Chafe Wallace. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing

University Of Chicago Press, 1994. — 327 p. — ISBN: 0226100545.Wallace Chafe demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on close analyses of conversational speech as well as written fiction and nonfiction, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination.
Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many linguistic phenomena, such as pronouns, tense, clause structure, and intonation, as well as stylistic usages, such as the historical present and the free indirect style. While the book focuses on English, there are also discussions of the North American Indian language Seneca and the music of Mozart and of the Seneca people.This work offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language and consciousness that will interest linguists, psychologists, literary scholars, computer scientists, anthropologists, and philosophers.PreliminariesUnderstanding Language and the Mind
The Nature of Consciousness
Speaking and Writing
Flow
Intonation Units
Activation Cost
Starting Points, Subjects, and the Light Subject Constraint
Identifiability and "Definiteness"
The One New Idea Constraint
Discourse Topics
Topic Hierarchies and Sentences
Another Language
Some Alternative Approaches to Information Flow
The Flow of Consciousness in Music
Displacement
The Immediate and Displaced Modes in Conversational Language
Representing Other Speech and Thought in Conversation
Displaced Immediacy in Written First-Person Fiction
Representing Other Speech and Thought in First-Person Fiction with Displaced Immediacy
Displaced Immediacy in Written Third-Person Fiction
Written Fiction That (Partially) Lacks a Represented Consciousness
Written Nonfiction
Displacement Integrated with Flow
Written Paragraphs and Discourse Topics
Epilogue