On Importance Hierarchy and Evaluation Devices in Narrative Texts
Yeshayahu Shen · Poetics Today · 1985
which can be organized into narrative units like actions, events, moves, etc. These units relate to one another in various ways: structural relations, coherence relations, causal relations, relations of hierarchical importance, and so on. The last mentioned the relations of hierarchical importance,1 has received relatively little attention within literary and text theory, despite the fact that they are so crucial. Their centrality is conspicuously revealed in recall and summary experiments, which reflect the various levels of the comprehension and processing of the narrative (and non-narrative text). The results of such experiments show clearly that the organization of narrative units into hierarchical relations is a dominant factor in the process of comprehension and storage of information. Generally, the information is stored in memory, and it is this information which is retrieved by subjects in recall and summary tasks. The other information which is considered less important is likely to be forgotten or deleted in these tasks.