What holds a narrative together? The linguistic encoding of episode boundaries

Bamberg, Michael; Marchman, Virginia A.

doi:10.1075/iprapip.4.1-2.02bam

Article published In: IPrA Papers in Pragmatics
Vol. 4:1/2 (1990) ► pp.58–121

Get fulltext from our e-platform

Download PDF

What holds a narrative together? The linguistic encoding of episode boundaries

Michael Bamberg

Virginia A. Marchman

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

Published online: 1 January 1990

https://doi.org/10.1075/iprapip.4.1-2.02bam

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of episode boundaries in narratives produced from a 24-page picture book by German and English speakers. We investigate the development of form/function relationships involved in the discursive organization of narratives, attempting to bring together research traditions that typically consider the linguistic structuring and the conceptualization of narratives as two separate domains. Focussing in our analysis on the linguistic realization of discourse boundaries, we integrate a qualitative and quantitative approach to the exploration of (1) the relationship between the existence and commonality (“availability”) of particular markers (e.g., aspect) in a given language and the structure that narratives take, and (2) the developmental patterns in the use of several formal devices for serving discourse (i.e., narrative) functions. Episode boundaries were identified with an “importance” judgment task. These ratings were used guiding the analyses of the narrative productions of 72 subjects in three age groups (5 and 9 years, and adults) and two languages (English and German). The findings suggest that, in general, event boundaries ranking higher in the episode hierarchy are more clearly marked than events that are seen to be less important. Further, comparing the English and German narratives, the availability of devices in a language can influence the explicitness with which episode boundaries are marked. Lastly, developmental analyses suggest that children in both language groups first mark episode boundaries in the service of highlighting and intensifying locally-defined discourse level units. The use of these markers evolves toward packaging larger discourse units, resulting in a global structuring of the episodic configuration of the narrative whole. These cross-linguistic and developmental patterns suggest that marking episode boundaries involves a complex interplay between two kinds of narrative orientations: (a) the horizontal alignment of linearly-ordered narrative events, and (b) the vertical organization of events along a hierarchical axis of narrative structure.

References (33)

Bamberg, M. (1987) The acquistion of narratives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

. (In press) Narrative as perspective taking: The role of emotionals, negations, and voice in the construction of the story realm. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy: An International Quarterly.

Bamberg, M., Budwig, N. & Kaplan, B. (in press) A developmental approach to language acquisition: Two case studies. First Language, 101.

Bolinger, D. (1979) Pronouns in discourse. In T. Givon (ed.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 12: Discourse and syntax. New York: Academic Press, 289-309.

Brown, G. & Yule, G. (1983) Discourse analysis. Cambridge: University Press. BoP

Chvany, C. (1985) Backgrounded perfectives and plot line imperfectives. In M. S. Flier & A. Timberlake (eds), The scope of Slavic aspect. Columbus: Slavica, 247-73. BoP

French, L. (1986) The language of events. In K. Nelson (ed.), Event knowledge. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 119-36

Gumperz, J. (1982) Discourse strategies. Cambridge: University Press. BoP

Halliday, M. & Hasan, R. (1976) Cohesion in English. London: Longman. BoP

Hinds, J. (1977) Paragraph structure and pronominalization. Papers in Linguistics, 101, 77-99.

. (1979) Organizational patterns in discourse. In T. Givon (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 12: Discourse and syntax. New York: Academic Press, 135-57.

Hopper, P. (1979) Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. In T. Givon (ed.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 12: Discourse and syntax. New York: Academic Press, 213-41.

. (1982) Aspect before discourse and grammar. In P.J. Hopper (ed.), Tense-aspect: Between semantics and pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 3-18. BoP

Hopper, P. & Thompson, S. (1980) Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language, 561, 251-99. BoP

Joos, M. (1964) The English verb. Form and meanings. Madison: University Press.

Labov, W. (1984) Intensity. In D. Schiffrin (ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context: Linguistic applications, (Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 43-70.

Labov, W. & Waletzky, J. (1967) Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (ed.), Essays on the verbal arts. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 12-44.

Lehnert, W. & Ringle, M. H. (1982) Strategies for natural language processing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. BoP

Mandler, J. (1978) A code in the node: The use of a story schema in retrieval. Discourse Processes, 11, 14-35. BoP

. (1983) Representation. In P. Mussen, John H. Flavell and Ellen M. Markman (eds), Cognitive development, vol. III, Handbook of child psychology. New York: Wiley, 420-94.

. (1984) Stories, scripts, and scenes: Aspects of schema theory. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. BoP

Rumelhart, D. (1975) Notes on a schema for stories. In D.G. Bobrow & A. Collins (eds), Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science. New York: Academic Press, 221-36.

. (1977) Understanding and summarizing brief stories. In D. L. Berse & S. J. Samuels (eds), Basic processes in reading: Perception and comprehension. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 265-303.

Slobin, D. (1986) The development from child speaker to native speaker. Paper presented at the First Annual Chicago symposium on Culture and Human Development, October 23-25.

. (1987) Thinking for speaking. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February.

Stein, N. L. & Glenn, C. G. (1982) Children's concept of time: The development of a story schema. In W. J. Friedman (ed.), The developmental psychology of time. New York: Academic Press, 255-82.

Stein, N. L. & Policastro, M. (1984) The concept of a story: A comparison between children's and teacher's viewpoints. In H. Mandl, N. L. Stein & T. Trabasso (eds), Learning and comprehension of text. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 113-55.

Tomlin, R. S. (1983) On the interaction of syntactic subject, thematic information, and agent in English. Journal of Pragmatics, 71, 411-32.

. (1984) The treatment of foreground-background information in the on-line descriptive discourse of second language learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 6:2, 115-42.

Trabasso, T., Secco, T. & Van Den Broek, P. (1984) Causal cohesion and story coherence. In H. Mandl, N. L. Stein & T. Trabasso (eds), Learning and comprehension of text. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 83-111.

Weinrich, H. (1964) Tempus: Besprochene and erzählte Welt. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.

Werner, H. (1957) The concept of development from a comparative and organismic point of view. In D.B. Harris (ed.), The concept of development: An issue in the study of human behavior. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Werner, H. & Kaplan, B. (1963/84) Symbol formation. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Cited by (31)

Cited by 31 other publications

Order by:

Slobin, Dan I.

2022. Learning to think for speaking. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 7 ff.