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Abstract:
When asked to retell a cartoon story (
Canary Row
), most narrators avoid mentioning a particular piece of
information in the story. We found that narrators avoid mentioning it probably because by referring to it they
would collapse the catchment, which is the recurrence of one or more gesture features
in discourse and is useful
for reference maintenance
because of the recurrent features that suggest a common discourse theme.
The avoided information in question is the direction in which the cat, the protagonist, escapes from the old
woman in the punch line of the fifth scene. Up to that point, all of the scenes end with the cat being thrown out
from the left to the right of the screen (The vertical dimension
is ignored here). In the fifth scene, the cat escapes
from the right to the left, deviating from the consistent pattern that had been established by then. The irregular
pattern could possibly call for special attention as new information, but the piece of information is actually often
dropped from the narrative. We explain the phenomenon in terms of catchment, which in many narrations of this
particular story materializes as the default positions of the cartoon characters, direction of movement, etc.,
and is
used to maintain references. If the
narrator collapses
the catchment by
mentioning the deviant spatial pattern to
be precise, he or she would not be able to use the catchment for reference maintenance again.
Thus, for many
speakers, the priority was on easy reference maintenance by keeping the catchment intact. This also explains why
many speakers mention the deviant spatial pattern in the final scene, because the narrator no longer has to
maintain a reference after talking about the final scene.
The phenomenon suggests that the catchment not only
serves to achieve cohesiveness in discourse (e.g., reference maintenance), but also may constrain the selection of
information to talk about.
