Schema theory and the processing of narrative texts: The x-bar story grammar and the notion of discourse topic

The Story Grammar approach suggests a model based on the generative framework, for representing both the structure of that class of narratives known as "Stories", and the cognitive aspects of story processing and comprehensive by actual readers (cf., e.g., Rumelhart (1975, 1977), Mandler and Johnson (1977), Stein and Glenn (1979). Thorndyke (1975)). The central aim of this paper is to suggest a radiacal revision of the S-G model (S-G=Story Grammar) replacing it with an X-Bar Story Grammar (XBSG), which incorporates the notion of the X-Bar system as developed in sentence level grammar (cf. Jackendoff (1977)). The XBSG will be presented in section 1. In section 2 I will argue that the XBSG is a framework within which central issues involved in the processing of narrative discourge can be accounted for; I will propose an analysis of one such issue, namely, the problem of the Discourse Topic construction within the XBSG framework.