Narrative Grammar Research Articles

From Narratology to Narrativity, and Back

A surprise shook the world of Greimassian scholars in 2014: narratology was back in strength! Major international congresses were organised, bringing together American and European universities, to studythe “fabulous powers of narrative”. Storytelling entered a new era, ensuring the success of Christian Salmon’s book well beyond the confines of acadaemia. However, among the theoretical references of this research movement, largely based on Anglo-Saxon cognitivism developed in English-speaking countries, not the slightest allusion was made to “narrative and discursive semiotics”. And yet, it was under this title that JosephCourtés, then assistant to Algirdas Julien Greimas at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (École de hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS-Paris), published an introduction to semiotics in 1976. And ten years earlier, in 1966, Greimas had published the actantial schemain Structural Semantics, his founding work. The formalization of narrative grammar and its development in modal syntax would become one of the key accomplishments of this semiotics. This was when narrativity, transcending the boundaries of narratology, was supposed to make its entrance into the humanities and social sciences. And yet it was apparently forgotten. What happened? Or rather, where was the Greimassian theory? Our purpose here is to review this conceptual story and put it into perspective. We will do so by discussing, at the end of our journey, the descending filiation of this theory, through some of the semiotic paths that it has produced. Not in order to present the labyrinthine conceptualisations but to suggest their respective contributions to a renewed reflection on the narrative.

A Study on the Characteristics of Literary Education Discourse on <Tokki-jeon> as a Lie Narrative

The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the reason of charm of <Tokki-jeon>(The Story of Rabbit) in which the two characters who succeeded in deceiving the other side by lying. To this end, we focused on various ending structures and repeated version derivatives. In contrast to the general narrative grammar of a classic novel in which a good man ends up through trials in the confrontation between a good man who appears as a hero or a smartass and an evil man who interferes with him, there is no such confrontation between good and evil. Nonetheless, <Tokki-jeon> was popular among readers of that times because it seems that the evaluation of the two characters’ lies has a broad spectrum. Because they were able to make various evaluations of their lies, different versions with its various endings, was once again derived. This study also examined the issue of how to be invited and how it is enjoyed with the youth readers of today. <Tokki-jeon> is included in middle school Korean Language textbooks, and tends to be accompanied by learning activities focused on an evaluation of personality and theme consciousness implied by various ending structures. This is a result of the fact that the traditional characteristics of ‘learning activities’.

LATOUR’S METHOD: SEMIOTICS BETWEEN LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

This article attempts to reconstruct the method of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory by articulating its links with the semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas. Semiotic methodology is considered as a point of entry to the labyrinth of Latour’s projects and a thread of Ariadne through it. The article is divided into two parts. The first one examines Greimas’ conceptions of narrative grammar and narrative programmes. This analysis leads to a number of conclusions: a) Greimas’ semiotics is as ambitious a scientific project as Latourian sociology. Greimas elaborates the general premises of structural linguistics and proposes to extend the latter not only to scientific discourses outside cultural (myth, folktale) and literary texts, but also beyond the textual world itself; b) Elements of semiotic methodology crucial for Latour are emphasized, including the operation of bracketing out (of referent and enunciator) and a separation of orders of (semiotic) acts that points to the distinction between linguistic operations inside the text and the meta-linguistic operations of semiotician; c) The vocabulary of movement (trajectory, a point of departure, circulation, vehicles etc.) that are omnipresent in Latour’s writing is narratological in origin and has methodological importance for his work. The second part of the article shows how Latour appropriates and transforms elements of semiotics in his early work on the sociology of science. Methodologically, Latour’s anthropological approach to science is marked by two successive moves: 1. suspension of the key binaries in sociology and the philosophy of science (e.g. subject/object, truth/falsity, social/intellectual); 2. reassembling such distinctions. In his works, Latour carries out these methodological practices by means of sequences of operations designated here as “bracketing in,” “bracketing out,” and “unbracketing.”

Architecture as Meaningful Language: Space, Place and Narrativity

A semiotics of architecture should focus on the process of the production of meaning through the articulation and organisation of space (and time). This articulation has, at least, a mental side (conception) and a material side (realisation). However, it would be misleading to try to reduce this double articulation into a formal logic alone (Pierce). Proxemics has convincingly demonstrated that spatial forms are part of social life and that their meaning depends on (and refer to) cultural values. We should study and think of the semiotics of space in the broader context of a semiotics of culture, insofar as its system of signs aims at the production of cultural meaning that is part of a code of social hierarchies and distinctions. In this paper, I propose a preliminary intersection between semiotics, literary theory and modal narratology. To decipher the social values that are inherent in spatial forms we need not only a general theory of their interpretation but also a theory of their manner of telling, their narrative structure, their plot, and how this plot is anchored and activated into specific and determinate social chronotopes. A possible strategy that would allow for the above intersection to take place could be a broad conception of the notion of 'text' that includes 'space' as a narrative process and as a discourse that follows a specific 'narrative grammar'. Therefore, architectural semiotics should lay emphasis on the process of the conception, design and production of spatial meaning as if this process was the writing of a social text, a codification of a narrative in space. In this paper, I will focus on a fragment of this project, examining some of the semiotic correlations and conceptual conjunctions between literature and architecture.

日本の昔話にみられる物語の文法(narrative grammar)を求めて

日本の昔話にみられる物語の文法(narrative grammar)を求めて

In defense of a “grammar” in the visual language of comics

Visual Language Theory (VLT) argues that the structure of drawn images is guided by similar cognitive principles as language, foremost a “narrative grammar” that guides the ways in which sequences of images convey meaning. Recent works have critiqued this linguistic orientation, such as Bateman and Wildfeuer's (2014) arguments that a grammar for sequential images is unnecessary. They assert that the notion of a grammar governing sequential images is problematic, and that the same information can be captured in a “discourse” based approach that dynamically updates meaningful information across juxtaposed images. This paper reviews these assertions, addresses their critiques about a grammar of sequential images, and then details the shortcomings of their own claims. Such discussion is directly grounded in the empirical evidence about how people comprehend sequences of images. In doing so, it reviews the assumptions and basic principles of the narrative grammar of the visual language used in comics, and it aims to demonstrate the empirical standards by which theories of comics' structure should adhere to.

Study of Strategic Narratives: The Case of BRICS

In the battle of narratives to give meaning to the international system in the twenty-firstcentury, emerging powers are actively engaged. In particular, the BRICS group, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, have advanced their claim to reconstitute international affairs to make it more just and fair. What if their narratives about the international system effectively contest narratives constituting the Liberal World Order? For understanding the battle more profoundly, this study examines the strategic narratives of the BRICS. A documentary methodology was employed to elicit themes and narratives in BRICS joint communiqués of 2009 to 2016 for the identification of its strategic narratives. I have identified a system narrative of global recovery, an identity narrative of inclusive participation and an issue narrative of infrastructural development. A narrative grammar was used to relate BRICS strategic narratives with their narrative environment of symbolic, institutional and material practices. Due to a partial compliance with the narrative grammatical rules, the BRICS group may not effectively influence and gain public support.

Drawing the line between constituent structure and coherence relations in visual narratives.

Theories of visual narrative understanding have often focused on the changes in meaning across a sequence, like shifts in characters, spatial location, and causation, as cues for breaks in the structure of a discourse. In contrast, the theory of visual narrative grammar posits that hierarchic "grammatical" structures operate at the discourse level using categorical roles for images, which may or may not co-occur with shifts in coherence. We therefore examined the relationship between narrative structure and coherence shifts in the segmentation of visual narrative sequences using a "segmentation task" where participants drew lines between images in order to divide them into subepisodes. We used regressions to analyze the influence of the expected constituent structure boundary, narrative categories, and semantic coherence relationships on the segmentation of visual narrative sequences. Narrative categories were a stronger predictor of segmentation than linear coherence relationships between panels, though both influenced participants' divisions. Altogether, these results support the theory that meaningful sequential images use a narrative grammar that extends above and beyond linear semantic shifts between discourse units. (PsycINFO Database Record

Studies in the Efficacy of Motion Graphics

Contemporary digital news packages (packages) frequently embed media elements such as motion graphics alongside the story’s primary content. A motion graphic uses animated two- and three-dimensional computer-generated imagery and typography to present visual explanations of the topic(s) covered by the feature. Graphics editors and other newsroom personnel alike have been increasingly critical of motion graphics because, according to Viera, “many motion graphics are nothing but a set of visual metaphors strung together to support the hypothesis voiced by the narrator”. Using a mixed design study, this paper examines how narrative structure can be imposed upon motion graphics according to the theory of visual narrative grammar in order to provide viewing experiences that resonate with an audience. The findings of the study are capable of advising newsroom personnel of the circumstances under which the narrative structure of motion graphics can be manipulated or maintained for maximum effectiveness within a package.

From comics to biology diagrams: structure and inference in visual narratives of transformation

It has been proposed that comics are a particular form of a fundamental human ability to produce visual narratives – a visual language. The expression of this visual language has received little attention outside comics. To address this matter, this work compares comics and scientific diagrams, focusing on representations of morphological transformation. Cohn’s Visual Narrative Grammar model, the role of dynamic knowledge structures and semiotics are considered in this analysis. A comic book and a diagram are investigated. Both reveal two kinds of transformation narratives: those that are depicted in the image sequence, and those that are inferred. In contrast to depicted narratives, inferred narratives do not depend on a narrative structure. Instead, they require context-specific instructions to organize subjects into narratives. Additionally, simultaneous events in visual narratives are proposed to generate concurrent narrative structures within a single image sequence.

Human action in narrative grammars

AbstractAfter sketching out a history of twentieth-century structuralist linguistics and poetics, the article presents Greimas’s theoretical contribution to the semiotic study of narratives at various levels, including actants, actors and their kinds of competence, the semiotic square that gives narratives their general meaning, the variety of figures employed, and the thematic fields evoked.

Delving into the Narratological "Toolbox": Concepts and Categories in Narrative Theory

One of the most common ways to characterize theory is that it offers a for the analysis of narratives. I find this to be an egregiously banal dead metaphor, but what is interesting is how the prevalence of this metaphor tells us much about the disciplinary aspirations of narratology itself. is because every time the narratological toolbox is invoked it operates as a methodological or metadisciplinary statement. Hence, in this article I plan to trace different uses of the metaphor to establish how narratology has constructed its disciplinary history and situated itself in relation to broader directions in literary and cultural studies, before addressing some of the paradoxes and limitations the reliance on this metaphor give rise to, particularly revolving around the role of interpretation. Ultimately, I hope to clarify our understanding of the methodological procedures in narratological analysis by suggesting the importance of distinguishing between theoretical concepts and formalist categories. will lead to a discussion of ontological levels in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses in relation to the question of fictionality. as we know, has traditionally distinguished itself by its theoretical focus on the deep structure of narratives, on the construction of a grammar of narrative, on the search for what constitute any and only narratives. However, we know it has often been and continues to be perceived as an abstract theoretical enterprise characterized by a neologizing obsession with formalist categories. To counteract these perceptions, narratologists often promote the export value of theory in terms of the transferable utility of its method. And here is where the metaphor of the becomes important. metaphor invites us to imagine the theoretical edifice of narratology as in fact a kind of practical hands-on enterprise, busily developing a number of concepts and categories that we can use when working on a narrative. So, for instance, in the online resource Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative, Manfred Jahn writes: This chapter builds a toolbox of basic narratological concepts and shows how to put it to work in the analysis of fiction. What gives the metaphor its ostensible dynamism, and hence its importance to the discipline, is that, like the iPhone, the toolbox can always get bigger and better. There are three broad reasons typically offered for tinkering with the toolbox: (1) We need to refine existing tools, especially when we encounter new narratives upon which the tools do not work. For instance, Gerald Prince, in the collection Analyzing World Fiction, argues that if a multicultural text involved that the toolkit supplied by classical narratology (or a richer and more powerful postclassical narratology) did not envisage and was unable to handle ... kit should be modified so as to accommodate these features (38). Or we might see the value of other disciplinary paradigms such as cognitive science for conceptualizing our tools, which is what Jahn does in his essay The Mechanics of Focalization: Extending the Narratological Toolbox. (2) We need to produce new tools, especially if we want to expand our object of study to include a whole range of different media. In On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology, Marie-Laure Ryan offers a critique of radical media relativism, pointing out that this approach insists upon the unique qualities of each medium, thereby forcing the theorist to rebuild the analytical toolbox of narratology from scratch for every medium (3), which of course no one wants to do. ideal, then, is a toolbox designed for all narratives, and one important tool here is the concept of storyworlds. In the introduction to Storyworlds Across Media, Ryan and Jan Noel-Thon write: Whether logical or imaginative, however, the concept of storyworld will only earn a legitimate place in the toolbox of narratology if it opens new perspectives on the relations between media and narrative (5). …

Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel by Jesse Rosenthal

Reviewed by: Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel by Jesse Rosenthal Katherine Voyles (bio) Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel by Jesse Rosenthal; pp. 272. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017. $56.95 cloth. Jesse rosenthal’s Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel all but guarantees that from now on, scholars of Victorian literature will be talking and writing about form in relation to ethics and ethics in relationship to form. Rosenthal enlivens our sense of the possibilities and powers of narrative by arguing that the temporal unfolding of a novel is a moral, philosophical, and ethical matter. The arc of a story bends as it carries characters from undesirable states of being to ones that, in a phrase that resonates throughout Rosenthal’s writing, “feels right” (1). The unfurling of a character’s fate links the world of fiction to the reader’s own internal state. Mary Barton (1848) is an early example in Good Form that Rosenthal uses to show “the pull of narrative: its compulsion to change” (23). Rosenthal reorients Raymond Williams’s well-known argument that Gaskell lost her nerve as Mary Barton’s romance plot supplanted its political plot. In Good Form, Gaskell’s novel is about an “internally founded ethics” (24). As Rosenthal argues, “Gaskell does seem to be committed to contrasting Mary’s private and deeply felt drive—one that does not even need much in the way of an object—with the story of false understandings of others that doom her father” (27). Rosenthal’s account of Victorian form throws light onto fiction’s traffic between a narrative that “feels right” to the reader and the world of narrative itself. Sympathy, he is clear, is not what Good Form is about; nor is this a book about sentiment. In moving to the internal, the diachronic pull through a story instead of synchronic description, Rosenthal emphasizes how “formal procedures are used to produce a readerly affect which, even though it is literally a response to tropes, is understood in ethical terms” (31). Much of Good Form is devoted to chapters about how winding down a narrative is coterminous with characters taking their place in society. A reader’s right feeling, the right ending for a character, and the end of narrative come together. In the chapter on Daniel Deronda (1876), “The Large Novel and the Law of Large Numbers: Daniel Deronda and the Counterintuitive,” Rosenthal charts Gwendolyn’s isolation, and the monotony of that isolation, to underscore how Eliot’s novel defers, instead of aligning with, a reader’s right feeling and the right outcome of a character. The Deronda chapter is pivotal because tracking this deferral process recasts the alignment that came before: there is a gap between a world made of words and the world of the reader. The process of measuring this gap, and measuring how closely it is narrowed, becomes part of the narrative and ethical work, not just of the book’s overall argument but also of how it inhabits and plays out its own argument. A special virtue of Good Form is Rosenthal’s contribution to current thought influenced by scholars affiliated with the V21 collective. The book is infused [End Page 147] with thinking about Victorian narrative in the present moment and with the ways in which our moment is constructed by Victorian narrative. “Start” is the final word of Good Form, and Rosenthal’s is a book about pulling readers through fiction that tends to its “Afterward” with a beginning (191). Rosenthal’s finale makes a presentist commitment, never buried earlier in the book, especially explicit. “To the extent that nineteenth-century realism becomes a key site for formal narrative analysis,” Rosenthal claims, “it does so because it most fits the model of a story that makes sense, that works according to a narrative grammar that we understand” (193). There is a crucial looping quality to Rosenthal’s argument; our ideas about form are shaped by narrative theory, a theory that is shaped by its understandings of the nineteenth-century novel, and that same realism shapes the theories that elucidate its form. The looping quality to...

Developing Standards and Strategies for Globalizing the Storytelling of Korean Online Games

Objectives: This study was aimed at extracting and proposing a narrative grammar that the South Korean online game industry would do well to take on strategically, in the context of a comparative analysis of storytelling in globally successful games. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The study set “globalization” as a key word for the industry’s current challenge, based on the view that this crisis in the game industry can be seized as an opportunity. As a method for comparative analysis, this study examined how the “hero narrative,” which is the most classical story archetype, is applied in game stories. Findings: The South Koran game industry has not fully understood the importance of storytelling, as it has focused on technology-centered production contexts, such as videos and graphics. Particularly, South Korean games focused on MMORPG share a trend in which there is a setting but not a drama. They only have settings in terms of basic elements, such as historical background, space, and characters, but no drama structure that develops conflict, confrontation, depth, and resolution. The study developed a globalization strategy for the global competitiveness of the South Korean online game market by approaching the optimization strategy of online game storytelling from four angles, namely “convergence,” divergence,” extension,” and “sharing”. To develop South Korean online games, professional writers specializing in game scenarios should be cultivated. Cultivation of competent writers who can develop scenarios that harmonize locality and universality via extension and sharing, beyond convergence and divergence, will be the only strategy to sustain export of the South Korean online game industry. Application/Improvements: Particularly in the current saturated market, stories with high completeness are in demand. This is the academic background to the problem of developing South Korea’s own creative narrative strategy in order to improve the completeness of stories, which will help to create new markets, and also to acquire global competitiveness.

Storytelling and telling history. Towards a grammar of narratives for Cultural Heritage dissemination in the Digital Era

The paper represents an attempt to set up a theoretical framework for storytelling approach applied to Cultural Heritage. After a general analysis and a narrative theory review, the first topic addressed is the long-lasting problem of harmonizing freedom of narration (human creativity) and the constraints of scientific reliability: a debate which is at least 150 years old, but become particularly important in the digital era. Then, it will be set a classification of storytelling elements (arena, characters) inspired on similar ones shaped in the domain of semantics for literature, in order to create a working tool suitable for virtual museums and historical dissemination in a broad sense.

The pieces fit: Constituent structure and global coherence of visual narrative in RSVP

Recent research has shown that comprehension of visual narrative relies on the ordering and timing of sequential images. Here we tested if rapidly presented 6-image long visual sequences could be understood as coherent narratives. Half of the sequences were correctly ordered and half had two of the four internal panels switched. Participants reported whether the sequence was correctly ordered and rated its coherence. Accuracy in detecting a switch increased when panels were presented for 1s rather than 0.5s. Doubling the duration of the first panel did not affect results. When two switched panels were further apart, order was discriminated more accurately and coherence ratings were low, revealing that a strong local adjacency effect influenced order and coherence judgments. Switched panels at constituent boundaries or within constituents were most disruptive to order discrimination, indicating that the preservation of constituent structure is critical to visual narrative grammar.

„Był sobie gender …”

“Once upon a time there was a gender…” The term gender in the discourse of Gosc Niedzielny – semantic field analysis and actantial analysis&#x0D; The year 2013 was a time of impressive media carrier of the term gender. From scientific niche the notion invaded fiercely the language of polish journalism and political debate. The Intensity of ideological debate, triggered by the word gender, is reflected by the semantic struggle. On the one side there is meaning worked out through years by the theoreticians, on the other, standpoint of those sceptical about gender, who refer to it as an ideology, which goals and content is fundamentally different from those declared by the theoreticians. The goal of this very paper is to reconstruct the content and the meaning of the term gender, as it appears in the discourse critical toward it. The task is carried out on the example of articles published in catholic weekly magazine Gosc Niedzielny. Two methods was applied to achieve above goal – semantic field analysis and actantial analysis, based on A.J. Greimas’ narrative grammar.

Narrative conjunction's junction function: The interface of narrative grammar and semantics in sequential images

While simple visual narratives may depict characters engaged in events across sequential images, additional complexity appears when modulating the framing of that information within an image or film shot. For example, when two images each show a character at the same narrative state, a viewer infers that they belong to a broader spatial environment. This paper argues that these framings involve a type of “conjunction,” whereby a constituent conjoins images sharing a common narrative role in a sequence. Situated within the parallel architecture of Visual Narrative Grammar, which posits a division between narrative structure and semantics, this narrative conjunction schema interfaces with semantics in a variety of ways. Conjunction can thus map to the inference of a spatial environment or an individual character, the repetition or parts of actions, or disparate elements of semantic associative networks. Altogether, this approach provides a theoretical architecture that allows for numerous levels of abstraction and complexity across several phenomena in visual narratives.

Semiotic square and narrative grammar in one first grade mathematical text

Analysis of narrative and logical-semantic levels according to Greimas‘s semiotics of concrete text from the first grade mathematics is presented in this article. Semiotic square is constructed and it is shown how moving in this square creates the meaning of the text.

Visual narrative and trauma recovery

Visual representations are powerful vehicles for the transmission of collective memory and the processing of traumatic events (Zelizer, 1998). But how do images create narrative, particularly in context of a traumatic past? This paper analyzes two visual narratives created by national truth commissions in Guatemala and Peru. Drawing from various theories of visual narrative and visual grammar, mainly Eisner (1985), McCloud (1993), Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006), and Cohn (2013), this paper analyzes how each project used visuals — photography and illustrations — to create the building blocks of narrative: characters, setting, and plot. It compares and contrasts the two projects in terms of how they depict the main actors in the conflicts, as well as the main events and the overall visual narrative structure. Finally, this paper discusses the potential benefits and drawbacks of each medium as a post-traumatic tool.