Article published In: Narrative in ‘societies of intimates’
Edited by Lesley Stirling, Jennifer Green, Tania Strahan and Susan Douglas
[Narrative Inquiry 26:2] 2016
► pp. 340–375
Sequentiality in the narratives of Tirax, an oceanic language spoken on Malakula, Vanuatu
Published online: 30 March 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.26.2.07bro
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.26.2.07bro
Sequentiality is widely considered to be a universal and defining characteristic of narrative, however there has been relatively little research on narrative in non-European languages with oral traditions. Evidence from the Vanuatu language, Tirax, suggests that sequentiality is not the only nor fundamental strategy for narrative construction. The Tirax data show that while there is a general correlation between narrative clause order and the order of story events, there are many exceptions to sequential ordering. Furthermore there is minimal or no specialized marking to indicate the disruptions to sequentiality in Tirax narratives. The disruptions to sequentiality appear to be motivated by the storytelling imperatives of hooking an audience and keeping them immersed in the story. The data suggest that the difference in cognitive pressures involved in remembering, constructing and comprehending the spoken narrative, compared with the written one, is reflected in different ways of organising information in a narrative.
Keywords: narrative, oral tradition, Austronesian, sequentiality, focalisation, reportability
References (32)
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Ballantyne, K.G. (2005). Textual structure and discourse prominence in Yapese narrative. (unpublished PhD thesis). University of Hawai‘i, Manoa.
Brotchie, A. (2009). Tirax grammar and narrative: A North-central Vanuatu language spoken on Malakula. (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of Melbourne, Melbourne.
Chafe, W. (1994). Activation cost. In Discourse, consciousness and time (pp. 71–81). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Djenar, D.N. (2016). That’s how it is there: Place, self and others in Indonesian narrative. This issue.
Du Bois, J.W. (1980). Beyond definiteness: The trace of identity in discourse. In W.L. Chafe (Ed.), The pear stories (pp. 203–274). Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.
Ewing, M. (2016). Reiterative construction of narrative: A storytelling device from Javanese conversation. This issue.
Fleischman, S. (1990). Tense and narrativity: From medieval performance to modern fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Grabes, H. (2013). Sequentiality. In Peter Hühn, et al. (Eds.), The living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. URL = [URL]
Hooper, R. (1998). Universals of narrative pragmatics: A Polynesian case study. Linguistics, 36(1), 119–160.
Hopper, P.J., & Thompson, S.A. (1980). Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language, 56(2), 252–299.
Labov, W. (1972). The Transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In Language in the inner city (pp. 354–396). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, W. & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis. In Helm, J. (Ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts (pp. 12–44). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Reprinted in Journal of
Narrative and Life History, 7(1-4), 3–38.
Madden, C.J., & Zwaan, R.A. (2003). How does verb aspect constrain event representations? Memory and Cognition, 31(5), 663–672.
Mandler, J.M., & Johnson, N.S. (1977). Remembrance of things parsed: Story structure and recall. Cognitive Psychology, 9(1), 111–151.
McGregor, W.B. (1987). The structure of Gooniyandi narratives. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2(1), 20–28.
Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (2001). A dimensional approach to narrative. In E. Ochs & L. Capps (Eds.), Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling (pp. 1–58). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ohtsuka, K., & Brewer, W.F. (1992). Discourse organization in the comprehension of temporal order in narrative text. Discourse Processes, 15(3), 317–336.
Ong, W.J. (1982). Oral remembering and narrative structures. In Tannen, D. (Ed.), Analyzing discourse: Text and talk (pp. 12–24). Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Peabody, B. (1975). The winged word: A study in the technique of ancient Greek oral composition as seen principally through Hesiod’s works and days. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Polanyi, L. (1989). The structure of stories. In L. Polanyi (Ed.), Telling the American story (pp. 15–42). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Prince, G. (1982). Narratology: The form and functioning of narrative. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.
Rappaport, W., Segal, E., Shapiro, S., Zubin, D., Bruder, G., Duchan, J., Felson Duchan, J., Almeida, M., Daniels, J., Galbraith, M., Yuhan, A., Wiebe, J., & Hanyong Yuhan, A. (1994). Deictic centers and the cognitive structure of narrative comprehension (Technical Report No. 89-01). Buffalo, NY: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science.
Rimmon-Kenan, S. (2002). Narrative fiction: Contemporary poetics (2nd ed.). London & New York: Methuen & Co.
Schiffrin, D. (2006). In other words: Variation in reference and narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Strahan, T., & Stirling, L. (2016). “What the hell was in that wine?”: Entitlement to launch and develop stories within a multiparty context. This issue.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Ewing, Michael C.
Mushin, Ilana
2016. Linguistic cues for recipient design in an Indigenous Australian conversational narrative. Narrative Inquiry 26:2 ► pp. 217 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.