Narrative and Discourse Analysis

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Narrative and Discourse Analysis

• Arienne Dwyer
• University of Kansas

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I. What is narrative?

• A way of recapitulating past experience (Labov
  Waletsky)
• Events presented in temporal sequence
• referential and evaluative
• Most academics (literature, linguistics,
  political science) study stories
• But not all narratives are stories.
• Non-story narratives Historical discourse,
  courtroom testimony
• they lack features of stories (e.g. testimony by
  definition contains no evaluation)

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Text

• Written texts manuscripts, books, articles,
  advertisements (gtliterary criticism, philology,
  text analysis)
• Spoken texts conversations, songs, stories,
  speeches (gt folklore, soc. of lg.)
• Cultural texts kinship terminology, political
  symbols (gt semiotics, anthropology, critical
  theory)
• The act of writing these down is interpretive

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Structure interpretation

• Structure
• Macro-structure Orientation, evaluation,
  complicating action (plot), resolution
• Features clauses, particles, exclamations
• Devices repetition, alliteration, audience
  interjections
• Semantic interpretations
• Coherence (How does it hang together?)
• Intention (What does the speaker mean?)

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Evaluation in Narrative

• Conveys speaker attitude towards events
• Conveys why the speaker believes the events are
  worthy of display
• How do we analyze evaluation?
• Formally (breaks between types of clauses)
• Semantically (range of meanings)
• Culturally (shared knowledge, iconic white)

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Reading A Constructivist approach to Narrative
Development

• How narrative is socially constructed
• Genre (type of text gt different forms/functions)
• Viewpoint of narrator, of audience
• Agency (who is active/in power/in control?)
• I broke the glass vs. The glass broke
• (in this article) How children learn to construct
  narratives

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Trends in narrative analysis

• Structuralist (19th, early 20th c) Propp
• classification of structure and genre
• Text linguistics (1970s-)
• Ethnography of Speaking, Ethnopoetics
  (1980s/90s-)

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Ethnolinguistic analysis

• Paricipant prominence
• Discourse coherence - continuity and
  discontinuity
• numerically patterning utterances and episodes
• 3. Narrative scenes, or episodes
• Marked off by what constituents?
• prosodic markers (intonation etc)
• pause phrasing
• syntactic markers (connectores, particles)
• Stylistic markers (repetition, parallelism)
• 4. The larger narrative frame
• Bracketing
• Audience participation (context)

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Types of narrative

• Written prose fiction, epic poetry, nonfiction
  (autobiography, memoirs), letters, court
  testimony, news reports, math problems,
  advertisements....
• Spoken speeches, jokes, interviews,
  conversations, stories.

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The importance of context

• What is the purpose of narration?
• display e.g. courtroom testimony
• convincing e.g. political speech
• creating identity/solidarity e.g. origins story
• Who is the intended audience?
• yesterdays musicians - Hungarian audience?
• What shared knowledge is required to interpret
  the narrative?
• use of symbols
• formal/informal language speakers intention

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Spoken narrative

• Geser (b)
• A long time ago in a wealthy mans house there
  lived a girl who was a cook.
• She was used as a slave.
• She was used as a slave, and in time her
  belly became large.
• Her belly became large, and her aunt did not
  agree.
• It wouldnt do to have this slave give birth at
  home.
• Have her give birth somewhere far away
  said.
• took her far away
• her aunt did not approve.
• that the slave was used.
• Far away, they gave her an old horse.
• It was not an old ox, but an old dog that they
  gave her.
• They came to bury her in a cave
• and her uncle took her there.
• After digging a large pit, they buried her
  Then the old ox was buried up to its horns. end
  XIB. XIIA0-

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II. Discourse analysis

• 1. Inference and interpretation (What is the
  speaker/writers meaning?)
• Characterizes how participants go about the
  process of interpreting meaning
• Conversational meaning reciprocal,
• Reading and writingrdg/wrtg non-reciprocal)
  both interactive
• Based on interpretive rules (these show how
  stretches of speech are understood as having
  particular significances)
• 2. Explains context of use
• Portrays structure of text/social transaction by
  imposing some framework on the data
• Structure is suprasentential
• Framework may be implicit or explicit
• Like text linguistics Ethnography of speaking
• Based on realization processes (these show
  relation of function to lexico-grammatical
  realization)

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(AUCA/State dept example)
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Concerned with

• language use beyond the boundaries of a
  sentence/utterance,
• the interrelationships between language and
  society and
• the interactive properties of everyday
  communication.

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Subfield conversation analysis

• Narratives are seen
• -not so much as structural realisations,
• -but as interactive accomplishments
• involve audience uptake
• involve negotation of an "extended,
  monological" turn in conversational talk
• cf. the work of Harvey Sacks.
• -speaking turns, adjacency pairs, overlap

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Text, Discourse, Narrative

• text analysis
• linguistics (functional, pragmatic)
• critical sociology etc. (everything is
  potentially a text)
• hermeneutics (interpretation) theories of
  interpreting texts (narrowly, religious texts),
  but now (by philosophers) more generally even for
  discursive text.
• Semiotics culture as a system of signs e.g.
  Ricoeur (lt Gadamer lt hermeneutic theory)