ABSTRACT
The study of narrative fiction in psycholinguistics, text linguistics, and discourse analysis focused on plot elements (Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975; Stein & Glenn, 1979) or on narrative framing devices (Bamberg & Damrad-Frye, 1991; Gee, 1986; Hopper, 1979; Labov & Waletsky, 1967). These are vitally important aspects of narrative discourse. To examine the unfolding of plot is to explore which aspects of experience are tellable or newsworthy—what it is that makes us wish to tell stories, to give a recognizable pattern to events. To study the unique aspects of narrative language structure is to understand how we set narrative apart from other forms of speech. But as McCabe (1991) pointed out, the study of narrative is an unfolding process, and new ways of looking at it teach us to understand it in new ways.
