“There are two kinds of tales, one true and the other false,” Socrates proposes to Adeimantos in the course of exploring the proper place of literature in The Republic (376e), and the truth value of narrative – one dimension of the relationship of stories to the events they recount – has been a basic typological criterion in the classification of narrative ever since. Folklorists, for their part, have relied rather heavily on the truth factor in classifying oral narrative forms. For some, the basic distinction rests on “the extent to which a narrative is or is not based upon objectively determinable facts” (Littleton 1965:21), whereas others are more pragmatic and relativistic, relying on local distinctions made by members of the societies in which the tales are told between “narratives regarded as fiction” and “narratives … regarded as true by the narrator and his audience” (Bascom 1965:4).

Recently, however, there have been increasing expressions of unease about the empirical basis and reliability of such truth-value criteria. Herbert Halpert, for example, reports frequent baffled disagreement between himself and his students in the application of the truth–fiction distinction to the sorting out of jests and anecdotes, local legends, tall tales, and personal narratives (1971:51). Robert Georges, in turn, sees the truth–fiction question as so empirically clouded in actual cases that “the only meaningful answer would have to be an ambivalent one” (1971:17, emphasis in the original).

Some years ago, in a wry mood, a prominent American folklorist described folklore as “a bastard field that anthropology begot upon English” (Coffin 1968:v). This cute image has a certain rhetorical zip to it, but it is slanderously misleading as intellectual history. In truth, modern folklore has a fully honorable heritage; the seminal figure was that great precursor of romantic nationalism, Johann Gottfried von Herder, in whose vision the oral literature of a people was both the highest and truest expression of its authentic national culture and the appropriate foundation of its national literature. There is an element of accuracy in the description, however, insofar as it suggests that academic compartmentalization and the stress on disciplinary integrity it engenders have compromised the legitimacy of folklore in some quarters, impeding its own pursuit of disciplinary autonomy within the academy. Scholars in anthropology and literature departments have generally remained willing to accord oral literature some place – however limited – within their own disciplinary purviews, but subject always to current fashions of intellectual concern and respectability.

My own conviction is that much has been lost as the rise of academic differentiation and its concomitant division of intellectual labor have fragmented the unified vision of literature as cultural production that was folklore's birthright.

Of all the devices by which the fusion of narrated event and narrative event is effected in narrative discourse, reported speech is perhaps the most sociolinguistically interesting. The appropriation of another's utterance, to be sure, is not confined to narrative contexts. As Bakhtin argues, “The transmission and assessment of the speech of others, the discourse of another, is one of the most widespread and fundamental topics of human speech. In all areas of life and ideological activity, our speech is filled to overflowing with other people's words” (1981:337). But Bakhtin himself has explored the patterns and functions of reported speech most fully in the novel, and other sociologists of language are finding it increasingly useful to examine the dynamics of speech actions and reactions in a variety of narrative forms, from oral stories of personal experience to myths, as a means of elucidating relations of speech, action, and ideology in the social worlds reported by such narratives (Labov 1982; Silverstein 1985; Urban 1984). There is a dual payoff here that is especially attractive to a language-oriented student of verbal art: Insofar as acts of speaking are of focal interest in certain kinds of narrative, an understanding of the ways that these speech acts are contextualized within the narrative can enhance our understanding both of how speaking operates and is understood to operate in social life and of how narratives are constructed.

Story, performance, and event: These are the cornerstones on which I have endeavored to construct a framework tying together narrated events, narrative texts, and narrative events, as part of a larger concern with the constitutive role of discourse in social life. As I have noted in the Introduction, however, the double grounding of narrative in human events that has concerned me here is no new discovery. It is certainly not my discovery; I have cited Walter Benjamin's felicitously economical statement of the interrelationship and have adopted Roman Jakobson's terms, “narrated event” and “narrative event” for the twin social anchor points of narrative discourse. And, to carry my argument still further, I offer still another formulation of the crucial nexus that occupies us here, this one by Mikhail Bakhtin:

Introduction

Perhaps the most basic and persistent problem confronted by students of oral literature is gauging the effect of the interplay of tradition and innovation, persistence and change, as manifested in the oral text. I have already touched on this problem in my analysis of reported speech in a series of West Texas oral anecdotes (Chapter 4), which revealed that those narratives in which quoted speech served as a kind of punch line were markedly more stable over time than those in which an instance of quoted speech was not the point of the story. For much of the history of modern folklore scholarship, the scales in which folklorists have weighed this dynamic interplay between tradition and innovation have been overbalanced rather strongly in favor of traditionality and persistence. Tradition has been the privileged term, consistent with the larger frames of reference predominant in social thought that have held the folk – peasants and primitives – to be conservative, “tradition bound,” resistant to change, and so on (Bauman 1977c, 1982; BenAmos 1972).

The past couple of decades, however, have witnessed an accelerating shift in perspectives on the dynamics of folklore that have begun to redress the imbalance. The recent burgeoning of a performance-centered perspective, especially, has brought with it a growing awareness of the role of individual creativity in oral literature and of texts as situated and emergent within particular contexts (Bauman 1977b; Ben-Amos and Goldstein 1975; Paredes and Bauman 1972).

Fabrications – both enacted and narrated – represent a fertile field for the exploration of the interrelationships binding together the narrated event, the narrative itself, and the event in which the narrative is recounted, as we saw in the preceding chapter. This chapter pursues this same problem from another direction, with reference to a further class of fabrications that has traditionally represented a productive resource for storytellers, namely, practical jokes.

There has been a notable and productive convergence of interest in recent years among linguists, sociologists, and folklorists around the nature and function of oral narratives of personal experience. William Labov has taken the lead among linguists in pursuing this subject of inquiry, using the texts of oral narratives of personal experience in the classic linguistic tradition as extended forms of natural discourse, but extending his analysis of structure beyond sentence grammar to encompass the narrative as a whole (Labov 1972, 1982; Labov and Waletzky 1967). From the standpoint of sociology, Erving Goffman has examined stories of personal experience as important instruments in the operation of the interaction order, including the presentation of self and the construction and communication of a sense of situational reality (Goffman 1959, 1974). And among folklorists, Sandra Stahl has directed the attention of her colleagues in a number of significant publications to this most ubiquitous of contemporary narrative forms, stressing the continuities between personal experience stories and other genres of folk narrative (Stahl 1977a,b, 1983).

The structure of information

In the previous chapters we have been considering increasingly restricted views of the production and interpretation of discourse. In Chapter 2 we considered the effect of situational context on discourse and in Chapter 3 the effect of different perspectives of topic structure. We devoted Chapter 4 to discussing the effect of linearisation in discourse, how what is presented first limits the interpretation of what follows and how decisions on thematisation provide the overall structure within which the addressee interprets the discourse.

In this chapter we focus in even further, to the smallest units of discourse structure: small local units at the level of phrase or clause. We consider how information is packaged within such small structures and, particularly, what resources are available to speakers and writers for indicating to their addressees the status of information which is introduced into the discourse.

Information structure and the notion ‘given / new’ in intonation

The serious study of information structure within texts was instituted by scholars of the Prague School before the Second World War. They studied what they called ‘the communicative dynamism’ of the elements contributing to a sentence, within the framework of ‘functional sentence perspective’. (For an overview of this work see Vachek, 1966; Firbas, 1974.)

Many of the insights developed by the Prague scholars were first brought to the attention of Western scholars by Halliday in an extremely influential article published in 1967.

Coherence in discourse

One of the pervasive illusions which persists in the analysis of language is that we understand the meaning of a linguistic message solely on the basis of the words and structure of the sentence(s) used to convey that message. We certainly rely on the syntactic structure and lexical items used in a linguistic message to arrive at an interpretation, but it is a mistake to think that we operate only with this literal input to our understanding. We can recognise, for example, when a writer has produced a perfectly grammatical sentence from which we can derive a literal interpretation, but which we would not claim to have understood, simply because we need more information. Extract (1), the first sentence of a novel, may provide an illustration of this point.

The novelist is, of course, leading his reader to read on and find out just what the first sentence, though literally complete, has only partially described.

At the opposite extreme, we can point to linguistic messages which are not presented in sentences and consequently can't be discussed in terms of syntactic well-formedness, but which are readily interpreted.

The functions of language

The analysis of discourse is, necessarily, the analysis of language in use. As such, it cannot be restricted to the description of linguistic forms independent of the purposes or functions which those forms are designed to serve in human affairs. While some linguists may concentrate on determining the formal properties of a language, the discourse analyst is committed to an investigation of what that language is used for. While the formal approach has a long tradition, manifested in innumerable volumes of grammar, the functional approach is less well documented. Attempts to provide even a general set of labels for the principal functions of language have resulted in vague, and often confusing, terminology. We will adopt only two terms to describe the major functions of language and emphasise that this division is an analytic convenience. It would be unlikely that, on any occasion, a natural language utterance would be used to fulfil only one function, to the total exclusion of the other. That function which language serves in the expression of ‘content’ we will describe as transactional, and that function involved in expressing social relations and personal attitudes we will describe as interactional. Our distinction, ‘transactional / interactional’, stands in general correspondence to the functional dichotomies – ‘representative / expressive’, found in Bühler (1934), ‘referential / emotive’ (Jakobson, 1960), ‘ideational / interpersonal’ (Halliday, 1970b) and ‘descriptive / social-expressive’ (Lyons, 1977).

Pragmatics and discourse context

In Chapter 1, we emphasised that the discourse analyst necessarily takes a pragmatic approach to the study of language in use. Such an approach brings into consideration a number of issues which do not generally receive much attention in the formal linguist's description of sentential syntax and semantics. We noted, for example, that the discourse analyst has to take account of the context in which a piece of discourse occurs. Some of the most obvious linguistic elements which require contextual information for their interpretation are the deictic forms such as here, now, I, you, this and that. In order to interpret these elements in a piece of discourse, it is necessary to know (at least) who the speaker and hearer are, and the time and place of the production of the discourse. In this chapter we shall discuss these and other aspects of contextual description which are required in the analysis of discourse.

There are, however, other ways in which the discourse analyst's approach to linguistic data differs from that of the formal linguist and leads to a specialised use of certain terms. Because the analyst is investigating the use of language in context by a speaker / writer, he is more concerned with the relationship between the speaker and the utterance, on the particular occasion of use, than with the potential relationship of one sentence to another, regardless of their use.

In the last chapter we were largely concerned with considering the structure of small formal chunks of language, particularly nominal expressions, and exploring the ways in which particular forms in English have come to be associated with a particular information status. These formal structures constitute cues for the hearer / reader as to how the speaker / writer intends the discourse to be interpreted.

We begin this chapter by considering how large chunks of language come to be interpreted as texts. We examine the formal expressions, some of which were discussed in Chapter 5, which are available to the speaker / writer as cues to signal explicitly how parts of the discourse are to be interpreted, particularly anaphoric expressions. We then go on to consider the central question of what it means to refer in discourse.

What is ‘text’?

We have proceeded in this book with the rather simple account of what constitutes a text which we gave, with accompanying caveats, in Chapter 1. Text, we said, is the verbal record of a communicative event. A number of authors have been concerned to provide a tighter, more formal account of how speakers of English come to identify a text as forming a text (cf. for example van Dijk, 1972; Gutwinski, 1976; de Beaugrande, 1980; de Beaugrande & Dressier, 1981; Halliday & Hasan, 1976.)

In the course of this chapter, we shall examine some of the uses of the term topic in the study of discourse. In the process, we shall explore some recent attempts to construct a theoretical notion of ‘topic’, a notion which seems to be essential to concepts such as ‘relevance’ and ‘coherence’, but which itself is very difficult to pin down. We shall suggest that formal attempts to identify topics are doomed to failure, but that the discourse analyst may usefully make appeal to notions like ‘speaking topically’ and ‘the speaker's topic’ within a ‘topic framework’. We shall also consider briefly how markers of ‘topic-shift’ may be identified in written and spoken discourse. In particular, we shall insist on the principle that it is speakers and writers who have topics, not texts.

We shall then go on to consider how the notion of ‘topic’ relates to representations of discourse content. Since many of the representations proposed are based on a hierarchical organisation of discourse content, we shall consider critically the possibility of characterising ‘topic’ in terms of the top-most elements in the hierarchical representation.

Discourse fragments and the notion ‘topic’

We have already argued that the data used in discourse analysis will inevitably reflect the analyst's particular interests. Moreover, the piece of data chosen for study can only be partially analysed.