists of three chapters that consistently address the discursive and narratological theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the study; the analysis of the evidential and epistemic marking in the discourse of dream reporting; the cognitive architecture of the split narrative perspective, double eventfulness and twofold configuration of narrative spaces of the narratives of this genre; and the conclusion that summarizes the findings of the study and outlines its further prospects. The first chapter “Methodological Foundations for the Study of Written English-language Dream Reports Narrative” presents an analytical review of the study’s theoretical and methodological underpinnings in the realms of discourse studies and narratology. The written narrative of the dream report is positioned among other narrative genres and its distinctive genre features are discussed in the light of dream retelling as a cultural discursive practice. I conclude the chapter with a description of the key principles, tools, and procedure for the study of the dream narratives. The second chapter “Linguistic Means of Evidential Marking in Written English-language Dream Reports” presents the results of manual corpus annotation with selected subcategories of evidentiality, as well as an analysis of the conceptualization of oneiric experience and its sensory nature as it is represented in the narrative. Revelative evidentiality in English is viewed as a conceptual category in mutually constituent opposition with anti-revelative evidentiality to sustain the reliance on real knowledge and support epistemic control over the conceptualization of oneiric experience in the narrative. It was established that due to the dominance of sensory evidential markers in dream reports, oneiric experience is conceptualized as distinctly sensory. The third chapter “Narrative Space Configurations and Narrative Perspective in Dream Reports” follows the modeling of a dynamic narrative perspective in dream reports in order to clarify the genre-determining features of these narratives. I argue that the distinct genre-determining feature of the dream reporting narrative is double eventfulness, which in turn renders dynamic the function of narrative perspective and informs the co-formation and cross-update of two narrative spaces of the story (that of reality and of dream). The role of conceptual integration is elucidated as a mechanism that provides for the narrative construction of oneiric experience (meaning-making of the dream retelling narrative) based on the activation and integration of two concurrent mental spaces.