Experience Affected in the Act of Remembering: A Study of Discursivity of Verb Tense Shifts in Memory Narrative

Anonymous

Abstract: This article contributes to the empirical understanding of the discursivity of verb morphology and verb tense shifts in memory narratives. Specifically, we explore how the 2016 presidential election result, as a historic and political event of the past decade, is recounted collectively through the lens of language use. In an online survey, 185 undergraduate students in the Computer Science department at the University of Georgia were asked to remember the day they learned about the 2016 presidential election results and write a narrative of their experience. The results from our analysis show a distinct correlation between the political leaning of the surveyed population and verb tense shifts in their stories.

Paper Type: long