‘Narrative structure’, ‘rhetorical structure’, ‘text structure’

The paper seeks to provide a cognitive-linguistic re-interpretation of the centuries-old notion of whole-text structure. The investigation presented here draws on 317 data sources selected through a scoping literature review. The paper demonstrates how text structure, narrative structure, rhetorical structure, etc. all represent metonymically one and the same multi-faceted underlying concept. That concept is argued to result from the amalgamated operation of conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy combined with the simultaneous and dynamic operation of (what are known in gestalt psychology as) profiling shifts. The paper further demonstrates how such shifts in profiling operate on text-worlds and discourse-worlds to bring about perceptions of a text’s ‘progression’ and of whole-text structure.