Narrative Form as a “Grammar” of Experience: Native Americans and a Glimpse of English

Abstract

This paper suggests that the linguistic experience of children is likely to include experience with narratives. This experience may be with narratives that are specifically addressed to children, or with narratives that are simply told over and over again in the presence of children. As more detailed analyses of narratives become available, recurring patterns of lines and verses emerge in their structure. In two Native American narratives analyzed here, patterns are adhered to at every level of the text. In fact, the patterning is so pervasive that it may embody an implicit logic of experience, a rhetoric of action. Societies may differ in the degree to which the organization of experience follows from these patterns or in the linguistic devices used to mark these patterns. Nevertheless, the few cases outside Native American texts that have been analyzed for patterns in this way indicate that the patterning may be more universal than expected. Further investigation into the area of narrative patterning as an organization of experience may well have educational implications, some of which have been speculated about here.