The linguistics of narrative

Professor Paducheva's book "The Linguistics of Narrative" is a valuable contribution to the interface between linguistics and literature and to the building of bridges between English-based and Russian-based studies of the linguistic analysis of literary texts. Professor Paducheva is a world-class linguist who has a wide familiarity with literature and with works about literature written from many different perspectives. The importance of this book for linguistic theory comes from its systematic analysis of the semantic and pragmatic consequences of some essential properties of the "non-standard speech-act contexts" in which narrative texts are written and interpreted. The vast majority of research in semantics rests on data concerning language as it occurs in normal conversational situations, where "I", "here", and "now" are the speaker, the place, and the time of the utterance, and speaker and addressee are presupposed to be participating in a common speech-act situation. But there has been little systematic study of the differences in semantic and pragmatic interpretation between ordinary conversational language and narrative texts, and the book fills the gap. Barbara H. Partee