PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In a first step this article gives some definitional properties of a linguistic concept of narrative and discusses a few of the data provided by the papers in the first part of this volume in relation to this concept. Narration is taken as an interactive process, which is accomplished jointly by narrator and listener and which is always part of a larger frame of activities. This view has certain consequences as to the way in which narrative data should be elicited, documented and analyzed in all the relevant disciplines. These consequences are discussed briefly. In a second step, three different types of narration distinguished on the basis of formal properties of the narrative interaction are introduced. The ‘replaying’ conversational narrative, the report and the brief statement are described; emphasis is put upon the formal characteristics of the replaying discourse pattern: direct speech, historical present, imitation, evaluation and high degree of detailedness. In a third step, a cognitive aspect of story-telling is dealt with, namely the features of information processing typical of the transformation which an event undergoes when it becomes the referent of conversational narrative. In a final step, the methodological consequences of a linguistic theory of narrative as has been outlined before are shown in a sample analysis of one of the narratives documented by Wiedemann (pp. 43–55).