Actions, events, scenes, plots and the drama. Language and the constitution of part-whole relationships

Abstract

The first part of this article challenges the assumption that actors, actions, spatial scenes and temporal events are primitives out of which narratives are formed. In contrast, the view is put forth here that events, scenes, actions and actors owe their existence to the role they occupy in higher order relationships which are best understood as plot formation in the context of human drama. The second part presents a number of empirical investigations of how children of different ages and different languages differentiate between language forms and functions in their construction of actors, actions, scenes and events as part-whole relationships.