The Universe of Discourse in a Virtual World: Triangulating Discourse Syntax with VR-Mediated Corpora, Sensory Schemata, and Cognitive Simulation

Abstract

In the universe of discourse and its text-internal and text-external worlds, information flows in and out of consciousness, shaping linguistic information structure. This thesis directs its scope to the central roles of cognition and text-external context in the syntactic construction of information structure. Following a comprehensive review of rationalist and empiricist research that identifies a range of context-sensitive constructional phenomena, the thesis presents an innovative simulationist exploration of these phenomena in discourse syntax. A two-phase mixed-method triangulation pipeline is designed and implemented to seek novel insights supported by the parallelism of language, cognition, and computation.

In the pipeline’s documentary phase, a virtual reality staging paradigm is applied to collect audiovisual data from thirty native speakers of Peninsular Arabic through utilizing virtual-reality-mediated fieldwork, immersive stimulus content, and participant psychological priming. The data is compiled into an egocentric embodiment corpus, systematically annotated by processing visual captures from virtual reality into spatiotemporal units and visual schema domains, which categorize text-external sensory-modality input based on patterns of visibility and actuation.

In the pipeline’s analytical phase, the quantitative component examines occurrence probabilities in the context of visual schema domains through a text-external abstraction linkage. The probabilistic results indicate that exposure to domain patterns triggers statistically significant effects of large magnitude associated with discourse-syntactic marking. A continuum mapping informed by these findings estimates trajectories of cognitive activation, reactivation, and deactivation.

The results further guide the qualitative component, enabling an empirical-theoretical integration into models of discourse and common ground in functional linguistics; attentive/preattentive processing and mental simulation in cognitive science; mental spaces in cognitive linguistics; and optimality in formal linguistics. The empirical findings of this work offer an explanatory account of the domain-general cognitive basis of information structure and support new theoretical proposals on sensory schemata, common ground simulation, activation equilibrium, ecosystemic marking inventory, and compensatory constructional optimization.