ABSTRACT
A great deal of important work on naturally-occurring narrative - particu larly the narratives of ordinary people in their extraordinary everyday lives - stems from just two seminal essays by the American sociolinguist William Labov. The first, written jointly with Joshua Waletzky, appeared in Helms (1967), under the title ‘Narrative analysis: oral versions of per sonal experience’. The second appeared as Chapter 9 of Labov’s Language in the Inner City (1972), and is titled ‘The transformation of experience in narrative syntax’. Much more recently, Labov has published ‘Some Further Steps in Narrative Analysis’ (1997), in a special issue of the Journal o f Narrative and Life History devoted to Labov-influenced com mentaries from a host of scholars celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the 1967 paper. That recent paper makes only slight adjustments to the widely-adopted Labovian account.
