Quantitative corpus-based investigation of the epistemological status of characters in narrative texts about history

Abstract

The paper investigates how the epistemological status of discourse characters is construed in narrative texts about history. Epistemological status is a property of characters which is determined by the degree of mental access of the character to the factual world of the narrative. The first half of the paper describes the three types of cognition associated with characters by means of Fauconnier’s theory of mental spaces: knowledge, thought and the lack of knowledge. The second half of the paper presents a quantitative study of the epistemological status of 17 historical figures and 12 nations. The corpus of the research consists
of American texts on Google Books written between 2000 and 2010. The investigation focuses on the frequency of the following collocations expressing knowledge, thought and the lack of knowledge: name of person/nation + knew, name of person/nation + thought, name of person/nation + did not know, name of person/nation + knew nothing. The proportions of the occurrences of the collocations in the cases of historical figures and nations do not show remarkable differences, which means that the construal of the
epistemological status of historical figures and nations follows the same general schema. I also compared the frequencies of the conceptualisations of cognition related to nations with the frequencies experienced in the case of historical figures. The results show that the frequency in the case of nations is not less than in the case of historical figures.