Henrik Skov Nielsen’s unnatural narrative theory not just remains at the level of pure formalist description. It also pays attention to the ways of interpreting unnatural narratives. While defining unnatural narrative, Nielsen considers both unnatural narrative’s formalist aesthetics and readers’ interpretation of it at the same time, emphasizing its feature of expanding the boundary of narrative forms. He then proposes“unnaturalizing reading”, advocating that readers should jump out of the existing cognitive frames based on experiential lives and refuse to naturalize fictional texts to the representation of real lives so as to gain fresh critical insights. Nielsen’s unnatural narratology establishes in the broader context that narrative forms undergoes constant expansion. His narrative poetics based unnatural narratives in return can interpret those narrative practices with new rhetorical forms and offer a kind of formalist perspective for understanding the development of literary history.
This study used the ERP（event-related potential） technique to investigate the number attraction effect in L2 agreement processing and its individual differences. Experiment results showed that advanced EFL learners exhibited distinct ERP patterns in different local noun conditions: ungrammatical verbs following singular local nouns elicited a P600 effect relative to their grammatical counterparts, whereas this positivity was replaced by an N400 effect when plural local nouns intervened between the subject head nouns and the verbs. Moreover, advanced EFL learners showed an asymmetrical pattern of attraction effect, in that plural local nouns interfered with the processing of ungrammatical sentences rather than grammatical sentences. Lastly, individual difference analyses revealed that EFL learners exhibited a pattern of N400—P600 continuum, with the number of P600-effect dominant participants being larger than that of N400-effect dominant participants in the singular local noun condition, but the number of N400-effect dominant participants larger than that of P600-effect dominant participants in the plural local noun condition. The overall outcome demonstrated that advanced EFL learners are sensitive to the attraction effect. Moreover, individual differences in the L2 number attraction effect implies that L2 syntactic processing is not restricted to a parsing route of a particular kind.
Diaspora literature has gradually become one of the hot issues in academic circles in the 1980s and 1990s. Franz Kafka is a Jewish writer who writes in German and mainly lives in Prague, the central city of Europe. He is not a typical diaspora writer because he does not have“personal diaspora experience”, and his works do not explicitly“express individual or group diaspora life”. However, not only Kafka’s thought but also his creation embody obvious“diasporality”. Kafka is a writer who was born, grew up and lived in the boom of diaspora, which must have influenced and shaped his unique writing style. In a word, both the tradition of diaspora culture and the source of today’s thriving diaspora literature could be traced back to Kafka.
“Crisis”, such as“burning down of home”, war subjugation and the invasion of history, is the major narrative theme in modern and contemporary Caribbean British diaspora literature.The description of crisis is intertwined with writer’s critical reflections on the secondary diaspora of British Caribbeans after the disintegration of particular communities, writer’s discussion on the important role of empathy mechanism in building an interracial community of destiny, and writer’s emphasis on the historical attributes of home and community life. As far as modern and contemporary British Caribbean diaspora writers are concerned, communities disintegrate or sustain because of crises. Consensus and empathy are not only at the core of the value discourse circulating in community but also the preconditons for the construction of home and community.
Figurative language processing is a highly interdisciplinary research field, which shows a tendency to integrate linguistics with other disciplines. To advance the understanding of the stateof-the-art in this field, this study, using a bibliometric method, explored research fronts and development trends between 2012 and 2021 from three aspects of major specialties, research foci, and emerging trends. It was found that the major specialties in this area over the past decade include the cognitive pragmatic study of metaphor, atypical population, bilingualism, sarcasm,irony, idioms, embodied cognition, conventionality and literary metaphor with research foci such as ERP, fMRI, eye movement, N400, cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The emerging trends are mainly related to the studies of the modulating effect of familiarity and individual factors,processing of various language types, and interdisciplinary study with pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics.
