Hierarchical structure in schematic representations: Aspects of meaning in the cinematic shot

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Journal of Pragmatics 26 (1996) 737-766

Hierarchical structure in schematic representations" Aspects of meaning in the cinematic shot Idan Landau* Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institue of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Abstract

The observation that the cinematic medium employs distinctive meaning-construction devices combined with the conviction that interpretation presupposes some preliminary cognitive processing, motivate attempts to explicate the former in terms of the latter. Focusing on one device - the cinematic shot - this paper examines such an attempt against some test cases from the movies of Alfred Hitchcock. The account proceeds in two stages: First, a hierarchical model of cinematic representation is developed, applying the 'basic level' analysis of categorial organization, proposed by Rosch et al. (1976), to the 'script' model of stereotyped schematic representations, proposed by Schank and Abelson (1977). Second, a scrutiny of 'discourse-violations' of the basic level in the cinematic exemplars is given a pragmatic account, shedding light on how these devices trigger meaning-construction in real-time viewing. A conclusion ensues, surveying some of the implications and consequences this study carries to both film criticism and cognitive theory.

O. Introduction This paper seeks to illuminate some aspects of the organization of the cinematic text that are implicated in its meaning-construction. Its major concern is the hierarchical nature of the cinematic representation, seen as a special case of a schematically structured text. The approach is cognitively oriented: It assumes the constructivist paradigm in cognitive science to explore the interaction of perception and interpretation. In particular, the model I will propose draws mainly on two research programs within the constructivist paradigm: The research program of Rosch and her colleagues,

* I am grateful to Rachel Giora and the anonymous Journal of Pragmatics reviewers for their detailed comments on earlier versions of this paper. " E-mail: [email protected] 0378-2166/96/$15.00 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PII S0378-2166(96)00022-7

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concerning basic categories in taxonomic organization, and the research program of Schank and Abelson, concerning the schematic organization of sequences of events as scripts (Section 1). The paper discusses the possibility of incorporating the key concepts of the two programs in a hierarchical model for textual organization, arguably applicable to the cinematic text. I will try to show how certain cinematic devices (for instance, longshots and zoom-shots) can be seen, from the cognitive perspective, as deliberate manipulations of the 'normal' (conventional, discourse-determined) level of representation, intended to trigger interpretive inferences on the part of the viewer. A considerable emphasis is put upon justifying, both empirically and theoretically, this 'hybrid model' (Section 2). Next, I explore the implications dictated by the model proposed in Section 2 with respect to meaning-construction processes in film viewing (Section 3). The account given is basically rooted in general pragmatic notions concerning various discourse phenomena (e.g., implicatures, segmentation and coherence). Most of the explanatory effort is directed at the level of a single or a few successive shots, yet not precluding the option of extending the model to longer segments. The illustrative cinematic samples are taken from Hitchcock's films, primarily because they provide us with crystal clear observations of meticulous, conscious and critical film-making, for which visual language is a fundamental tenet; a better 'laboratory' for the cinema researcher seeking to explicate (rather than metaphorize) the cinematic effect can hardly be found. Finally, one should bear in mind that although a general claim concerning schematic representations is made here, only its cinematic applications are explored in some detail. The proposed model is fairly preliminary, and is far from suggesting a total, comprehensive theory of meaning for film criticism. Rather, it should be taken (by cognitive theorists) as an attempt to extend the domain of applicability of current theories, and (by film theorists) as first, suggestive steps in an avenue too promising to remain unexplored.

1. The constructivist paradigm The constructivist approach underlying this work assumes that the growth of human knowledge is an outcome of a perpetual interaction between the inflow of environmental stimuli and our cognitive knowledge acquisition devices, combined with theretofore acquired knowledge (i.e., memory). It furthermore assumes that for knowledge acquisition to take place at all, some a priori set of principles has to determine what a stimulus in fact is, what it consists of, how it will be incorporated in our general experience, and how it is to be recorded in memory. More and more researchers in the last decades have come to realize the necessity of 'constitution principles' (to use Kantian terms) of this sort by way of accounting for the multitude of human cognitive capacities. The classical descriptive question ("Given such and such environmental conditions, how is a person placed in them predicted to behave?") was replaced by the explanatory question, "Given such and

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such human behaviour, the possession of what knowledge structures must be attributed to a person, in order to account for it?". As Bordwell (1989) notes, this version of constructivism (as opposed, for example, to some Piagetian versions) reconstructs, in an entirely new fashion, conventionalism as a critical-aesthetic stand, a point first realized by Gombrich (1962). The traditional account of the evolution of stylistic conventions and the formation of genres is now given a cognitive, naturalistic justification: The transformations in artistic conventions are viewed, in light of cognitive science, as subject to our perceptual system, so that artistic devices are ultimately explained in terms of cognitive constraints. Arbitrariness in creative development is curbed, the latter now understood as a dialectic interplay of learning and self-correction, an endless persistent quest for more and more perceptually adequate possibilities of representation and expression. Here lies, as Bordwell points out, the real relevance of the constructivist approach to critical theory in general, and to film theory in particular: "To learn something, you must already know something else. So if your theory of cinema assumes that discursive conventions,being historicallyand culturally contingent, must be learned, then the theory must either devise a new theory of concept acquisition or resort to some version of constructivism,which in turn requires some commitmentto prior factors." (Bordwell, 1989a: 21) Invoking the familiar 'poverty of stimulus' argument to establish the autonomy and richness of the mental apparatus, the constructivist is interested in three major domains - representation, processing and memory - which are crucially involved in the process information has to go through before it becomes knowledge. A constructivist explanation will often be formulated in structural terms; the meaning ascribed to a given system is not a function of the collection of its semantic-semiotic signifieds (as prevalent hermeneutic paradigms assume), but rather the very manner in which it is structured: Structure constructs meaning, or better, structure constrains meaning. It follows, then, that the question of meaning arises, in the framework of the constructivist explanatory effort, at stages in which it was not even formulable in the framework of classical paradigms (e.g., psychoanalysis or structuralism): Prior to the question what is the hidden metaphor in the father-son relationship in Providence by Alain Resnais, we wish to address much simpler and more 'primitive' questions: How come, for instance, we can actually 'build up' the character of the son, what sort of interaction between the cinematic expression and our own perceptual apparatus 'constructs' his contours; and perhaps, later on, we might inquire on what grounds in the first place we were led to believe that there was a metaphor here, Calling for unveiling. All these, in my view, are questions that logically precede the classical interpretation questions, as it is within the power of answers to the former to constrain the nature of answers to the latter. For this reason, the last section of this paper will attempt to examine in a critical way the implications of cognition studies for signification and coherence processes that enter into the interpretation of films.

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I begin with a brief survey of two research programs: The first, by Rosch and her colleagues (Rosch et al., 1976), concerns hierarchical structure of categorial organization over taxonomic dimensions; the second, by Schank and Abelson (1977), concerns schematic organization of stereotyped event-sequences as memory scripts. 1.1. The hierarchical structure of categorial organization

Rosch et al. (1976) argue that human perception is organized at different categorization levels. It appears that the cognitive representation of any taxonomy consisting of categories that are mutually related by inclusion relations, is best described as a 3-level structure: the 'upper' (superordinate) level, the members of which are specified at a (relatively) high level of abstraction; the intermediate (basic) level, the members of which are specified at an average, 'normal' level of abstraction; and the 'lower' (subordinate) level, the members of which are generally specified in elaborate details. Now the central claim of Rosch and her colleagues is this: The intermediate, basic level is indeed more 'basic' and more elementary than the other levels - either more or less abstract - in the taxonomic tree. Thus, for example, the category 'flower' is more basic than both 'plant' and 'daisy'. The precise sense of 'basic' employed here, and its manifestations in perception and processing, are the subject matter of the study. In the first part of their study, Rosch and her colleagues examine and corroborate the hypothesis that the basic level of categorization indeed reflects the correlational structure of objects' properties in the world. In other words, this is the most abstract level at which category members still share significant properties and similarity. Rosch and her colleagues show that subjects assign basic category members a considerably greater number of shared properties than they assign superordinate category members, a number in fact very close to that assigned to the subordinate category. Further, sharing of properties among category members is not limited to physical properties but is exhibited by functional ones as well: The basic level is the most abstract level at which many standard motor operations are done with category members; variability within superordinate level sharply increases. Significant visual similarity is found to hold among basic category members but not among superordinate category members; it is also demonstrated that the basic level is the most abstract level where similarity among members can still sustain identification of a "figurative average" of different members as a category member in itself. In other words, there is an average chair, but there is no average furniture, at least as far as visual memory is concerned. The research thus establishes the existence of a basic level, which is the most abstract level still exhibiting a maximization of intra-categorial cohesive factors, which are not effectively enhanced in its subcategories. Rosch et al. further demonstrate that the physical advantages of the basic level are manifested in clear cognitive advantages as well. The basic level is the most abstract categorization level still maintaining a distinct visual representation of (almost isomorphic to) a category member. The availability of such a representation signifi-

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cantly improves identification of presented objects as belonging to the same category, or determining whether or not they are instances of a given category. These findings are especially relevant to the thesis I am about to propose later on. In membership identification tasks, subjects primarily assign presented objects to their basic level of categorization rather than to other levels. Lower performance was attested for both super- and subordinate levels, suggesting that the accessibility of basic level representation for processing needs - at least short-term ones - is higher than the accessibility of representations of other levels. The results also concur with the fact that 'category cue validity', a measure expressing the distinctiveness of a category in terms of the conditioned probability for an item to belong to it, given a certain property the item has, peaks at the basic level and drastically decreases at other levels. Rosch et al. assume that assignment to superordinate level occurs only after basic level assignment has taken place, and is solely based upon inferences drawn from inclusion relations on the taxonomic tree, whereas assignment to subordinate level requires the detection and identification of additional features in the object, which they alone can identify it as a member in this sub-category and not the other. This assumption is supported by evidence, as reaction times for superordinate assignment were shorter than the ones for subordinate assignment: The former, once basic level assignment was carried out, requires no further input; the latter obligates processing of additional input. This conclusion will also have important bearing on the arguments to follow. Developmentally, it is shown that basic categories are acquired by children before sub- and superordinate categories, and that they are the categories that dominate their visual perception. Further, the cognitive prominence of basic level categories is reflected in linguistic encoding: Nouns related to the basic level are most fequently used to designate objects, significantly preferable to nouns related to other levels of categorization. Finally, the first words in the child's lexicon belong to the basic level, and there is some evidence that languages lacking 'taxonomic depth', like sign language, tend to omit the edge levels rather than the prevalent basic level. One should add that Rosch et al. do not consider basic categories themselves as some kind of pre-determined cognitive universals, but only the formative principle of their generation as such. In other words, what will be considered a basic category in culture X, maintaining a certain world view, will not necessarily be so in culture Y, maintaining a different world view. The 'cutting points' of the spectrum of stimuli along a taxonomic scale, which divide it into categories, are not fixed, and their exact location is subject to the influence of personal and cultural parameters, beyond the universal physiological basis of perception. As Rosch et al. summarize: "Basic objects for an individual, subculture or culture, must result from an interaction between the potential structure provided by the world and the particular emphases and state of knowledge of the people who are categorizing." (1976: 430) Variability, hence, is not infinite, but bounded, both by the objective structure of the world, and by the structure of the human categorizing device.

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1.2. The script: Schematic organization of a sequence of events Along the principles outlined by Minsky (1975), Schank and Abelson (1977) attempt to formulate a comprehensive multi-layered theory of human knowledge and understanding mechanisms. This attempt is guided by two motivations: The first theoretical, concerns the uncovering of the cognitive knowledge structures that organize our representation of the world, texts included; the second - applicative, concerns the modeling of these structures in computer programs for the purposes of AI research. The core assumption of Schank and Abelson is the one shared by all constructivists: Namely, that a virtually 'quantic' gap lies between the meager quantity of information provided by the stimulus and the enormous quantity of information that we are capable of inferring from it and exploiting in complex ways. Schank and Abelson try to characterize the cognitive mechanism which "fills" that gap, which in fact is present in every act of understanding, no matter how simple and ordinary. In order to represent in a clear and accurate way the semantic processes involved in text comprehension, Schank and Abelson employ a procedure of 'semantic decomposition' of propositions, called CD (conceptual dependency). In this system, every noun or verb in the language is represented as a unique composition of universal semantic primitives, the combination of which creates its overall meaning. The representation of a proposition in this system is called a conceptualization, and is usually formulated in terms of elementary states, elementary operations and roles (agent, patient), causally linked together. By way of illustration, the verb buy is a combination of two conceptualizations with two participants around the primitive act ATRANS (the transference of an abstract relationship, like possession, control and so on, from one party to another): ATRANS of money from the buyer to the seller, and ATRANS of the goods from the seller to the buyer. Schank and Abelson enumerate a relatively limited set of such 'building blocks', with which one can compose every normal expression in language (including complex mental operations), and also some 'building relations', enabling the composition itself: Causation, enablement and prevention. Hereby one of the central theses of Schank and Abelson's theory is implied: The major task in the course of text comprehension is the reconstruction of the causal connections among its constituents, in a manner that will 'fill in' whatever the text itself omitted. Thus, in a sentence like: -

(1) John gave Bill tea for his cold. we must infer by ourselves that John wanted to cure Bill or ease his cold (that is, to extract implicit goals), and for this intention to be realized, Bill has to drink the tea (that is, to construct predictions). Furthermore, even when a causal connection is linguistically present in an explicit from, an exclusive reliance on it will not suffice to construct a coherent picture of the true state of affairs: (2) John didn't come because he broke his arm.

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It takes quite a rich, elaborate world knowledge to be able to come up with the interpretation that the breaking of the arm prevented John from coming not because he actually used the arm to come, but because it prevented him from participating in the main activity taking place at where he was supposed to arrive. However, if utilizing the text for the construction of the CD representation proves problematic already in single sentences, how is it to be accomplished in full texts - even the simplest ones? (3) John went to a restaurant. He ordered roast beef. He paid and left. How do we understand such a text? If, following Schank and Abelson, we construe 'understanding', or at least a major aspect of it, as being able to construct a detailed representation of the causal 'infra-structure' of the text, then it turns out we in fact 'read' a lot more than is written in (3): We know for sure that John entered the restaurant, looked for a free table, sat down, asked for a menu, looked through it, ordered, waited for his order to arrive, and finally ate. But notice that of all the above-mentioned actions (themselves already abbreviated), only one appears in the text; and yet it seems one need not be very imaginative in order to deduce them from it. If so - why? First, what is the source of this elaborate knowledge we unconsciously employed to 'fill' the blank spaces in the text? Secondly, what is the precise nature of the mapping process that took place between the externally given information and the internally supplementary information? Schank and Abelson offer the script theory as an answer to these and related questions. A script is a specific knowledge structure, organizing what we know about a certain stereotyped state of affairs/sequence of events in a detailed, structured manner. The organization is schematic: It is a spatio-temporal chaining of all the conceptualizations involved in a characteristic instantiation of the script. The restaurant script, for example, which Schank and Abelson discuss extensively, consists of four major scenes: Entering, ordering, eating and leaving. In each scene there is one (or two) main conceptualization - Schank and Abelson name it a MAINCON accompanied by other related actions. In addition, the script defines roles (customer, waiter, cook ...), and is usually constructed from the perspective of one of them. Without ramifications to sub-scripts ("the food is cold!", "the waiter who drops the dish", "who pays ... ?" etc.), an average script of this type can contain dozens of conceptualizations. How is a script applied? Once it is activated (Schank and Abelson do not resolve the patent problem of the precise specification of the activation triggers of a script), the script functions as a sort of a "knowledge anchor' for text processing and comprehension, supporting and supplementing it whenever unexpected blanks call for filling in. If only ordering and paying are mentioned in the text, then, knowing that a pre-condition to the paying conceptualization is receiving the food and eating it, we can fill this gap in the text by 'copying' the appropriate actions from the script; similarly, as script roles imply certain typical courses of action, they help us predict forthcoming information - and complete the default values in case none shows up.

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What the script enables, therefore, is the reconstruction of the implicit steps between every two explicit points in the text. A continuous mental representation of the text is thus constructed, of which all the parts are equally accessible to processing and memory, whether they originated in the text or in the script. That is why it is perfectly natural to encounter linguistic markers of highly accessible entities (e.g., the definite article) attached to entities that were not explicitly mentioned in the preceding text ("John entered a restaurant. The waiter approached him ..."). Naturally, the inferability of an entity or an action from a script is inversely related to the quality and duration of its encoding in memory. In other words, the more typical and frequent an object or an action is within a script, the less mental resources will be allotted to its processing and storage, so more of these will be available for handling exceptional cases which are not directly inferable from the standard script. The script, then, has two functions: First, it provides a knowledge-base for the construction of meaningful representations of texts and thus facilitates their comprehension; secondly, it is a selective information encoding sieve, resolving the recurring conflict between the need to remember as much as possible and the limited storage capacity of our memory. Let me finally remark that within the boundaries imposed on the concept of the script by these specifications, limited variability is permitted. Basically, scripts are standard, rigid and deterministic knowledge structures. Nevertheless, our ability to understand quite easily events and texts that diverge from their acceptable scripts, indicates the existence of 'compensatory' or 'detour' devices, which account for successful processing with such cases as well. Schank and Abelson propose several options, starting from script ramifications to sub-cases and ending with 'traverse strategies' based on general plans and goals directing the organization of the text; I will return to these issues in Section 3.

2. The hierarchical structure in schematic organization 2.1. The model

The claim I would like to put forward here concerns the internal structure of schematic representations. Inasmuch as categorial organization is hierarchical, schematic organization exhibits hierarchical structure as well. Schank and Abelson's model accommodates (indeed, even supports) the division of the script-based organization spectrum into three levels of abstraction, bearing a considerable resemblance to the Roschian levels of categorization. If this is the case, it follows that there is (in the absence of any alternative terminology, I will stick to the original one) a basic level in the mental representation of scripts, from which one can both 'ascend' and 'descend' to super- and subordinate levels. Although categorial organization is evidently very different from schematic organization - the first defines hierarchies in a semantic space, the second does it in a spatio-temporal space - I maintain that (the majority of) Rosch et al.'s insights are also applicable, to some extent, to the analysis of schematic organization.

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It js worth emphasizing that the following analysis does not aim merely to point at arbitrary analogies between the two systems. The resemblance between the schematic and the categorial organization, is more than superficial topological correspondence; it is arguably an inherent feature of the mental categorization device as such. The purpose of this section is thus to justify the analogy between the two structures, and this justification has to be articulated in terms of their cognitive functions. However, it is obvious that for this hypothesis to be fully confirmed, further empirical tests against a variety of schematic phenomena are required.

2.2. The 'fractal' problem The early version of Schank's CD theory was criticised for imposing no constraints on the amount of elaboration of the conceptualizations constituting a typical script. The attempt to maximally explicate the inference processes involved in text comprehension has brought about a situation where a three-line text could be assigned an intricate, lengthy conceptual-semantic 'deep structure', sometimes several pages long. Indeed, in principle, there is no a priori limit to the level of specification one can arrive at in representing of any given event. This problem I called 'the fractal problem', after the mysterious creature from chaos theory, which is 'similar to itself' at any observed level, no matter how infinitesimal. Two related problems come to mind: First, from the representational angle, is it plausible to assume that the scripts stored in our memory are really complex multibranched 'monsters'? If so, what sort of activation device could efficiently access such memory units? Secondly, from the processing angle, is it plausible to assume that all the detailed conceptualizations ('the waiter moves his head, turns around, moves his legs towards the table, halts, bends forward ...', or instead of all that 'the waiter comes') are available or even useful in real time processing of texts? The CD theory, evidently, had to be revised. Schank and Abelson resorted to the familiar procedure in such cases, namely, positing several levels of representation, which differ along the abstraction dimension. During normal text processing, reconstruction of the underlying causal structure does not always involve an elaborate CDrepresentation; the human understanding 'device' can handle larger 'chunks' of representation, more 'abstract' and composite, relate them directly to one another and decompose them into their constituents. Consequently, Schank and Abelson arrive at the distinction between two levels of description of event-sequences: The microscopic, which is the original instrumental CD level, and the macroscopic, which is a sort of abstraction and summary of the microscopic level. The CD tree in the macro-level contains only the central 'goal-oriented' actions in the script (the MAINCONS of every scene), chained directly to one another, with no further specification of their constituent 'atomic' conceptualizations. Every node in the macro-representation functions as a pointer to the sequence of events it summarizes, which in turn is accessible at the micro-level. Finally, there is the most abstract level of Knowledge Structure (KS), specifying only scripts titles, themes, goals and roles active in a given text, without further details:

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"We are left, then, with three levels of representation: The Knowledge Structure Level for themes, goals, plans and scripts, The MacroscopicConceptual level for goal-orientedglobal actions that are summaries of action sequences; and the MicroscopicConceptual Dependencylevel for interconnectedcausal chains of physical events." (Schank and Abelson, 1977: 164) Putting terminological nuances aside, it is important to notice two major points: First, Schank and Abelson introduce here, for the first time, a triple-level representation model ~t la Roch et al.; Secondly, though it is not formally stated, they seem to regard the intermediate level - the macro-level, in their terms - as the functionally basic level of the representation. Furthermore, although Rosch et al. do not pursue the implications of their theory for other cognitive organization models, they do speculate (towards the end of their paper) in a surprisingly similar spirit: "... it (the categorizationprinciple) may provide insights into how the stream of experiencebecomes segmented into events." (1976: 435) One should bear in mind that Rosch et al. and Schank and Abelson, prima facie, differ in every conceivable aspect: Their theoretical frameworks, methodologies of investigation and types of relevant data are fundamentally different, if not unrelated. Therefore, the generalization emerging from the two works is anything but trivial: In order to account for the cognitive organization competence attested during text comprehension, it is necessary to assume a hierarchy of at least three levels of representation in memory; this topological hierarchy also defines a cognitive priority hierarchy, where the 'privileged' level, in terms of immediateness of processing and assignment of mental resources, is the basic (intermediate) level. That scripts might possess a hierarchical structure as well as a schematic one, has already been suggested by several script researchers (see Abbott et al., 1985; Barsalou and Sewell, 1985). These suggestions mainly draw on one central observation, namely, that people can access directly different points along a script, in what seems to be a non-linear way. Abbott et al. (1985) argue that subjects' performance on memory and inference tasks with scripts indicates that in addition to their temporal organization, scripts are also structured by superordinate relations; Further, there is evidence for the existence of an intermediate basic level in the sense employed in categorial organization. I will return to these suggestions to clarify where they converge on and diverge from the current proposal. Why should one regard the intermediate level (merely a positional feature) of schematic organization as a real basic level (a distinct cognitive feature)? Because it satisfies, as I argue below, most of Rosch et al.'s crucial criteria for 'basic levelness', mutatis mutandis, within the schematic hierarchy. (I) The basic level of the script is the most abstract level of schematic organization still preserving the characteristic spatio-temporal relations of entities in the worM. The basic level of the script representation consists of summarizing actions and events which are abstract enough to avoid a laboriously detailed representation, yet

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sufficiently concrete to allow direct access to their underlying subordinate constituents. Consider, for example, the usage of the verb go. Its inherent polysemy escapes our attention due to external disambiguating factors, such as context and intonation. However, it seems quite obvious that the meanings of went in (4) and (5) differ drastically: (4) I went to the kitchen. (5) We went to a movie While the first went denotes a simple physical action (again, 'simple' for the sake of the present argument), representable by a simple 'movement' conceptualization, the second went is totally different; it may subsume many sub-events: Leaving the house, reaching the cinema, waiting in line, buying tickets, entering the hall, taking a seat, etc. In fact, not only does (5) imply that eventually we saw the movie, but it is quite possible that those who uttered it did not physically went (= walked) to a movie, but rather arrived by car! In principle, one can easily imagine many completely different scenarios corresponding to (5), all of which could be truthfully reported by the same laconic utterance. The relevant conclusion seems to be this: What all the different uses of the verb go have in common, is the availability of an appropriate script representation, both in the speaker's and the hearer's consciousness. Specifically, each go is, in fact, a title of a sub-script, or a possible scene from some "movement" script in the basic level; its constituent microscopic actions and events are specified within the subordinate level. In virtue of its being represented at the basic level, any appeal to it is sure to have convenient and rapid access routes to its subordinate levels whenever the need arises. By contrast, appeal to the superordinate level would lack all the schematic information necessary for the reconstruction of the text's spatio-temporal organization (compare (5) to we m o v e d to the entertainment hall). Now, on what grounds did we refer to the basic level as more 'abstract' than the subordinate one? More generally, in what sense are schematic organization levels comparable along an 'abstractness' dimension? Surely this sense cannot be identical to its counterpart in categorial organization: One can hardly expect (semantic) class inclusion relations to hold between schemes. Yet, I believe there is a sense in which one schematic representation, say R1, can be said to be more abstract than another, R E. First, elements in RI, though specified identically to elements in R2, may refer to more complex, ramified sequences of operations, some of which can be purely abstract, in the common sense of the word. Secondly, R t may already presuppose some abstract connections to hold among its constituents (inferential, analogical and so on), whereas RE'S 'concreteness' might not appeal to them (recall the above pair of sentences (4, 5). Alternatively, one may wish to express the relationship between the various levels in other ways. For instance, one may maintain that the crucial differentiation lies in the informativeness of the representations (i.e., the 'higher' the representation, the less informative it is). Thus, a basic level schematic description contains more information than its superordinate counterpart (hence, is less abstract) and less than

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the subordinate level description. The property under discussion can be taken to claim that the basic level is the least informative level of schematic organization still preserving the characteristic spatio-temporal relations of entities in the world. Simply put, this amounts to the natural assumption that if you want to obtain the richest description by the poorest means, you should use basic level 'lexicon'. (II) Cue validity maximizes at the basic level (in comparison to other levels), i.e., a minimum of information can determine a maximum of distinctiveness of the related scheme. This contention appears intuitive and self-evident, especially if one's world of associations is cinematic. Given our cinematic experience, it is quite obvious that some shots are immediately identified from the outset, whereas others' identification is delayed, as we hesitate a few seconds before we can positively decide 'what it is' over there on the screen. Methods of delaying identification are numerous, but as we shall see (Section 3), many of them can be described in terms of deliberate deviations from the basic level. Whether it is a close-up or a long-shot distant from the scene of activity, our ability to identify a familiar scheme is heavily dependent upon the 'level of specification' of the visual field exposed to us by the camera. A compelling discussion touching precisely on this point, both cognitively and historically, )s to be found in Gombrich (1962). Even though Gombrich's interest is primarily in the plastic arts - painting and sculpture - his insights are relevant, in my view, to every visual domain in modem representation. Gombrich surveys the history of the delicate and intricate dialectics underlying the aesthetic experience: This is the interplay between the technical competence of the artist and the imagination faculty of the observer. The ancient attempt in art to create the perfect illusion, namely, the illusion that were the observer to stand in the position of the painter, in similar weather and illumination conditions, he would have seen the painted object exactly as it looks in the painting, has taken innumerably various forms. Importantly, it sharpened the distinction between realism and illusionism, or if you like, between different degrees of sophistication within realism. The real illusion, it turned out, does not lie in meticulous fidelity to details, but rather in a sort of flowing 'ease' of the painting, a slight obscurity of the sharp contours, and a tendency towards an 'unfinished' finish. Gombrich cites Vasary, who contrasts the two Singing Galleries for the Florentine Cathedral, done by Luca and Donatello: "[Donatello] left it rough and unfinished, so that from a distance it looked much better than Luca's; though Luca's is made with good design and diligence, its polish and refinementcause the eye from a distance to lose it and not to make it out as well as that by Donatello,which is hardly more than roughed out." (1962: 162) Here a completely new conception of art and artist--observer relationship emerges. The perfect work of art is no longer the classical 'one to one' imitation of nature, but rather the work which successfully invokes the projection of the observer's internal

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images onto the painting, so as to fill the blanks deliberately left by the ' s l o p p y ' brush o f the artist. A m o n g the artists that have reached the maturity o f this recognition, according to Gombrich, are the late Titian and Gainsborough. Note that this recognition, in the context of the present discussion, is nothing else than the conscious shift from the subordinate level of representation to the basic level of representation. The Renaissance artists rediscover a truth k n o w n long before to the great Hellenistic sculptors: That for the illusion effect to be realized in the mind o f the beholder, so that a m i n i m u m of visual cues would yield a m a x i m u m of mental images (the Roschian cue validity), the 'representation lens' has to be tuned to an average focus, neither too strong nor too weak; one should c o n v e y the essence of things accurately - but not too accurately; one should replicate the colour contrasts o f the original - yet not too faithfully. In short, one should be a realist without sanctifying reality. G o m b r i c h summarizes the conditions o f illusion: "There are obviously two conditions that must be fulfilled if the mechanism of projection is to be set in motion. One is that the beholder must be left in no doubt about the way to close the gap; secondly, that he must be given a 'screen', an empty or ill-defined area onto which he can project the expected image." (1962: 174) The great illusion artists were those who erties of our imagery and visual perception half o f the long mysterious w a y between pictures constructed in our minds; the other by a few directive landmarks. 1

knew (even tacitly) to exploit the propin such a way, so that they walked only the paint stains on the canvas and the half, we had to walk by ourselves, aided

(III) The basic level of the script is the most abstract level associated with a con-

crete visual representation capable of facilitating memory and processing. W h a t this characterization amounts to is the claim that schematic organization o f higher abstractness than the basic level will be chiefly encoded in the semanticverbal m e m o r y , while basic level 'information r will be additionally (not exclusively) preserved in visual m e m o r y , or what has been called imagery. Therefore, it goes one significant step b e y o n d the general claim made in the first characterization: Spatiotemporal relations are actually preserved in a roughly isomorphic way to the experienced sequence o f events, in addition to semantic encoding. O f all the claims about the basic level, this seems to me the hardest to establish. Even Rosch et al.'s experiments do not appear to support it directly; at the most, they provide a compatible corpus o f findings. The difficulty lies in the shift from the question "what is d o n e ? " to the question "how is it d o n e ? " . It is one thing One cannot help speculating, in view of these observations, that modem art took the course outlined in the Renaissance almost up to its end: Not satisfied with the basic level opportunities, it 'soared' up to the superordinate one. Whether in impressionism or conceptual art, it seems that the observer is required to apply more and more abstract decoding schemata, their 'grip' on the canvas being gradually weakened. In its most extreme forms, this art imparts the whole burden of 'creation' on the miserable observer: There you have a black square in the comer of a white square - and you do the rest ....

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to assume that the basic level organization has certain processing and encoding advantages, but it is another thing to conclude that these advantages are imparted by one mechanism rather than another. Unfortunately, we have no guarantee that this conclusion is totally immune from the fundamental uncertainty that this kind of research is exposed to, namely, our inability to disentangle (unequivocally) preverbal from post-verbal effects. The findings and hypotheses to be presented, although concurring with the view that the basic level representation contains a purely visual component, nevertheless do not preclude the possibility that any apparent difference between the levels is due to some intra-linguistic processes. An imagery researcher, Paivio (1971), surveys a series of works which study the connection between the properties of a visual scene and the quality of its encoding in memory, as exhibited in recall tests. These works seem to suggest that objects are significantly better recalled when presented in some mutual interaction, than in separation or in arbitrary adjacency: A lion and a deer presented in a chase scene were better recalled than a lion and a deer not incorporated in any scene. Similar results are obtained for both verbal (sentence presentation) and visual (picture presentation) stimuli: "... among the variables that have been considered meaningful, spatial organization is perhaps the most important feature of effective mediating images." (1971: 350) The application of theoretical terms, as it often happens in experimental psychology, is not sufficiently rigorous and clear: What exactly is 'spatial organization' in this context? Presumably, in the general case, it refers to a certain kind of conn e c t i o n between the objects, recently labeled as schematic. Those stimuli, whose constellation enables us to 'project' a familiar, organizing and signifying scheme onto them, are the ones to be best remembered. Naturally, the scenes discussed are specified in the basic level, hence their saliency. It is a well-known fact that concrete nouns, in general, are capable of inducing a more immediate and stable visual representation than abstract nouns, and this was verified in numerous experiments. Texts depicting scenes that vary along an abstractness dimension enable one to examine of the 'strength' of visual representation for every given level of abstraction, and its role in text comprehension. Paivio cites the results of one of these studies: "... comprehensionwas significantlyfaster for high- and medium-imagerysentences than for lowimagery sentences." (1971 : 444) These results, then, also confirm our hypothesis: If we construe 'low-imagery sentences' as sentences describing typically superordinate level scenes, then the most abstract (least informative) level where visual representations still enhance comprehension is the basic level. I should note, though, that the somewhat obscure nature of the theoretical discussion in this domain (until very recently), together with the inherent complexity of the problem itself allow for a wide variety of altemative accounts (the intervention of categorial rather than schematic organization, conflation of inference processes and access processes, etc.).

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(IV) The basic level is the level where the initial mapping and organization of input occurs, prior to abstraction onto the superordinate level and particularization onto the subordinate level. As mentioned previously, the priority of the basic level is manifested both in processing and encoding. Given an input attributable to some scheme, its initial encoding will take place at the basic level, and only then, in accordance with its informational content and the encoder's various needs, will the other levels of representation be constructed. Several predictions concerning identification and memory tasks follow, which were verified experimentally time and again. Presented scenes are mostly remembered in an average level of specification, in spite of the availability of time to study their details; the quality of memory is defected by significantly basic violations of the scheme, almost indifferent to changes in its infrastructure (cf. Biederman et al., 1973). The preference of the basic over the superordinate level is quite understandable, in view of the latter's 'poverty' as a schematic organization unit, designed to provide as many 'slots' for incoming information as possible. But why is the basic level preferable to the subordinate one as well? Prima facie, the subordinate level, being more informative and explicit, should count as a better starting point for the construction (or activation) of a script. Stenning (1986), who explores the ways in which mental models are constructed, offers a few pertinent insights. In this study, parameters influencing the construction of a mental model for the representation of simple texts are examined. The treatment of extremely simple texts, the complexity of which differs only with respect to two dimensions - the number of objects and the number of predicates in the model - enables one to effectively control the course of the experiment and consistently interpret its results. Accumulating reading times of sentences in two kinds of textual organization are compared: A text in which every object is followed by its predications (object by object); and a text in which every predicate is followed by the objects it predicates (predicate by predicate). The results of the comparison suggest that the addition of every new predicate to an object 'costs' extra processing time, whereas the addition of objects to a given model hardly does so. For example, a sentence introducing the fourth predication of the first object will be read much more slowly than a sentence introducing the first predication of the fourth object. This result was also obtained for the "predicate by predicate" textual ordering, suggesting that the dominant determiner of reading time is not sentence ordering or similar 'surface factors', but rather the amount of predications already incorporated in the mental model, into which new information is to be assimilated. One should bear in mind that the subordinate level is essentially an elaboration and refinement of the basic level, i.e., its enrichment with new predications rather than new objects. In fact, what we perceive as an 'object' is inevitably scale-dependent, and usually reflects the range of values characteristic of the basic level: In a living room scene, the couch, the television and the painting will be considered as 'objects', whereas the couch's legs, the volume adjustor and the frame of the paint-

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ing will not be so considered, even though any of the latter is no less 'real' and tangible than any of the former, and one can easily conceive a situation in which the latter appear separated from their respective 'containing' objects. Quite similarly, we will generally avoid referring to superordinate level object-clusters as 'objects' (a whole wall in the room, the dining 'area', etc.). From the perspective of the present work, then, Stenning's research illuminates a fundamental feature of mental models' birth: The construction of a subordinate level representation requires extra processing, dedicated to the incorporation of new incoming predications into the present model. The richer the model, the longer the processing, since every new predicate has to be ascribed an increasingly specific sense with respect to its predecessors: The knowledge that I bought a car delimits the range of values available for the description big; the knowledge that I bought a big car delimits the range of values available for the description expensive (with respect, say, to a merely unqualified car) and so on. Furthermore, 'updating' a model at the subordinate level is a long and complex process; it involves inferring from old material in order to incorporate new material, rather than mapping the new material into pre-existing 'slots' - as is the case in the basic level. Therefore, the subordinate level representation, lacking most of the accommodation mechanisms already built in the basic level scheme, is less adapted to handling digressions and unpredictable changes in inflowing input. It will have been constructed, if at all, only after the basic level representation has stabilized, to provide an 'anchor' for the initial organization of the input. In practice, for ordinary communication and expression purposes, as Mandler (1984) notes: "Details of events below the 'basic level' at which we encode and categorize incoming information are usually not noticed or remembered, even though they may typically occur in a situation." (1984: 103) What ultimately determines the 'depth' of the schematic representation of a certain input will be the cognitive needs dictated by the ever-changing involvement of the individual in his or her environment. 2.3. Various notions of basic level

It is worth noting that my construal of the hierarchical structure of schematic organization is somewhat different from other proposals made in the literature. In particular, the present analysis should not be confused with terminologically related works on what has been termed 'the basic level in event taxonomies'. These studies (e.g., Rifkin, 1985; Morris and Murphy, 1990), although dealing with schematically structured memory representations - namely, with events - are essentially studies in categorial organization. The last comment calls for clarification. Rifkin (1985) aims to establish the existence of a basic level in the representation of events, by showing it to fulfill one of Rosch et al.'s crucial tests for basic level: It is "the most inclusive level in taxonomies at which clusters of features are attributed to categories" (1985: 540). Thus,

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for triplets like meal-breakfast-quick breakfast or entertainment-movies-horror movies, it was found that the middle (arguably, basic) terms elicited more attributes in common than both the first (superordinate) and the last (subordinate) terms did. Notice, first of all, the 'scale' shift: Rifkin's basic level in event taxonomies roughly corresponds to my superordinate level in scripts (namely, the title). However, importantly, this shift does not carry over to the subordinate level: 'Quick breakfast' - a subordinate term according to Rifkin - is definitely not a basic level term in script organization. This discrepancy follows from the fact that while the present model adapts the Roschian notions of hierarchical relations to fit into a schematic framework, Rifkin's analysis goes a little beyond, if at all, what has already been stated by Rosch and her colleagues. Thus, he is interested in descriptive 'terms' rather than descriptive narratives, 'features' rather than spatio-temporal connections (cf. my first criterion for basic level), and 'A being an instance of B' rather than 'A being an action implementing B'. A horror movie is no more schematically subordinate to a movie than a coffee table is to a table; both are exemplars of categorial terms in taxonomical organization, figuring in purely semantic inclusion relations. Similar considerations hold regarding Morris and Murphy (1990). In this study, the authors aim to corroborate Rifkin's thesis through converging operations borrowed from Rosch et al. (1976). Although 'features' here were replaced by 'actions' in elicitation tasks, the approach is practically identical; events are viewed as terms on a taxonomic scale, with no internal, schematic structure, which can be represented in varying degrees of elaboration. What these findings amount to, then, is that scripts as such (whether or not a 'basic level' label is attached to them), are useful, facilitating memory devices for cognitive processing. But this, I believe, deserves by now to be a departure point for our study, rather than a final conclusion. Other studies in the field are closer to this one, at least in the extension they give to the notion of the basic level in scripts. Abbott et al. (1985) view the script as a 3layered knowledge-organization: The script header, the scene headers and the scene action (corresponding to the super, basic and subordinate levels respectively). The three levels are vertically connected, while horizontal, temporal connections hold between scene headers and between scene actions (of the same scene). Abbott et al. conducted recall tests and found that while subjects always infer a scene header from one of its scene actions (even when the former had actually been absent from the presented script), the opposite inference is unattested. From this they concluded that processing scripts crucially entertains hierarchical representations, thereby obligatorily activating all scene headers (= basic level actions) and optionally their corresponding scene actions. However, it is not clear from Abbott et al.'s account just what makes the level of scene headers a functionally cognitive basic level. Being indispensable for every path through the script, as they claim it to be, does not yet constitute a basic level. In fact, none of the crucial characteristics of a basic level entail this property; one can easily scan the members/actions of a category/script purely at the super or subordinate level of abstraction, suppressing any reference to the basic level. True, such an operation will be cognitively unproductive - but surely feasible.

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It is important to realize that given two distinct levels of abstraction, an element of one of them is no more 'necessary' or 'unnecessary' than an element of the other; each is equally important for the representation of the script at its own level. Thus, Abbott et al. seem to confuse abstraction with centrality, taking the latter to imply the former. Consider, for example, one of their experiments (1985:191), which uses the script 'In the classroom'. The authors distinguish between a scene header ('she listened to the teacher's lecture') and a scene action ('she took careful notes'). Obviously, the first action is more central (typical, essential, etc.) to this script, but can it be said to be more abstract than (superordinate to) the second one? It also seems to me that Abbott et al.'s application of the Roschian measures of similarity and distinctiveness is over-simplistic. Basic level categories in schematic organization are individuated not so much in virtue of their internal similarity and external dissimilarity (fundamentally categorial attributes), but rather by bearing those significant processing-features discussed above. Finally, the authors take vertical relations in scripts to be exclusively temporal; that is, action A is superordinate to action B only if B is part of A - in terms of duration. However, levels of scriptal representation can also vary in their spatial abstraction; this observation, indeed, will motivate much of the following discussion on representation in cinema.

3. Hierarchies in the cinematic shot: Meaning aspects "Even a three-hour film begins with one single shot ..." An ancient Hollywoodian proverb 3.1. The basic level in the cinematic shot Consider the implications of the preceding discussion for an account of meaning construction in the cinematic experience. Basically, the cinematic text consists of sequences of scenes and events organized in a patently schematic manner. Importantly, the time and space limitations of the medium forces it to exploit just those characteristic types of situations and events that are familiar to the viewer, therefore capable of invoking a maximum of associations by a minimum of 'screen cues'. It is this reliance on the filling capability of the viewer that makes meaning processes couched in stereotyped script representations so crucial in the comprehension of the cinematic text. What is, then, the basic level of the schematic organization in the cinematic text? While the hierarchy in categorial organization is defined in semantic terms, a natural assumption would be that schematic hierarchy is spatio-temporal, hence defined on the space and time dimensions. On the space dimension the basic level will be the level at which objects are represented in their normal size as we perceive them in ordinary environment: People will be seen full-sized or nearly so, tables, cars, trees and dogs alike. The cinematic frame of the basic level will contain information intermediately specified: We will

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expect to identify characters, but not the colour of their shirts' buttons; we will see them eating, but will not recognize the kind of forks they use. It is hard to delimit precisely the common physical size of the objects occupying the visual space at the basic level. First, to a large extent, this is a personal perceptual measure, susceptible to individual aptitudes and experiences (compare the notions of a 'basic' size of a crane-operator to those of a clock maker); secondly, from time to time, the camera deliberately distorts our spatial coordinate system to an unrecognizable extent. Still, judging from the general case, a rough estimation would converge more or less, I believe, on the range 10 cm-10m; objects/scenes that are 'scanned' in a higher scale than this range will be generally classified in the superordinate level, whereas those 'scanned' in a lower scale will be generally classified in the subordinate level. In any case, whatever the standard deviation is, an ultimate bounded range does exist for the size of details that the film viewer is able to perceive, process and encode at the basic level, and it is in this ultimate range that we take interest. On the time dimension, analogously, the basic level will deal with average time 'units', the seriation of which will create the illusion of the normal pace of the time flow. The superordinate-level time units will presumably represent longer narrativetime units; however, as the screen-time assigned to their 'flow' is equal to the screen time assigned to the flow of basic-level time units, the perceived time of these 'superordinate' stretches will flow faster. Recall our intuitive sensation when the camera distances its "gaze" to a long-shot of the horizon for several seconds; how naturally we infer that within a flash, by the time it returns to the basic level, a day, a week or a month will have already passed. Similarly, (narrative) time in the subordinate level is composed of smaller units, therefore (perceived as) flowing there more slowly; hence the feeling of 'the time that has stopped' in close-ups (recall Greta Garbo's frozen countenance), or when the camera slowly surveys the multitude of details comprising the inside of a room, and so on. The properties of the different levels in the representation of the cinematic text discussed hitherto can be summarized in the following scheme: Large

Superordinate Level

Fast

xpidin

cceliratin

Basic Level

Slow

Small Space [

Subordinate Level

\

Time /

By now it seems that the schematic hierarchy we entertain is roughly reflected in the classical cinematic distinction between long-shot, medium-shot and close-up (corresponding to super, basic and subordinate level, respectively). In what follows I

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will try to account for camera shifts between the three kinds of shots in terms of meaning-motivated shifts between the corresponding schematic levels. 3.2. Level shifts in meaning construction

In order to interpret cinematic level shifts in terms of meaning-facilitating devices, we must have recourse to some pragmatic account of the role deviations play within discourse in general. Grice's (1975) framework of implicatures in discourse can be instructive. Consider the film as a 'participant' in discourse, generally (putting aside extremely avantgarde exemplars) committed to what Grice calls 'the cooperative principle'. This commitment is manifested in certain rules and norms of execution, to which the film's organization and unfolding conform. The rules and norms may originate either in genre conventions, in cognitive constraints, or even in local contextual biases. Consequently, at every moment during the film or, the viewer entertains (active, though mostly subconscious) expectations as to the impending changes on the screen where the camera is about to move, what is going to be heard next, etc. When these expectations are not met, that is, when the film seems to violate its basic 'discourse maxims', for no apparent reason, conditions are appropriate for an implicature to be produced. In particular, for every given reference level, a marked, unexpected level shift (= deviation) may 'urge' the viewer to construct a tentative explanation in virtue of which that shift would regain coherence. It is only natural to consider the basic level of schematic organization as one such reference level for meaning processes. Namely, in the unmarked case, the camera is likely to prefer medium shots, usually staying within its boundaries. However, when a long, marked track-in forces us into the subordinate level (and vice versa for the superordinate level), chances are very likely that this is an intentional act on the part of the director; recognition of that intention is the trigger of the implicature. Note that one can recast these considerations so as to fit concretely into Grice's 'informativeness maxim'. Namely, adopting the conception that schematic levels of representation are informationally individuated (see Section 2), a level shift is perceived as a sudden discontinuity in the flow of information from the screen: An increase in the case of a shift to the subordinate level and a decrease in the case of a shift to the superordinate level. The viewer, guided by the assumption that the film indeed 'obeys' the dictum - Be informative just as required, no more and no less is bound to interpret the violation as implicating something beyond the explicitly messages presented on the screen. The above observations should be qualified. It is well known that certain contexts call for certain types of shots: For example, establishing shots opt for a long-shot rather than a medium-shot, and we accept this quite naturally. To account for such a possibility of exploiting a marked device in an unmarked manner, we need to introduce the notion of segmentation into our discussion. Giora (1985) suggests that segmentation of discourse occurs just in those places where a new discourse topic is introduced. It is argued that for a (consistent) discourse to be coherent, it must either satisfy a relevance condition (namely, all its segments -

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m u s t be about one certain topic), or explicitly m a r k any digression from a given topic (e.g., by d i v i s i o n into p a r a g r a p h s in written texts). T a k i n g the c o h e r e n c e r e q u i r e m e n t to be (mutatis m u t a n d i s ) a general c o n d i t i o n on any text, it f o l l o w s that the introduction o f a n e w c i n e m a t i c ' d i s c o u r s e t o p i c ' in the course o f the f i l m will also be m a r k e d - b y standard c i n e m a t i c p r o c e d u r e s o f " d i s r u p t i n g t h e " routine. G i o r a ' s m o d e l supports a distinction b e t w e e n two cases o f d i g r e s s i o n w h i c h differ with r e s p e c t to the r e l e v a n c e r e q u i r e m e n t : "... for various text segments with different discourse topics to meet the relevance requirement ... they must be interpretable as being about a hyper theme which the text/discourse as a whole is actually about. However, those which are not, can still be considered coherent if they make use of an explicit connector to mark the digression." (p. 710) Note that the two cases c o r r e s p o n d straightforwardly to the two loci o f level shifts we o b s e r v e d before. N a m e l y , the one within a s e g m e n t (e.g., a slow zoom), w h i c h induces the r e f o r m u l a t i o n o f the current topic and thus maintains relevance; and the one b e t w e e n s e g m e n t s (e.g., an o p e n i n g long-shot), w h i c h introduces a n e w topic. The distinction further suggests, as indeed witnessed, that the f o r m e r shifts, which trigger inference and implicature processes, are m o r e c o n s p i c u o u s than the latter ones. It also explains w h y dynamic (track) shots, in which the basic level context is not e r a s e d at once, are m o r e effective m a r k e r s than static super- or subordinate level shots. Quite naturally, the ensuing d i s c u s s i o n will be restricted to level shifts o f the first kind, n a m e l y , those w h i c h are initially p e r c e i v e d as r e l e v a n c e violations, but later on turn out to m e e t this r e q u i r e m e n t on a d e e p e r level. 2 To sum up: W o r k i n g out the signification o f the text involves an incessant m a p ping o f the h a p p e n i n g s on the screen onto a storage o f archetypical scripts e n c o d e d in m e m o r y at the basic level. W h e n this process encounters m a r k e d d e v i a t i o n s from the representation specified at this level, it triggers a search for the m o s t adequate explanation by means of implicature production. Meaning construction processes c o m m e n c e , as will be illustrated b e l o w by excerpts from H i t c h c o c k ' s films, precisely where the script " e n d s " , n a m e l y , w h e r e it p r o v i d e s m o r e (or l e s s ! ) information than what is actually available f r o m the screen.

2 It is important to realize, that nothing said thus far aims to compete with the standard accounts of formal, cinematic conventions abundant in disciplinary film criticism. Explicating a long-shot in terms of its narrative function (an 'establishing shot') or its symbolic/repressed meassages, and in terms of its relation to the preceding basic-level script - is, strictly speaking, answering two different questions. One can focus on various, parallel meaning aspects of films, depending on which of them one takes for granted and which one considers worth interpretation. It is beyond the scope of this work to evaluate the interaction of the cognitive paradigm and other interpretive traditions in film criticism. I can only contribute my conviction that any critical effort engaged in attributing meaning by positing some process of inference, should make clear exactly what it means by these obscure notions - 'meaning' and 'inference'. Unlike many other 'schools of interpretation', the cognitive school, though perhaps not always providing satisfactory answers to this question, never fails to recognize its urgency. (For a comprehensive discussion of this and other related problems, see Bordewell (1989b); thanks to an anonymous Journal of Pragmatics reviewer for bringing to my attention the need to clarify this point.)

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3.3. The Hichcockian narrative: Reality through the lens

There exists an immense literature on Hichcock's art of story-telling, and I do not intend to discuss all of its manifold aspects. Rather, following the preceding discussion, I will address the following specific questions: How does the Hitchcockian narrative exploit the hierarchical structure of the schematic organization of cinematic text? In particular, in what ways do direction decisions pertaining to the level of representation on the screen (the 'width' of a shot, the pace of the cinematic time) influence our understanding and interpretation of Hitchcock's rims? To begin with, one should mention a convention that is very commonly found in Hitchcock's cinema: It is his admirable attention to small details. This attention is not merely a stylistic 'trademark', lacking any definite function; with Hitchcock no frame or shot is redundant, and every camera move is perfectly premeditated. Small details are always 'pregnant' from the viewer's perspective, and whoever wishes to 'break down' the code of the Hitchcockian spell, must begin with the close-up shots. Quite often, the story advances with the help of a few close-up shots, avoiding any unnecessary conversations: Madlen's locket in Vertigo (1958), Roger's matchbox in North by Northwest (1959), Alicia's key in Notorious (1946) - are all small items that are paid a close, long (in terms of screen time) exposure. As soon as the camera passes on to them, the basic level, around which the input from the screen had so far been organized, fades away, and the viewer's attention is all at once focused on one of the 'corners' of the script; the need to return to the original script or identify the onset of a new one, namely, the need to restore the processing advantages of the basic level, underlies our restless attempt to make sense of these close-ups. This attempt is dominated by an inclination to form implicatures compatible with the current topic. Hitchcock's talent lies, inter alia, in that his background preparation is so pedantic (that is, the array of schemes and expectations he 'plants' within us is so rich and predictive), that every momentary "descent" from the basic level is immediately mappable to some script. 3 This is why the processes of detachment from and attachment to familiar representations that we experience during film viewing, occur in effect within a flash. Scotty's puzzlement in Vertigo as to the identity of the mysterious woman he meets (in the second half of the film) is so piercingly discomforting, that the viewer is virtually 'aching' for a bit of information to resolve his/her doubts; hence, it takes only an 'excessive' fraction of a second in which the camera rests on the locket for the identity of the woman to be disclosed and for the relevant scheme to be finally fixated ('the woman under cover' rather than 'the foreign woman'). In Grice's terms, an over-informative shot was taken to implicate a piece of knowledge which was completely absent from the overt discourse but nevertheless had an immense effect on it. The opposite choice, i.e., photographing in the superordinate level, can obtain similar results. Again, Hichchock succeeds in setting up a very accurate emotional back3 In contrast to other artists in the genre, Hitchcockperceived that it is the known and familiar, rather than the unknown and strange, from which the most horrifying anxiety springs up.

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ground before he directs his camera to the horizon, so that the desired effect (usually, suspense intensification or ironic insight) will actually be 'imposed' on the viewer. This effect will frequently be achieved via the tension created between the 'superordinate' and the 'basic' areas in the frame: In the famous cornfield sequence from North by Northwest, when the hero arrives at the meeting with his (nonexistent!) 'double', in the middle of a barren desert, we gaze at an empty, sunny view for long seconds. The soundtrack is mute, Roger waits just like us for things to come; but a slight buzz draws our attention (long before his!) to a plane 'locking' on him from behind, like a predator about to assault its prey. The power of this scene lies in the fact that the real drama takes place in the distance, behind the unaware hero's back, and the suspense that is being built up within us is a typical Hitchcockian suspense: When is the hero to discover what we already know? As for the cinematic technique, Hitchcock ingeniously uses very 'poor' materials to create an extremely tense atmosphre: It is the blank, indefinite (by its very remoteness) background - namely, the superordinate level that fails to evoke predictive schemes and scripts, just when those are badly needed - that 'charges' the scene with compelling intensity. Note that here the opposite case of 'informativeness violation', namely, providing less information than required, does not result in a merely propositional implicature, but rather in a sharp alternation of the scene's emotional import. Consider a further demonstration of this procedure, the scene from The Birds (1963) where the crows are gradually gathering on the electricity wires, way behind the heroine, Melanie; much like in the previous example, the drama here rests on the 'distant-near' confrontation within the frame, a confrontation only visible, of course, to the viewer. These and other examples suggest that opening a scene that does not introduce a new topic but is rather interpreted as a continuation of its preceding context, with an edge level rather than with the basic level - signals the viewer to initiate an active 'intervention', by building the "meaning-bridge" reconnecting him to the basic level. 3.4. Varying distances - The movement of the soul

"From the farthest to the nearest, from the smallest to the biggest ..." F. Truffaut, Hitchcock The hierarchical structure of the cinematic scene can be harnessed either to advance the plot or to intensify the emotional impact of a situation. Hitchcock, the most anti-realist of all realist directors, fully appreciates the significance of the width of a shot as a dominant determiner of its emotional 'import'. In his talks with Truffaut he ostensibly declares: "I maintained the rule of varying the size of the image in relation to its emotional importancewithin a given scene." (1985: 180) It seems to me that the effectiveness of this technique is most convincingly demonstrated by the (very 'Hitchcockian') tracking-shots found in his films; a

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purely visual device, wherein the measured camera movement, from the all-encompassing overview to the tiniest detail - or vice versa - virtually 'duplicates' the emotional transformation experienced simultaneously by the viewer. One may see it as the 'movement' of the soul itself, disclosed from within itself. Hitchcock applies this rule already in his early film Young and Innocent (1937), in the famous track-in (from the dancing-ball scene) on the face of the drummer. Again, the preparation of the appropriate expectations in the viewer is perfect. The old tramp says to the woman: "Isn't it ridiculous to try to spot a pair of twitching eyes in a crowd of this size." And the shot begins at once: The camera, located at the end of the hall, near the ceiling, slowly 'strolls' down, passing the chandeliers, the dancers and the band musicians, until it closes-up on the drummer's face. Then - his eyes twitch, suddenly bringing into our consciousness the ironic soundtrack, which was in fact there all the time - the Drummerman's song. During all that time, the tension is being built up, anticipating the disclosure of the criminal's identity, a tension enhanced as always in virtue of the fact that this information is being held from those who need it most. This shot epitomizes, for me, the essence of the 'Hitch ° cockian experience': The persistent quest for clarification, the viewer's nearly compulsive search for a resolution, the "advent" that will enlighten the hidden meaning of things, and perhaps bring forth some comfort to those who suffer for others' sins. What has happened in this shot in our terms? The camera scans the scene at the superordinate level; at that level, the viewer has hardly any 'grip' on the screen. However, as we pointed out, this very emptiness, the absence of any actual clue as to the correct solution, exactly when we need it most, constitutes the root of suspense; and the camera, as if "pushed down" by the coherence-seeking viewer, reaches the basic level. But it does not stop there, thereby signifying that something important is impending. Proceeding to the subordinate level after reaching the basic level can only indicate that here lies a message to be revealed, one that couldn't possibly have survived the too obvious, mechanical perception routines of the basic level 'grid'. This conspicuous 'glide' from the super- through the basic- to the subordinate level of the cinematic representation, cannot leave the viewer indifferent: All the way through, it echoes with a deafening volume: "Watch out, pay attention, something is happening here, and it is anything but trivial". Hitchcock applies this 'gliding' technique in other places as well, always having in mind a very specific emotional effect. In a similar scene from Notorious, the camera focuses, after a long drift, on the hand of the heroine, to show us the crucial key in it. As before, the combination of suspense and anxiety assumes impressive intensity. In another tracking-shot, the one that opens Psycho (1960), the camera surveys from a high vantage point a busy urban center, and gradually starts to descend, approaching a certain suburb, focusing on a particular building, then on a particular window, through which we observe the opening scene of the film: Adultery (in fact, we infer it is adultery, by Hitchcock's unique 'touch', not through the dialogue, but

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from the uncommon noon time for a lovers' rendez-vous, indicated by the clock on the wall). The shift between the levels - in this case, the rather indifferent and anonymous business of the city, and the provocative, intimate act taking place inside one room in this city, creates a poignant, ironic effect. The superordinate level is literally ignorant to its subordinate counterpart. In terms of informativeness, one can describe this shot as a very steep climb from the nullest level to a highly informative one. Less common but no less curious is the inverse transition: From the subordinate level, through the basic level, to the superordinate one. A remarkable example for this is a particular track-out from Frenzy (1972): The camera follows a psychopathic strangler leading his next innocent victim up a staircase to his apartment; as they mount the stairs, the camera gets closer to their faces, and by the time they reach the doorstep, it takes a full close-up of the murderer's horrible grin. But then, instead of entering the apartment with them to show us the murder itself (as it did in previous cases), the camera turns around the same way, slowly curving down with the 'loop' of the staircase (a highly symbolic loop, as was widely noted), exits the building, crosses the street and ascends to a full high-shot of the house. It has been widely observed that this is one of the more chilling shots ever seen on the screen: It is a shot of sheer emotional manipulation. The information has already been given in advance - the viewer knows that a murder is about to be executed. Yet the camera's withdrawal from the scene of the crime (which never disappears from the frame), only intensifies our sense of horror, as we watch the naive predestrians in the noisy street, unaware of this act of violence taking place so close to them. The track-out seems to differ quite drastically from the track-in in one respect: While the latter, in addition to its emotional impact, outlines an informationally increasing progression (from the less specific to the more specific), thereby advancing the plot, the former is totally 'barren': We know no more in its end than in its beginning, we just 'feel' more. The decrease of informativeness is instrumental only inasmuch as it is recognized redundant on the part of the viewer; in other words, the lack of narrative functionality of the track-out dismantles it as a plot device, thus enabling it to be entirely dedicated to the emotional dramatization of a moment. If this interpretation is correct, it may bear on a general pragmatic claim to be adopted later on, namely, that identifying an implicated 'meaning point' is still very remotely related to the construction of the meaning itself; consequently, that the identification of two such points is similar, by no means entails that their meaning construction must be alike as well. 3.5. The elasticity of time

As pointed out before, the hierarchy of the schematic organization dictates not only a spatial but also a temporal gradation. In particular, our model predicts that the higher we climb the representation level of the scene, the faster the perceived flow of represented time. The distant long-shot will frequently signify the passing of a considerable period of time, a sort of intermission introduced by the narrator before resuming the story. The highly parsimonious Hitchcockian direction rarely uses this

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common technique, and one can only speculate that the reason for this is its potential attention-reducing consequences. Rather than condensing the 'extemal' time into the cinematic one, Hitchcock is primarily interested in the inverse operation: In slowing down the external time, even to a complete halt. Here too, the decelaration of the basic level clock forces the viewer to fill in the concomitant 'spaces' somehow, in order to retain the continuity of the script representation; one has to 'thicken' the representation one has constructed, which was 'spread' over a considerably long (compared to the usual) screen time. As always, the 'thickening' encouraged by Hitchcock will be the heightening of the emotional tension built throughout the scene. There is a well-known scene in Sabotage (1936) in which the heroine, Sylvia, murders her husband, Verloc, the executor of the mysterious sabotages all over the city. Verloc is in the kitchen sitting and eating, Siivia is serving him. The audience, unlike Verloc, is aware of her agitation: She has just found out that he had caused the death of her little brother. During the scene (which is totally silent), the camera repeatedly passes from Silvia to Verloc. Gradually, as Silvia's expression can no longer mask her inner stress, the camera closes-up on four targets: Silvia's face, Verloc's face, the big cutting knife and her hands. It seems like eternity before Verloc comes to realize he is about to be murdered. Even then, his rising to his feet and approaching Silvia are performed as if they were in 'slow motion', obeying some inner rhythm detached from the external world; the time of this scene is a different time. By purely visual means, Hitchcock places a 'magnifying glass' on a single moment in the story, forcing us to focus all our attention resources on this tiny point, as if it encompassed a whole world. In this way, a completely disproportionate (in relation to what is perceived as the real) emotional weight is concentrated in the scene, accounting for its remarkable impact. Hitchcock, the greatest deceiver of our cognitive system, would probably puff on his pipe, and mutter beneath it that after all, the end justifies the means. Similar observations hold for the time regulation in Rear Window (1954). The film, as noted by many, makes a highly sophisticated use of the cinematic apparatus to the effect of a reflexive insight about this very apparatus as a projection of the 'self'. As such, it wanders along the fine, elusive boundary between the inner consciousness of its hero, the peeping photographer, and the outside world, represented by the panorama of fiats viewed from his apartment's window. Time and again, Hitchcock deliberately blurs this boundary: One of the commonest shots in the film is a long circular pan, starting with the face of the hero (therefore, perceived as what he himself is about to see), going out and slowly surveying the various fiats across the yard, sharing with us some stolen moments of a Peeping Tom's pleasure, then coming back to the starting point, to a final close-up on the hero's face. During all that seemingly eternal time, full of many 'life fragments', the posture of the hero and his expression never change; we then realize that everything lasted a few seconds or even less. Yet the innter, subjective time of this man, trapped in a state of physical and emotional impotence, flows in a different, slower pace. What we have seen with him through the opposite windows (which were occasionally

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argued to symbolize an actual movie screen), was nothing but the projections of his own self. Hitchcock takes here, through a purely visual manipulation in reality time, one of his most deep secrets one step forward: Nothing can disclose the viewer as the gaze itself, especially - when the gaze, as if animated with its own life, is separated from the viewer; the gaze becomes a viewer, and the viewer - gazed at. Discussing the basic level of the time pace, one should bear in mind that one is dealing with a relative rather than absolute notion of pace. It is a pace determined in relation to several scales of reference simultaneously: The first, of course, is our natural, biological scale, which is roughly constant; in addition, there are the characteristic genre's time scale, the film's time scale and the single scene time scale. Whereas the first of these is predetermined and unchangeable, the other three are the products of manipulations of stylistic conventions: No one would expect a ' v o y a g e ' film to be conducted in the pace of a police movie, and what is considered fast in the former might be considered slow in the latter. Similarly, a competent director can regulate the adaptation level of the viewer with respect to the evaluation of time segments, by a repetitive conditioning biased to a certain direction. Angelopoulos, for instance, 'forces' his viewers to decelerate their clocks, while Spielberg does the opposite. However, what eventually matters is this: When the basic levels defined by these time scales are properly weighed, some ' m e a n ' basic level stabilizes for any given viewing moment; and this is the level with reference to which deviations are assessed - i.e., decelerations and accelerations - that mark the meaning foci for the viewer. Consequently, nothing in the above observations weakens our previous conclusions, which appeal to processing procedures only insofar as they already presuppose an existing basic level in the internal representation of the cinematic text, defining the presently 'active' frame of reference for new input. 4

4. Conclusion I would like to briefly review the course taken so far. I started with a survey of the theoretical work done in the field of cognitive organization of general knowledge (semantic and visual). On the basis of two research programs, a sort of 'synthesis' was proposed, in the form of a hierarchical model of the schematic organization of texts. I finally considered the implications following from this model with respect to perception and meaning construction in film viewing, inspired by general pragmatic principles of felicity and coherence in discourse. It should be clear that no attempt was made to establish some kind of a global meaning theory of the cine-

4 A comment concerning the editing function should be made when considering the time regulation problem in cinema. I have not touched on the editing aspect at all (though I fully appreciate the dominant role it plays in Hitchcock's art), for theoretical considerations that I will clarify below. However, to my best judgment, the two examples above, which demonstrate the treatment of time in cinema, are neutral (to a reasonable extent) with respect to the editing element. We may thus plausibly attribute the acknowledged effects to manipulations of the shot's size rather than to independent editing operations.

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matic text; the preceding discussions on meaning aspects were strictly limited to the theoretical assumptions developed in the second section. Instead of asking "how does a cinematic text get interpreted?" I asked "how will cinematic text comprehension, viewed along the lines of our model, proceed? ". The latter accounts for the selective discussion I applied different issues that arose along the way. In particular, it explains the deliberate avoidance of entering the typical 'minefields' lying ahead of the 'meaning-hunters' in this domain of inquiry. However, some remarks concerning the purported nature of meaning construction are in order. One question that comes to mind, is what the script model implies with respect to meaning construction processes. More specifically, does Schank and Abelson's model offer some oeprative procedures for handling deviations from the basic level of the script, procedures that will impose some constraints on the process of meaning construction triggered by this deviation? If the answer is positive, the next reasonable thing to ask would be, do these procedures provide us with some insights into the process of signification taking place during film viewing? Schank and Abelson do discuss several suggestions, though hardly attractive ones; insofar as these suggestions are of some substance, it is highly questionable whether they are applicable in any illuminating way to our account of cinematic comprehension. Schank and Abelson survey a variety of cases characterized by the occurrence of a detectable deviation from the standard script. The problem lies in that although different script'deviations have a lot in common, the inferences drawn from them do not. A customer angrily leaving the restaurant can do so for many different reasons, and our choice of one rather than another draws on our acquaintance with both the relevant circumstances and the relevant scripts. Notice that the nature of the interaction between these two kinds of knowledge, unfortunately obscure in Schank and Abelson's analysis, is precisely the thing to be characterized: Why do we look for the reason for the script deviation in certain places rather than in others? Why are certain script violations attributed to internal script factors, and other violations to external factors? Schank and Abelson propose no systematic account for all these difficulties. The tactics they apply assume (e.g., 1977: 169) that whenever a problem arises during the implementation of the script, some inference rule sets into action, reconstructing the causal connectivity of events. But clearly, such an account only reformulates the problem: Where does this inference rule come from? In any event, this kind of solution is, in principle, dubious on theoretical grounds as well; there is something alarmingly uneconomical in the tendency to account for every mental act engaged in understanding by postulating some 'underlying rule of inference'. An inference rule, by its very name, has to be something of a much wider generality than the 'thumb rules' proposed by Schank and Abelson; moreover, one must establish, in advance and in principle, what may count as an inference rule and what (more importantly!) may not. If we aim at ascribing some degree of psychological reality to these rules, we ought to constrain their possible manner of operation, the legitimate contexts for their application, their possible products and so on.

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It should be noted, though, that Schank and Abelson's treatment of meaning construction is no worse than many other related models in this field. Unfortunately, we still lack explicit accounts of meaning construction, a fact owing to the primarily representational rather than inferential character of current theories. Even the Gricean approach is still silent about most of these issues. Significant generalizations - regarding the nature, rather than the conditions of production of implicatures - are hard to formulate beyond preliminary 'direction clues' dictated by the script model, This despite the undeniable fact that in each case, we hardly have any doubts as to the right way in which we should, in Gombrich's words, 'fill in the gap': It is perfectly obvious to us that in a certain scene a transition to a close-up signifies meaning X, while in another scene, a transition to a long-shot signifies meaning Y. Much less obvious is the connection between X and Y, and more importantly, whether there is a common 'nucleus' to the ways in which they were computed (cf. the above examples: Creating suspense or irony by applying the very same technique; differences between track-out and track-in, etc,). It seems that in order for the hierarchical model of schematic organization to become a solid ground for the formulation of a full textual meaning theory, it first has to be supported by a comprehensive theory of inference, guided by a deeper contextual sensitivity than that of the present representational theories. I have consciously limited the discussion to only a few of the cinematic channels that are customarily discussed in the literature: The soundtrack and the editing, for instance, are hardly ever mentioned. Surely one should not conclude that their role in meaning construction processes is secondary to the composition of the frame and the camera movement, or for that matter, even significantly different. The only reason for this distinction, is that while the latter proved relatively amenable to an analysis based on the theoretical tools provided by the proposed model, the former proved the opposite. In the first place, it is far from obvious what the basic level analogues in the editing and the soundtrack channels are; is there any sense in which we can use the notion of an 'average' editing or an 'average' soundtrack, which is given cognitive priority in virtue of this property, and the manipulations of which result in meaninggenerating processes? Note that 'average' here should be interpreted with reference to some scale defined over schematic representations. That is, such an attempt would be obliged to expand the basic lexicon of the theories dealing with schematic organization, so as to justify treating entities like soundtrack and editing in schematic terms. Furthermore, it seems that talking about hierarchies in these channels is reducible to the notions of time and pace ('fast' editing in contrast to 'slow', etc.); in that case, one would inevitably need to appeal to changes of pace across much longer segments than those we limited ourselves to dealing with, namely, to full sequences and beyond. So evidently attempts to extend the proposed model so as to encompass the total cinematic experience are liable to provide many more insights into the problems in question, but need to be carried out in a careful and critical manner. 5 5 I accept the suggestion of an anonymousJournal of Pragmatics reviewer that a possible candidate for basic-level editing is 'continuity editing'. That is, one can take the normal character of film editing to be

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Part of the problem, no doubt, lies in the inherent theoretical difficulty to s u b s u m e

context-dependent processes - and signification processes are distinctively so - under m a x i m a l l y context-free generalizations. Yet the advantage of the cognitive program over its competitors is that gradually, step by step, it forces every interpretive perspective to take it into account, thereby to stand to some general criteria of adequacy with respect to the claims it makes. In this way it begins to reveal a genuine, deep c o m m o n core to the various 'universes of discourse' in film criticism. G i v e n this kind of affinity, the goal of conceptual integration of the major disciplines in the field becomes, if not attainable, at least defendable.

References Abbott, Valerie, John B. Black and Edward E. Smith, 1985. The representation of scripts in memory. Journal of Memory. Journal of Memory and Language 24: 179-199. Barsalou, Lawrence W. and Daniel R. Sewell, 1985. Contrasting the representation of scripts and categories. Journal of Memory and Language 24: 646-665. Biederman, Irving, Arnold L. Glass and Webb E. Stacy Jr., 1973. Searching for objects in real-world scenes. Journal of Experimental Psychology 97: 22-27. Bordwell, David, 1989a. A case for cognitivism. Iris 9:11-40. Bordwell, David, 1989b. Making meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Giora, Rachel, 1985. Notes towards a theory of coherence. Poetics Today 6(4): 699-716. Gombrich, Ernst Hans, 1962. Art and illusion. London: Phaidon Press. Grice, Paul H., 1975. Logic and conversation. In: R. Cole and J. Morgan, eds., Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3: 41-5~. New York: Academic Press. Mandler, Jean Matter, 1984. Stories, scripts and scenes: Aspects of schema theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Minsky, Marvin, 1975. A framework for representing knowledge. In: P.H, Winston, ed., The psychology of computer vision, 211-277. New York: McGraw-Hill. Paivio, Allan, 1971. Imagery and verbal processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Morris, Michael W., and Gregory L. Murphy, 1990. Converging operations on a basic level in event taxonomies. Memory and Cognition 18(4): 407-4 18. Rifkin, Anthony, 1985. Evidence for a basic level in event taxonomies. Memory and Cognition 13(6): 538-556. Rosch, Eleanor, Carolyn B. Mervis, Wayne D. Gray, David M. Johnson and Penny Boyes-Braem, 1976. Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology 8: 382-439. Schank, Roger C. and Robert Abelson, 1977. Scripts, plans, goals and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Stenning, Keith, 1986. On making models: A study of constructive memory. In: Terry Myres, Keith Brown and Brendan McGronigle, eds., Reasoning and discourse processes, 165-185. London: Academic Press. Truffaut, Franqois, 1985. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster.

continuous (no discernible 'jumps' between the shots), so that every break in this continuity is construed as a sort of 'discourse violation', triggering implicatures. Abstractness of editing may thus be related to the amount of 'filling-in' required from the viewer. Still, it is not clear how all kinds of 'non-basic' editing (jumpy, fade-out ...) can be sharply classified as either superordinate or subordinate, and further, to what extent these manipulations are not reducible to independent time/pace scripts.