A Study of Narrative Structure and Cognitive Processes in English Language and Literature

Narrative structure, as a fundamental component of a literary work, involves plotting, characterization, and time flow, and it has a profound impact on the way readers understand and receive texts. Cognitive processes, on the other hand, are concerned with how individuals interpret story content through mental activities such as perception, memory, and reasoning. The article constructs a corpus of English language literature based on English language literature works from 1900 to 2000, and uses the cardinality statistics algorithm to obtain the characteristic words of English language literature, and analyzes its narrative structure innovation by combining with the improved dichotomous K-Means clustering algorithm. Then, from the bibliometric perspective, we explore the guidance of English literature on readers’ cognitive behavior by analyzing its stylistic style. Between 1900 and 2000, the narrative forms of “adaptation” and “utilization” showed a continuous growth trend, with growth rates of 143.14% and 240.38% respectively. There are eight clusters of narrative structure in English language and literature, mainly centered on the three themes of bilinear narrative, nested structure, and collage structure of non-linear narrative. The frequency of guiding readers to perform cognitive behaviors in the corpus of English language literature reaches 712 times, and the proportion of guiding mainly through the form of “adapted” narrative reaches 45.79%. Narrative structure not only shapes the artistic characteristics of literary works, but also profoundly influences the readers’ emotional experience and way of thinking, and the interaction between the two is of great significance in the combination of literary research and cognitive linguistics.