- 25 - Figure 2.6
2.3 Story Grammars
A Story Grammar is a formal description of the structure of a particular kind of text; the Story Grammar approach was first introduced by Bartlett 1932 in order to study memory
for stories and seek to explain why his subjects made so many errors in reproducing a story that they had recently read. He suggested that people develop schemata of what stories are
like which, when memory fails at any given point in the story, enable them to reconstruct what might have occurred. His theory did not account for the internal structure of stories;
yet stories do have a particularly clear structure, as Propp 1968 [1928], Colby 1973 and G. Lakoff 1972 have demonstrated for Russian, Eskimo, and other folk tales. Propp’s
morphology of the Russian fairytale is basically an inventory of all, and only, the fundamental events which he calls functions that he identifies in his corpus of 115 tales.
Recurring elements he calls constants, and random or unpredictable ones he calls variables. NARRATIVE DISCOURSE
MANIFESTATION Verbal
GENRES
Story Grammar Folk tale
Personal Narrative
Conversational Narrative
MODELS OF DESCRIPTION High-point Analysis
Turn-taking model
TYPES OF ANALYSIS Semantic
Syntactic Pragmatic
- 26 - Morphologically, a tale…may be termed any development proceeding from villainy…or a
lack…, through intermediary functions to marriage…or to other functions employed as a denouement. Terminal functions are at times a reward…a gain or in general the
liquidation of misfortune…an escape from pursuit....Each new act of villainy, each new lack creates a new move. One tale may have several moves, and when analyzing a text,
one must first of all determine the number of moves of which it consists. One move may directly follow another, but they may also interweave; a development which has begun
pauses, and a new move is inserted. Propp 1968:92 Toolan demonstrates how “easily and appropriately Propp’s grammar can fit simple tales”
by applying it to the story of a 7-year-old child p. 17 and describes his work as “a fascinating pioneer exploration of the narrative ‘competence’ that readers seem to share”
p. 33. However, it is Rumelhart’s work on fairy tales which is usually cited in any discussion of Story Grammars.
Rumelhart’s 1975 characterization of story structure is hierarchical. At the highest level, each story consists of a “setting” followed by an “episode” and these, in turn, break down
into further components such as “states” and “events”. The various identifiable parts are welded together by gross relations such as “allowing”, “initiating”, and “motivating”. In
1977, he revised his grammar; it varies in a number of ways from the 1975 version. His work was also expanded by Thorndyke 1977 and Mandler and Johnson 1977 to
accommodate a wider range of stories than could be described using Rumelhart’s 1975 version—as he himself concluded at the time,”…the grammar has difficulty handling more
complex multi-protagonist stories” p. 234. In all these later analyses, a “well-formed” story is seen to have three essential elements: a beginning, a piece of action, and an ending
as part of their event structure. The middle section, often referred to as the “development”, contains elements such as a reaction, goal, attempt and outcome, which
take the action from the initial problem to the protagonist’s various attempts to deal with that problem and the final conclusion.
I experimented with the story grammar approach, myself, first attempting to base my analysis of some of my collected narratives on Rumelhart 1975 and then on the Mandler
and Johnson version of the model; see figure 2.7 for an analysis of Aqeel’s Story B. Apart from the obvious difficulty of trying to fit in many cases ill-formed narratives into an
- 27 - idealized story framework, the results of the exercise are not particularly revealing; the
model was not intended as a tool of text analysis. The literature includes elaborate studies of people’s comprehension of stories, e.g. Stein 1983 and Wimmer 1980 and 1982, and
studies of recall, e.g. Glenn 1978 and Stein and Nezworski 1978, and we have nothing new or revolutionary to contribute to the debate. The analysis, such as it is, merely
provides a basis for the comparison of the stories with the original “model story” and with each other. Some subjects followed the original more closely than others, that is all. We can
explain, in general terms, why this should be: the list includes lack of expository skills, problems with temporal order or causal relationships and inability to comprehend parts of
the original, etc. But within Story Grammar theory, this says more about the structure of the model story than about the actual performances of the subjects themselves Story
grammars are not very useful for a performance study; they are simply not relevant. The tree-diagrams produced by the two sets of re-write rules are representations of story
content, rather than its performance and expression; they are idealizations, describing underlying structure, rather than the surface structure, which is really what is interesting
about children’s narratives. In Structuralist terms, they have nothing to say about discourse and its manifestations. We can ask the question: How well do the surface manifestations discourse
convey the content story? We may well do so to some extent as we proceed, but the Story Grammar road is not an appropriate one to go down in order to do it.
A common criticism of both Narrative Theory in general, and Story Grammars in particular, can be summed up in the term “decontextualization”: the text or narrative is
viewed as an entity in and of itself, totally divorced from both its social and cultural contexts and the circumstances in which it was written down or uttered. Narratives do not
come prepacked, nor do they occur in a vacuum; they are created in a given context and the context of their creation is part of their meaning. Dundes, in his preface to Propp’s
Morphology of the Folktale, has the following to say: Literary folklorists generally have considered the text in isolation from its social and
cultural context.…Clearly, structural analysis is not an end in itself Rather, it is a beginning, not an end. It is a powerful technique of descriptive ethnography in as much as
it lays bare the essential form of the folklorist text. But the form must ultimately be related to the culture or cultures in which it is found. Propp 1968:xii–xiii
- 28 - Figure 2.7. Aqeel and Kenneth; Aqeel’s Story B2.
AQEEL’S STORY B2 SETTING
EVENT STRUCTURE A
STATE EPISODE 1
STATE STATE
A BEGINNING
DEVELOPMENT C
ENDING C
EVENT 2
EVENT A STATE
SIMPLE REACTION ACTION
C 1
3 INTERNAL EVENT
EVENT 4
5 - 6 7
EPISODE 2 BEGINNING
DEVELOPMENT C
ENDING C
EVENT COMPLEX REACTION
GOAL PATH EVENT
SIMPLE REACTION 8
INTERNAL EVENT C
[GOAL]
9 - 10 ATTEMPT
C OUTCOME
EVENT EVENT
EVENT ? 11
EVENT 12 - 13
EPISODE 3 BEGINNING
C DEVELOPMENT
C ENDING
EVENT [COMPLEX REACTION]
GOAL PATH EVENT
EVENT C
T EVENT
14 15
T EVENT
ATTEMPT C
OUTCOME EVENT
EVENT EVENT
17 EVENT
A STATE
16 16
A EVENT
18 T
EVENT EVENT
20 - 22 23
19
- 29 - Polanyi-Bowditch 1976 voices a similar criticism:
Traditional narrative analysts have concerned themselves with narrative as a formal system to be studied without regard to the real world or extra-systematic constraints. They
conclude that narrative structure should be described in terms of sequences of changes of state brought about through the actions of a character.…To me this seems to be a
description of what a narrative may be about and not a description of how it is structured as a form of language encoded discourse. 1976:59
Labov’s approach to storytelling is totally different. It is firmly rooted in the real world hence its immediate appeal. The narratives he considers are “narratives in black vernacular
style” which describe and evaluate personal experiences, as speakers are asked to recount and re-live situations where they feared for their lives. We will be looking primarily at his
essay “The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax” which appeared as chapter 9 of Labov’s Language in the Inner City 1972a, but also at “Narrative Analysis: Oral
Versions of Personal Experience” which was written jointly with Joshua Waletzky 1967. Labov’s “fully-formed” narratives have a very clear structure, which he analyses in the
following terms: 1. Abstract
2. Orientation 3. Complicating action
4. Evaluation 5. Result or resolution
6. Coda The Orientation section contains setting-type information as does the Evaluation and the
Coda. The Complicating action and the Result or Resolution carry the main events of the narrative, while the Abstract is a summary of the whole narrative, preparing the hearer for
what is coming.
2.4 Evaluation and the Work of Labov 2.4.1 The Structure of the Narrative Clause
Kategori