The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production

by Wallace Chafe (Editor)

From Preface to Volume III. The main object of the project, was to look for linguistic evidence that knowledge is stored in the mind in part analogically, and not only propositionally. As the project developed, however, a number of other hypotheses and findis regarding the relation betweenwhat people know and hwat they say began to emerge. This book presents some of the hypotheses and findings we thing worth putting int print. They are highly varied, covering a wide range of cognitive, cultural and linguistic topics, but they are unified in their elation to a single body of data.

350 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Wallace Chafe was one of the foremost original scholars of the functional theoretical approach to linguistics. He was involved in ongoing work with several communities of North American Indians, most notably the Seneca of New York. He also wrote extensively about discourse, language and consciousness, laughter, prosody, and other topics.
At the end of his life he was Professor Emeritus of the University of California, Santa Barbara.