Narrative Genres Based on Verb Semantics

Author
Hossein Safi Pirlojah
PhD student in Linguistics, University of Tehran
Abstract
The purpose of present article is to introduce the basic constituents of the story blueprint, and principles governing them. By the story blueprint I intend the reader's inference about some relatively short sequences of narrative events. The local rules operative on these sequences help the reader discriminate story characters' goal-directed actions from unintentional events and states, before mentally modeling an overall structure of interlinked larger sequences within a storyworld. Action, event, and state are among the concepts inextricably connected with the notion of story and reiterated through the history of narrative analysis. The concepts at issue, and with them the nature and scope of narrative itself, have been further illuminated by recent insights offered mainly by linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists. Most of these developments occurred long before the establishment of cognitive sciences, and even before the heyday of structuralist narratology. But despite their availability at the time, they have been brought within the compass of classical theories of narrative since only a couple of decades ago. Narrative theorists argue that to tell and comprehend stories is to operate within a system of rules in which events are preferentially viewed as structural sequences of intentionally-oriented actions. In recent works on the semantics of verbs, however, language theorists have made finer-grained classifications of expressible events, with actions as a mere subcategory. This article is thus meant to explore some of the implications of verb semantics for narrative theory, especially as concerns typology of narratives under various genres.

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Literary Criticism
Volume 1, Issue 4
Autumn 2008
Pages 83-106