Volume 48, Issue 3 - Themenheft: „Narrativität als linguistische Kategorie“ besorgt von Sonja Zeman

Is there a ‚narrative syntax‘, i. e. a special grammar restricted to narrative fiction? Starting from this question which has been investigated since early structuralism, the paper focusses on grammatical characteristics of narrative discourse mode and their implications for a linguistic theory of narration. Its goal is two-fold: In a first step, the traditional accounts by Benveniste, Hamburger, Kuroda and recent typological studies are brought together in order to support the claim that the distinction between narrative and non-narrative discourse mode is a fundamental one that has consequences for the use of grammar. In a second step, I discuss three central questions within the intersection between narrative micro- and macro-structures, namely (i) the definition of narrativity, (ii) the status of the narrator, and (iii) the relation between narration and fictionality. In sum, the article argues that investigations on the ‘grammar of narration’ do not just offer insights into a specific text configuration next to others, but are deeply linked to fundamental theoretical questions concerning the architecture of language – and that the comparison between linguistic and narratological categories offers a potential for addressing them.

Text comprehension is based on the literal content of sentences and pragmatic enrichment. Theories of pragmatic enrichment in the literature include enrichment of narrative texts, but also pragmatic content conveyed by presupposition triggers. Taking texts by Ror Wolf as my test case, I illustrate that our capacity of pragmatic enrichment can be abused to understand paradoxical content, even though the literal content of the text seems coherent at the surface level. This shows that pragmatic enrichment in narration is a genuine part of language processing and must not be equated with commonsense reasoning.

In this paper I show that a close look at the use of demonstrative pronouns (DPros) of the der / die / das paradigm in the crime novel Auferstehung der Toten (‘Resurrection of the dead’) by Wolf Haas allows us to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay of the narrator’s and the main protagonist’s perspective in narrative texts. At the same time, it provides an indirect argument against the assumption that the distribution of DPros can be fully derived from anti-logophoricity (Hinterwimmer and Bosch 2017) and in favor of an analysis sketched as an alternative in that paper: DPros avoid maximally prominent discourse referents as antecedents, where not only protagonists, but also narrators can be discourse referents. In text segments where the narrator’s perspective becomes prominent in virtue of evaluations, comments etc., the narrator is the maximally prominent discourse referent, while in text segments involving Free Indirect Discourse or other forms of protagonist’s perspective-taking such as Protagonist Projection (Holton 1997, Stokke 2013) or Viewpoint Shifting (Hinterwimmer 2017), the respective protagonist is the maximally prominent discourse referent. Finally, in text segments involving neutral narration where neither the narrator’s nor a protagonist’s perspective is salient, the respective discourse topic is the maximally prominent discourse referent.

The present study focuses on serially occurring narrations of ‘everyday’ life, more specifically on birthing as narrated by mothers on online forums; the underlying idea being that these narrations happen against the background of cultural narratives. The present paper uses word embedding models to detect typical topics and actors in these narrations. The calculation of word embeddings automatically constructs semantic spaces, where semantic relations (synonymy in particular) can be modeled. This method offers a way to think of synonymy as ‘functional equivalence in discourse’. The present study relies on previous work with n-grams (Bubenhofer, 2018). N-grams are sequences of words that often appear together; their sequential order in different narrations gives insight in narrative patterns. A further step in the analysis is the construction of ‘narrative topoi’, which is achieved through clustering neighboring vectors. The emerging clusters can in turn be grouped into five narrative elements of ‘telling a birth story’: 1) disruption of daily life, 2) personnel, 3) body, 4) fear, 5) joy. While it seems obvious that certain themes ‘belong’ into the narration of a delivery, it is less obvious with what vocabulary these themes are expressed. The presented method of clustering word-embedding-profiles adds tremendously to the modelling of a narrative. Its advantages lie in its potential to show lexical variation, as it also includes rare, non-conformative orthographical variants. Furthermore, it allows for a discourse-specific (and usage-based) view on semantic relations. The same applies to relations between semantic clusters. Seen from a discourse linguistics or cultural analysis perspective, word embeddings renew our understanding of semantics. This shows particularly fruitful if used to analyze (discourse dependent) derivations between semantic spaces.

The following essay aims at elaborating some aspects of the genre grammar of linguistic practices embodied in folk narratives. It starts from the idea that linguistic practices like narratives are controlled by a corresponding genre-knowledge just as it holds for most types of human actions in general. Individual linguistic practices are thus sequenced and arranged according to a corresponding knowledge frame that is related to the situationally activated genre. The term text is used to denote this sequence of situationally and interactionally coherent linguistic practices that are construed according to the grammar of a ‘genre in action’. A genre will be understood as a semiotic unit whose signifiant corresponds to a set of types of lexical and grammatical patterns ultimately represented by the micro-structure of the text. Its signifié will be interpreted as a text world model (TWM) that is internally invoked by the functionality, semantics, and quantification of the types of construction that occur in a text together with their syntax as well as by corresponding world knowledge. The essay first discusses some theoretical aspects of a genre-based approach to one kind of linguistic practices, namely narratives before turning to an illustration of the approach by referring to some selected aspects of two folk narratives, one taken from Grimms’ collection of folk narratives, the other stemming from the Udi community in the Eastern Caucasus (Northwestern Azerbaijan).