Suspense is an aesthetic quality of literary narrative texts that tends to increase their success. It is often considered to be a psychological phenomenon on the side of the reader that is caused by the literary text.

Authors usually have an intuitive understanding of suspense and master techniques to create and increase suspense. In a literary text, as opposed to, e.g., movies the only tool that authors may use to create suspense is language. Our goal is to better understand the relation between the linguistic form of literary texts and literary suspense.

In order to achieve this, it is important to distinguish between the content of utterances and their linguistic form. In a literary narrative, the content is the story itself, that which is being reported. The form is the way in which the narrative is expressed. The relation between form and content is asymmetric. The same content can be expressed in different ways. For example, the two sentences: “Mary is chasing the dog” and “The dog is being chased by Mary” have (roughly) the same content. The same form, however, cannot communicate (vastly) different contents. So, the form is never entirely independent of the content.

In the project we are solely interested in the role played by linguistic form in the licensing of suspense. Put differently: there may be inherently suspenseful events (a dangerous situation, for example) and events that inherently lack suspense (e.g. counting sheep). Distinguishing between these is not part of our goal. However, the same event can be narrated in a more or less suspenseful way. We are interested in the techniques of narration that increase suspense.

Our main hypothesis is that suspense depends on the evocation and the probability of the resolution of questions. A suspenseful text makes the reader entertain certain polar questions that they deem important but which are answered by the text with a certain delay. Thereby, the probability of a positive answer will fluctuate during the delay period. Hence our interest in the following three main questions: a) Which questions are suitable to license or increase suspense? b) How exactly does a suspenseful text delay the resolution of suspense-creating questions? c) What are the linguistic formal features that increase the importance of certain questions for the reader?

To answer these questions, we compare the structure of more and less suspenseful literary narratives and conduct experiments in which we measure the way in which the suspense experienced by the reader changes when we make minimal formal manipulation in stories.

This way we hope to explicate and make transparent with some precision the intuitive knowledge of authors on how to create, maintain or increase suspense in literary narratives.