Pragmatics of Narration with Language

This paper explores how research conducted into pragmatics and cognitionin the past fifty years can deepen our knowledge on natural languages, narra-tives, and ultimately language processing. Studies along this line were aimedat exploring how humans organise linguistic forms and expressions under theinfluence of several types of non-linguistic factors - that had for the most partbeen neglected by core linguistics - including the speaker’s communicativeaims, perceptual experiences, stance/viewpoint, as well as cultural and socialaspects of communication. One of the first and most e↵ective e↵orts towardsthis goal is the Pear stories Project launched by William Chafe, which re-vealed crucial insights into the relation between languages, cultures, and howhumans perceive, experience, and retell the same story, serving as foundationfor much progress in understanding both spoken and written language. Thepaper ultimately explores how some of the fundamental pragmatic elementsthat characterise narratives are present and in fact heavily influence the wayslanguages structure basic linguistic elements, such as clauses, sentences, and texts.