Narratives in Conversation
Narratives in Conversation
By Agatha Xaris Villa
INTRODUCTION
This essay focuses on the study of the narrative most prevalent in everyday conversations – the conversational narrative. First, it discusses a definition of the narrative from a structural level based on the structure of conversational narrative presented by William Labov (1972). Next, it enumerates some of the important functions which the narrative is able to achieve both on a personal level and also on the interpersonal. Lastly, it ventures to explore the notion of the narrative based on its context – language and society, culture.
NARRATIVES: A STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE
In the 1960s and 1970s, William Labov developed what is now commonly believed to be the general structure of a narrative. His research involved ‘a focus on spontaneous recounting of experience’ and the capturing of vernacular, unmonitored speech. He interviewed African American youths in South Harlem and asked them whether they had ever encountered a life-endangering experience. He found that the stories which ensued from these interviews ‘reduced the effects of observation to a minimum’ (Labov, 2001) and referred to them as oral narratives of personal experience.
Through his study, Labov noted some very important structural characteristics of oral narratives. First, he observed that the events featured in narratives often appeared in the order in which they actually happened. According to his definition, the narrative was a way of retelling (i.e. narrating) the action sequence of an event that had already happened. Therefore, parts of conversation considered to be ‘narrative’ was limited to the discursive data contributing to the recounting of the turn of events. All other parts which were not directly related to the story served the purpose of backing up the story.
He claimed that these oral narratives usually had a basic structure composed of any of the following six basic parts: (1) Abstract, (2) Orientation,
By Agatha Xaris Villa
INTRODUCTION
This essay focuses on the study of the narrative most prevalent in everyday conversations – the conversational narrative. First, it discusses a definition of the narrative from a structural level based on the structure of conversational narrative presented by William Labov (1972). Next, it enumerates some of the important functions which the narrative is able to achieve both on a personal level and also on the interpersonal. Lastly, it ventures to explore the notion of the narrative based on its context – language and society, culture.
NARRATIVES: A STRUCTURAL PERSPECTIVE
In the 1960s and 1970s, William Labov developed what is now commonly believed to be the general structure of a narrative. His research involved ‘a focus on spontaneous recounting of experience’ and the capturing of vernacular, unmonitored speech. He interviewed African American youths in South Harlem and asked them whether they had ever encountered a life-endangering experience. He found that the stories which ensued from these interviews ‘reduced the effects of observation to a minimum’ (Labov, 2001) and referred to them as oral narratives of personal experience.
Through his study, Labov noted some very important structural characteristics of oral narratives. First, he observed that the events featured in narratives often appeared in the order in which they actually happened. According to his definition, the narrative was a way of retelling (i.e. narrating) the action sequence of an event that had already happened. Therefore, parts of conversation considered to be ‘narrative’ was limited to the discursive data contributing to the recounting of the turn of events. All other parts which were not directly related to the story served the purpose of backing up the story.
He claimed that these oral narratives usually had a basic structure composed of any of the following six basic parts: (1) Abstract, (2) Orientation,
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