STORY GRAMMAR
المؤلف:
John Field
المصدر:
Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P289
2025-10-16
274
STORY GRAMMAR
An attempt to represent the structure of a narrative text in terms of a set of rules. It was suggested that the surface forms of the simpler types of story derive from a single underlying deeper structure and that this structure plays an important part in the way we process such stories. A set of rewrite rules were proposed following the principles of early Transformational Grammar:
1- STORYà SETTING + THEME + PLOT + RESOLUTION
2- SETTING à CHARACTERS þ LOCATION þ TIME
3- THEMEàGOAL
4- PLOT àEPISODE(S)
5- EPISODE à SUBGOAL + ATTEMPTS + OUTCOME
6- ATTEMPT àEVENT(S)
7- RESOLUTION à EVENT or STATE
The theory is based on the type of folk tale that is handed down orally; such stories are said to be memorable because of the way they are structured. There is a high degree of internal organisation; and a theme is established for the story quite close to the beginning. These two factors enable the reader or listener to slot information into a recognisable framework. However, even when a thematic sentence is presented late in the text, performance is better than when no theme is specified. This suggests that, at quite a late stage, readers remain able to restructure the information they hold.
The story grammar approach does not account adequately for more sophisticated fiction. However, it receives support from the kind of broad outline which readers give when asked to recall a story and from evidence that readers spend more time reading sentences which are high in the structure of a story and thus potentially thematic.
See also: Reading: higher-level processing
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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