Internal structure of oral narrative in Arabic

Year 2020, Volume: 16 Issue: 4, 2059 - 2076, 30.12.2020

Aied Alenizi

https://doi.org/10.17263/jlls.851034

Abstract

This qualitative study aims at exploring the internal structure of personal experience oral narrative in Arabic in terms of Woodbury (1987) rhetorical components and Labov (1972) approach of narrative structure, who claimed its presence in all well-formed narratives. Recordings of orally told narratives by five Saudi informants were elicited in informal settings, and were coded and qualitatively analyzed to provide a comprehensive understanding of oral narrative structure in Arabic. The findings of this study confirmed that the Labovian components of the internal structure of oral narrative were exhibited in Arabic oral narratives. The results also seemed to support the idea of the essential role of Woodbury (1987) rhetorical categories. That is, pauses and intonational contours line up to form the structure of the narrative. In addition, adverbial particles can be used as a mechanism to reinforce the internal structure of the narrative which coincide with pause phrasing and intonational contours. With regard to syntactic constituency component, the study found out that each line corresponds to at least one clause or phrase.

Keywords

internal structure;, narrative in Arabic;, Labov’s approach

References

• Berger, A., A. (1997). Narratives in popular culture, media, and everyday life. London: Sage Publications. doi:10.4135/9781452243344.n12
• Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Bruner, J. (2002). Making stories: law, literature and life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Bruner, J. (2004). Life as narrative. Social Research: An International Quarterly 71(3), 691-710.
• Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14. doi:10.3102/0013189x019005002
• De Fina, A., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2012). analyzing narrative: discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139051255.001
• Ewick, P., & Silbey, S. S. (1995). Subversive stories and hegemonic tales: toward a sociology of narrative. Law & Society Review, 29(2), 197. doi:10.2307/3054010
• González, M. (2009). Narrative clause organization of catalan and english storytelling. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(3), 540–563. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2008.06.013
• Hymes, D. (1982). Narrative form as a “grammar” of experience: native americans and a glimpse of english. Journal of Education, 164(2), 121–142. doi:10.1177/002205748216400203
• Johnstone, B. (2001). Discourse analysis and narrative. In: D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, H. Hamilton (Eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 635–650). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. doi:10.1002/9780470753460.ch33
• Juzwick, M., M., (2014). Spoken narrative. In: Gee, J.P., Handford, M. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 326-341). London & New York: Routledge.
• Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Labov, W., & Fanshel, D. (1977). Therapeutic discourse. New York: Academic Press.
• McQuillan, M. (2002). The Narrative reader. London & New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203459065
• Ochs, E., Capps, L. (2001). Living narrative: creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Özyıldırım, I. (2009). Narrative analysis: an analysis of oral and written strategies in personal experience narratives. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(6), 1209–1222. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2009.01.003
• Richardson, L. (1990). Narrative and sociology. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 19(1), 116–135. doi:10.1177/089124190019001006
• Stapleton, K., & Wilson, J. (2017). Telling the story: meaning making in a community narrative. Journal of Pragmatics, 108, 60–80. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2016.11.003
• Tannen, D. (1982). Oral and literate strategies in spoken and written narratives. Language, 58(1), 1. doi:10.2307/413530
• Tedlock, D. (1977). Toward an oral poetics. New Literary History, 8(3), 507. doi:10.2307/468297
• Tedlock, D. (1983). The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Woodbury, A. C. (1985). The functions of rhetorical structure: a study of central alaskan yupik eskimo discourse. Language in Society, 14(2), 153–190. doi:10.1017/s0047404500011118