Narrative Representation Theory: The Macrostructure in I-Language

Abstract

Narrative Representation Theory has emerged as a linguistics-based framework to account for the formation of macrosuperstructure in natural human languages. Previous studies on a wide range of linguistic systems including Native American languages, African American vernacular, varieties of Englishes, and Chinook jargon have discovered a systematic rule-governed pattern in their narrative discourse. This article claims that Creole languages, archetypal forms of human languages, also present fundamental similarities with these languages in the organization of their narrative superstructure. They manifest such fundamental structural relations as constituency or hierarchical ordering, precedence or linear sequence, and componentiality or atomic elements, which cooperate with other linguistic constituents, namely, phonology, morphology, and syntax. Narrative representations, which function as part of the underlying language faculty, are direct projections of the supersentential module in the mind. They are realized as 5-layered external levels of hierarchical narrative units. Each of these levels may consist of a linear-sequential unit of internal constituents. Also, the terminal node of the linear sequence must be filled with the appropriate atomic element of "a structured idea." These findings suggest that the system of narrative superstructure is rule governed and autonomous, and thus should be regarded as part of internalized language.