- 114 - So Mr. Wong found an envelope and tucked the letter into it. He gave it to the
Snowman. Then Mr. Walter Kristel slowly stood up and lumbered off down the High Street.
Mr. Wong never saw him again. But, on Christmas Eve, a large sack of rice came tumbling down his chimney and put out the fire. But Mr. Wong didn’t complain. His
customers could have their Take-away “Specials” after all And they did. They enjoyed them very much indeed.
4.2.3 Analysis of the Narrative Data
All the stories were tape recorded and those that were needed for the data, i.e. the forty- five stories produced by the eight L2 speakers, plus nine stories produced by L1
interlocutors, were transcribed roughly into meaningful chunks. These were then divided into clauses, in order to obtain a measure of story length.
Labov himself used a different system. He took as his basic unit the independent narrative temporally ordered clause or the free clause containing setting-type information plus any
appended subordinate clauses, giving a letter only to independent clauses. We have followed Bamberg 1987 and Bamberg and Damraid-Frye 1991 in numbering and
counting all clauses—narrative, free, and subordinate—including those in which there is ellipsis see section 5.4.3, pp. 196–202.
The narrative texts were then divided into Narrative and Orientation Sections, based on the distribution of narrative and free clauses. Initially, a separate Evaluation Section was
included as part of the main framework of the narrative; there were problems with the analysis in consequence, mainly because both orientation and narrative passages could be
evaluated. Orientation sections also posed problems. Labov identifies Orientation on strictly structural grounds, but does not elaborate on it fully. Typically, according to Labov
1972a, “it is quite common to find a great many past progressive clauses in the orientation section” and to find that the orientation section is not only placed at the
beginning, but also at key points in the story. Because of this variable placement, it is often difficult, when analysing a story, to decide whether to label a section which interrupts the
basic narrative structure as “Orientation” or some sort of evaluation “which suspends the action of the narrative at a crucial point”. For this reason, we decided to simplify Labov’s
model and take evaluation out of the main framework of the narrative and to label a section “Orientation” on functional, rather than purely syntactic, grounds because young
- 115 - children are still acquiring the syntax of past progressives and do not use them consistently.
For example, Shvinder’s Story A: 12 One day Mr. Wong went into a house and he was…
is analysed as Orientation and not as part of the narrative section, even though she did not say:
“One day Mr. Wong was going into a house” and the sentence tailed off without describing his condition. The initial clause functions as
a story opener, signalled by the “One day” with its characteristic rise-fall intonation pattern. It is a preliminary event which sets the scene for the main events which follow.
Labov’s famous “diamond” picture of the progression of an oral narrative 1972a:369 looks something like this:
Figure 4.2 He sees narrative as “a series of answers to underlying questions”.
1. Abstract: What is the story about? 2. Orientation: Who, when, where, what?
3. Complicating Action: Then what happened? 4. Evaluation: So what, how is this interesting?
5. Result or resolution: What finally happened? 6. Coda: The story is finished and the teller is “bridging” back to the present situation.
Evaluation
Resolution Complicating
Action
Orientation Coda
Abstract
- 116 - In figure 4.2 Evaluation is associated with the high-point between the Complicating Action
and the Resolution, but the spreading waves indicate that it “can permeate throughout the telling” Toolan 1988:153. However, this does not help us much with the detailed analysis
and the actual display of each narrative. Therefore, in our version, evaluative material is seen to be outside the main framework but distributed at key points throughout the
narrative as a whole, including the Orientation and the Coda. The Orientation may also be distributed within the Narrative Section. The proposed simplification will look something
like figure 4.3, consisting of the main narrative framework and an evaluative commentary. Notice that the six elements of Labov’s “fully-formed” narratives have been reduced to
four see chapter 2, p. 29. Not only is there no Evaluation Section, there is also no clear break between the Complicating Action and the Resolution. Not all the narratives in the
corpus actually have a resolution; some are what Peterson and McCabe call “leap-frog” narratives “where the child jumps from event to event unsystematically, leaving out
important events” 1983:48, others are “chronological” in that there is a temporal sequence of events, but the material lacks any real point or coherency.
Figure 4.3 Reported speech is seen as the embedded complement of the speech verb. In cases where
there are no speech margins, we assume a deleted verb “to say” i.e. “he said”. All conversation is placed in the body of the displayed text, but set in a smaller typeface to
distinguish it clearly from the narrative sections e.g. he said, “I didn’t know rice could speak”. Similarly, all other subordinate clauses are included in the body of the text and
indicated by the smaller typeface. EVALUATION
TITLE ABSTRACT ORIENTATION
NARRATIVE EVENTS Complicating Action +
Resolution
CODA
- 117 -
4.2.4 Transcription and Editing of the Data
