Philosophy of action and theory of narrative

Dijk, Teun A. van

doi:10.1016/0304-422x(76)90014-0

Cited by 72 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…One of the evaluative expectations in storytelling is that the narrated incident be "tellable" (Ochs & Capps, 2001). In other words the incident should be unusual, unexpected, unique, or remarkable (Labov & Waletzky, 1967;van Dijk, 1976). Correspondingly, personal stories will typically reflect "a struggle or polarization of some sort" (Longacre, 1996, p. 10).…”

Section: Events Set In Past Timementioning

confidence: 97%

Personal narratives in aphasia: Coherence in the context of use

Olness

Ulatowska²

2011

Aphasiology

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Background: Discourse functionality is a primary goal of aphasia assessment and intervention. People who have aphasia often display a paradoxical functionality in their production of discourse, despite their aphasic impairment. A variety of linguistic and non-linguistic resources are orchestrated to produce coherent discourse. One discourse genre, the personal story, is ubiquitous and fills important intrapersonal and interpersonal functions. Aims: The primary objective is to provide a framework for the structure and function of personal stories, to guide future clinical discourse research towards development of practical clinical assessment of discourse functionality in people who have aphasia. Main Contribution: Characteristics of personal stories in their context of use are discussed for their contributions to overall discourse coherence. Examples of coherent and incoherent personal stories narrated by people who have aphasia illustrate interactions among coherence-building resources. The influence of group contexts and cultural contexts on coherence of personal stories is considered. Conclusions: It is the interaction, and not the componential addition, of multiple resources that supports coherent production of personal stories in context. Qualitative frameworks need to be integrated with quantitative approaches as we develop reliable and valid means of functional discourse assessment. An understanding of the lives of people who have aphasia will be essential for defining the most meaningful and functional contexts for our discourse assessments.

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Section: Events Set In Past Timementioning

confidence: 97%

Personal narratives in aphasia: Coherence in the context of use

Olness

Ulatowska²

2011

Aphasiology

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“…Some of these theories (Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1981van Dijk, 1976van Dijk, , 1977 were explicitly influenced by the work on text in humanities (see the first paragraph in this section), whereas for other theories (Johnson-Laird, 1980, 1983 the distinction arose out of an independent analysis of the nature of mental representation. Brewer has argued that the event/discourse distinction should play an important role in understanding how global discourse organization affects text comprehension (Bock & Brewer, 1985;Brewer, 1980;Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1982).…”

Section: Event Structure Versus Discourse Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Discourse organization in the comprehension of temporal order in narrative texts

Ohtsuka

Brewer

1992

Discourse Processes

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We investigated the role of global discourse organization on the comprehension of temporal order in narrative. We proposed three principles of discourse organization: (a) the immediate integration principle-a new event should be integrated immediately with old information, (b) the consistency principle-a new event should be attached to a consistent locus, and (c) the isomorphism principlediscourse structure should match event structure. Five passages varying in discourse structure were presented auditorily, and the comprehension of the underlying event order was tested. Subjects' comprehension was best in the canonical passage. The backward, flashback, and embedded passages were significantly more difficult than the canonical passages. The flashforward passage was the most difficult. The results were interpreted as showing that the immediate integration principle is a strong component of comprehension of temporal order and that the isomorphism principle contributes to text comprehension, but to a lesser degree.The purpose of the present experiment is to investigate the role of global discourse organization on the comprehension of temporal order in narrative texts using experimental narratives in which discourse order and event order were not confounded. To study global discourse structure, we believe that it is necessary to make a clear distinction between the events in the underlying event world and the linguistic representation of these events in a narrative text. The organization of the events in the underlying event world will be referred to as the event structure (E-1, E-2, E-3, etc.), and the temporal arrangements of these events in the text will be referred to as the discourse structure (e-1, e-2, e-3, etc.). For example, given an underlying event sequence such as, 1 APA reference to the published article is: Ohtsuka, K., & Brewer, W. F. (1992). Discourse organization in the comprehension of temporal order in narrative texts. Discourse Processes, 15, 317-336. 2 We would like to thank Ed Lichtenstein, Nelson Skinner, and Jim Treyens for help with some preliminary experiments on text organization, and Marlene Schommer for preparing the tape recordings for the experiment. In addition, we would like to thank Ellen Brewer, Tricia Tenpenny, and Jane Zbrodoff for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

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“…The area of plan understanding is of crucial importance for theories of narrative and theories of stories, since the core of most narratives and most stories is a description of a sequence of human actions (see van Dijk, 1975van Dijk, , 1976. In developing theories in this area it seems to us that one must be very careful to distinguish those aspects of the phenomena being studied that derive from general plan comprehension and those aspects that derive from other domains.…”

Section: Stories Are To Entertainmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A number of recent researchers in this area have argued that stories are somehow different from other types of narratives (de Beaugrand & Colby, 1979;van Dijk, 1976;Kintsch, 1980;Meehan, 1976;Wilensky, 1978) and that they must contain something of interest to a reader. We agree, and'want to make the more specific claim that stories are a subclass of narratives which have entertainment as their primary discourse force.…”

Section: Stories Are To Entertain 10mentioning

confidence: 99%