Narrative clause organization of Catalan and English storytelling

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Catalan and English narrative clause organization based on Labov (1972) structural pattern of oral narrative. The study aims to specify the regularities present in the storytelling of past personal experiences in both languages, thoroughly discussed through examples taken from a corpus of Catalan and English oral narratives elicited from native adult speakers. The segmentation of the narratives following Labov's model makes it possible to observe the similarities and differences in terms of clause and segment organization in the two languages. Although the hypothesis held at the beginning of the study is that in both languages a narrative will evolve similarly, the results show that in terms of pure and combined segments this is not the case: English narrators tend to embed their evaluation combined with action clauses, whereas Catalan narrators do it in separate chunks mostly. In addition, data show that, in terms of external and internal evaluation, English presents a much higher rate of combined internal evaluation segments than Catalan.