ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines some language approaches to narrative, including speech but concentrating on writing as the major focus. It considers how narratives connect with each other and contribute to discourses of different kinds. Although William Labov's collection of narratives did not start as a form of research into storytelling, in the process of collecting material he noticed that the stories he was told resembled each other structurally. Labov suggested that typical spoken narratives are structured via a number of identifiable stages: abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution and coda. A specific field of criticism that developed in early twentieth-century Russia, termed 'Formalism', produced a legacy of paying particular attention, as the name suggests, to how literary narratives were structured. The origins of Stylistics lie between Literary Criticism and Linguistics, with a focus on the language of literature. One important area often used as an analytical tool within Stylistics is that of point of view.