What’s in a pear film narrative?

This study examines twenty pear film narratives (Chafe 1980), produced by native speakers of Castilian Spanish, following the ‘frames/schema’ model used by Tannen and Wallat (1993) in their study of a medical examination/interview. By analyzing the narratives in terms of interactive frames (originally defined by Bateson 1954) and knowledge schemas, we can see how frames and schemas interact and how participants’ expectations influence framings. Using a discourse-analytical approach, I show how various linguistic elements in the discourse convey (implicitly or explicitly) the speakers’ framings (i.e. the activities they are participating in when speaking) and their expectations about the study itself, films, elements in the pear film and their perceived roles when speaking. Segments of the discourse can convey simultaneous (merged) framings or sequential framings. The analysis shows that in order to fully account for the discourse produced during the Spanish narrators’ retelling of the pear film, we must take into consideration the participants’ underlying knowledge schemas resulting from their cultural experiences living in a rural town in Spain, the influence of and assumptions about the situation in which they find themselves and about the activity they are participating in, and the fact that the narrative discourse is co-constructed as an interactive conversational activity with interlocutors who are family members or friends of the narrators.