- 32 - clause final position. However, the beauty of the system is that it reflects surface structures
without the need to reorder the elements: e.g.
Having described the features of narrative syntax, Labov proceeds as follows: Given the existence of this simple organization of narrative clauses, we can ask: where,
when, and with what effects do narratives depart from it? Since syntactic complexity is relatively rare in narrative, it must have a marked effect when it does occur. And, in fact,
we find that departures from the basic narrative syntax have a marked evaluative force. The perspective of the narrator is frequently expressed by relatively minor syntactic
elements in the narrative clause. 1972a:378 Labov equates complexity in narrative with evaluation or evaluative force. So we can state
that: evaluation is expressed by greater syntactic complexity and inversely that greater syntactic complexity signals the presence of evaluation. But, clearly, this does not
necessarily follow and the claim, therefore, needs to be investigated. At this juncture, we will not embark upon a detailed discussion of the devices themselves;
we will leave that until a later chapter. However, we do want to discuss the whole notion of evaluation in its wider context, to justify our interest in it and to show its relevance to the
narratives that have been collected.
2.4.2 Evaluation in Narrative
So, what is evaluation? In the first chapter, we defined it informally as the ability of a narrator to convey hisher own feelings about the story she is telling, to clue a hearer in
Sheibas Story B1
1 2
3 4
5 6
7 8
1 One
day Father
Christmas woke up
“Where have these come from?”
He 2
looked in the box
and 3
saw balls.
45 He
said early in the
morning.
- 33 - as to the whole point of the narrative, and to involve himher in the actual telling. This
presupposes that, in the narrator’s opinion, the story is worth telling in the first place Polanyi 1981a has the following to say on the subject of “tellability.”
In order to decide whether a given story is “tellable”, a would-be-teller must have a model of what is tellable at all and he must have a model of his potential listeners which gives
him some idea of what is potentially narratable for them.…Speakers will intend their contributions to be something “worth” listening to and therefore they build their stories
around “points”—one or more of the set of things interesting enough to be explored at some length. 1981a:165
Once having decided that the story is “tellable”, the would-be-narrator then has to present it in such a way that the hearer will think so too. To quote Polanyi again:
Narrators are under a positive obligation to construct their stories around salient material and also to signal to their hearers what they believe their story to be about, what, if you
will, is interesting about it. Since stories are complex discourses with lots of words, many details and incidents of various sorts and degrees of importance, tellers want to emphasize
the important at the expense of the less important and therefore they evaluate various aspects of their texts differentially using a variety of conventional “evaluation devices” to
point out particularly important material in the story which they are telling. 1981a:165
As the term evaluation is also used by Chomsky and other linguists e.g. Chomsky 1965:37– 47; Huddleston 1976:17–22 to mean something different, we need to point out that when
we use the term in this thesis, it is always in the Labovian sense of the word, even though other linguists may be quoted. Labov’s own definition of evaluation is placed in the context
of narrative theory and it is worth quoting in full. Beginnings, middles, and ends of narratives have been analyzed in many accounts of
folklore or narrative. But there is one important aspect of narrative which has not been discussed—perhaps the most important element in addition to the basic narrative clause.
That is what we term the evaluation of the narrative: the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, its raison d’être: why it was told, and what the
narrator is getting at. There are many ways to tell the same story, to make very different points, or to make no point at all. Pointless stories are met in English with the
- 34 - withering rejoinder, “So what?” Every good narrator is continually warding off this
question; when his narrative is over, it should be unthinkable for a bystander to say, “So what?” Instead, the appropriate remark would be, “He did?” or similar means of
registering the reportable character of the events of the narrative. 1972a:366 Evaluation is difficult to pin down because it is so wide-ranging; yet its significance is
beyond dispute. Labov and Polanyi take a broad view of the whole concept, while Grimes 1975 has a much more restricted view; without at this point explaining Labov’s
categorization of evaluation see pp. 40–42, we can illustrate the differences as in figure 2.8 below. Grimes’ definition of evaluation appears to be a purely affective one:
Evaluations bring the hearer more closely into the narration; they communicate information about feelings to him that goes beyond the bare cognitive structure of what
happened or what deduction is to be made. 1975:63
Figure 2.8 Performative information involves the devices used by a narrator or author to relate
himself to the audience. Labov would probably include some of these under the evaluation umbrella too. Thus, when we talk about “evaluative devices”, we are referring to specific
syntactic and phonological features which are used deliberately by the narrator to hold his Structural Functional
categories marked in Syntax and Phonology
Structural Functional categories, all of which may
be at some time evaluative in Labov’s terms
Explicatives Performative Information
Explanatory Information Comparators
Collateral Information Evaluative Information
Correlatives Intensifiers
Grimes 4 evaluative categories
4 non-event categories only one of which is evaluative
Labov
- 35 - hearer’s attention, to indicate the point of the narrative, and to involve the hearer in the
telling of it. We might disagree on the details but not about the usefulness of the concept. Nevertheless, how can we be quite sure that such entities actually exist and that we are not
reading them into the narrative text? Can they really be separated out from other non-event information such as the setting, background information, reference or identification?
Quasthoff 1980 criticizes Labov for not making clear exactly how evaluative elements in the narrative should be identified and categorized; so there is a problem. In many cases
there is an obvious overlap of function where, for example, the same device signals both an evaluation and an identification; in the sentence:
Just look at that twit Billy the word “twit” identifies Billy and also labels him as a fool in the speaker’s eyes. Grimes
refers to a similar example and has the following to say about it: The addition of internal feelings to other kinds of information which is not the same as a
simple reporting of what one’s internal feelings are involves specific modes of linguistic expression.…The reactions that are expressed come from several sources. The most
obvious is the speaker’s own evaluation: Here comes that blackguard Jones not only identifies Jones and sets the action in the speaker’s immediate environment, but also
lets the hearer know what the speaker thinks of Jones.…Winograd shows how a word like “nice” tells us nothing about the object it is applied to, but only about the attitude of
the person who uses the word expressively. 1975:61 There is clearly a problem with trying to get at a narrator’s attitudes and intentions; how do
we know for certain when he is using a syntactic feature evaluatively and when the function is purely referential? In some cases we do not and cannot know; we are cast back on our
own intuitions as observers. But it is worth the risk of being wrong sometimes, if in the end, we gain a greater understanding of how evaluation operates in narrative.
Grimes mentions two other kinds of evaluation which may be indirectly related to the work that we have been doing. The first has a bearing on reported conversations or
thoughts in discourse:
- 36 - Often evaluations are imputed to the hearer or to other people referred to in the discourse.
Any participant in a discourse can be assumed to have his own opinions of things, and the speaker may feel that he knows what those opinions are sufficiently well to include
them. 1975:61 There is, however, a viewpoint constraint, which has to do with the speaker’s obligation to
“connect any evaluation that he gives with the possibility that he can give it legitimately”. The second kind of evaluation is that of the culture within which the speaker is speaking
and the conventions of the society she represents. The ancient Greek chorus served this purpose by indicating the values of society and including them in the play. It is perhaps
highly unlikely that we would discover some of these cultural norms overtly expressed in the narratives of young subjects, but it would certainly be noteworthy if we did The
nearest thing to it is the expectation in the minds of British children that Father Christmas will bring them toys at Christmas time if they are good, expressed here by Sheiba in her
Story A: 19
“And who is Father Christmas?” 20
he said. 21
“He’s the one 22
who gives little children some toys 23
and they be very good.”
2.4.3 Types of Evaluation
