Instructures |
ABSTRACT Understanding the structure of a discourse as a dynamic construction of a discursive “world” it is possible to understand embedded discursive structures as framing “tools” that enable the process. Central to the idea of a framing tool is its analogical (metaphorical) structure which provides a “mental model” of experiences. Discursive structures are, in effect, instructions about how to construct a mental model of a situation. For this reason, I refer to them as “instructures.” |
In Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Seymour Chatman borrows from Claude Bremond and Jean Piaget to delineate a conception of narrative structure:
Claude Bremond argues that there exists a
. . . layer of autonomous significance, endowed with a structure that can be isolated from the whole of the message: the story [recit]. So any sort of narrative message (not only folk tales), regardless of the process of expression which it uses, manifests the same level in the same way. It is only independent of the techniques that bear it along. It may be transposed from one to another medium without losing its essential properties: the subject of a story may serve as argument for a ballet, that of a novel can be transposed to stage or screen, one can recount in words a film to someone who has not seen it. These are words we read, images we see, gestures we decipher, but through them, it is a story that we follow; and this can be the same story. That which is narrated [raconte] has its own proper significant elements, its story-elements [racontants]: these are neither words, nor images, nor gestures, but the events, situations, and behaviors signified by the words, images, and gestures.
This transposability of the story is the strongest reason for arguing that narratives are indeed structures independent of any medium. But what is a structure, and why are we so ready to classify the narrative as being one? In the best short introduction to the subject, Jean Piaget shows how disciplines as various as mathematics, social anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, and physics have utilized the conception of structure, and how in each case, three key notions have been invoked: wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation. Any group of objects without these characteristic properties is merely "an aggregate not a structure. Let us examine narratives in terms of three properties to see whether they are in fact structures. Clearly a narrative is a whole because it is constituted of elements—events and existents—that differ from what they constitute. Events and existents are single and discrete, but the narrative is a sequential composite. Further, events in the narrative (as opposed to the chance compilation) tend to be related or mutually entailing. If we were to extract randomly from cocktail chatter a set of events that happened at different times and different places to different persons, we would clearly not have a narrative (unless we insisted upon inferring one—a possibility I will discuss below). The events in a true narrative, on the other hand," come on the scene as already ordered," in Piaget's phrase. Unlike a random agglomerate of events, they manifest a discernible organization. Second, narratives entail both transformation and self-regulation. Self-regulation means that the structure maintains and closes itself, in Piaget's words, that "transformations inherent in a structure never lead beyond the system but always engender elements that belong to it and preserve its laws. . . . (20-21)
Follwing Bremond, Chatman notes that stories have narrative structures because a story can be transposed from one context to another suggesting that its content (the words used to tell it) can be changed without changing the story. Earlier I noted that the quest story (narrative structure) has been retold from the Summerian story of Gilgamesh to the American story of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with numerous retellings between the two time periods, notably the Grail Quest stories featuring Peredur or Parzival or Perceval depending on whether the retelling is Celtic, German, or French. Following Piaget, Chatman notes that narrative structures is a whole made up of parts (characters, events), is self regulating (begining, middle and ending resolution), and involves a transformation (initial state, pivotal transforming event, new state of affairs).
discourse as structures embedded in a framing structure
As Chatman notes, narratives are both discourses and stories. Thus it not only has a story structure but also a discursive structure.
As Diane Blakemore remarks in "Discourse and Relevance Theory,"
It is generally agreed that the study of discourse takes us beyond the study of the sentence. ... And of course, one of the most influential books on linguistic aspects of discourse, Halliday and Hasan's (1976) Cohesion in English, is based on the view that a text is a "unit of language in use" (1976: 2) which must be studied in terms of its function in communication. Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 100.
We can say that discourse is a string of sentences structured by a purpose, usually a communicative one. Its purpose frames the discourse. From this point of view, every discourse is a "text in its context" (Werth, 1999,1-4.) or a text in a communicative situation which frames it.
Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Dionysis Goutsos argue persuasively that there are basically two modes of discourse: narrative and non-narrative (2004, 40ff.). These modes are made up of smaller units of discursive structures. Complex discourses can contain several discursive structures.
A news report can contain a story. Conversations can include stories. And, of course, stories include conversations and reports. It is not necessary to identify all discourse types. It's less confusing to identify the major discourse structures rather than their multiple variations. This section identifies nine discourse structures in three categories:
- Conversational Structures
- exchanging information (e.g., teaching) [framing/categorizing]
- collaborating (planning & problem solving) [questioning/answering]
- comparing (matching the features of one entity with another.) [evaluating]
- Narrative Structures
- narrating (anecdotes) [chronicling, planning]
- plotting (life stories as story structures, news stories) [storytelling]
- configuring (cultural stories as instructive stories, fables, legends, myths) [mythologizing]
- Non-narrative structures
- describing (propositions/statements) [asserting/stating]
- proclaiming (declare someone to be something, affirm or declare as an attribute or quality of someone or something, praise, glorify, or honor) [declaring]
- arguing (logically arranged propositions) [inferrin, [propositioning/counterclaiming]
This is not an exhaustive list. It is a selection of discourse structures that are frequently used and are usually strongly linked to the indirect expression of beliefs and values. Any of these discourse structures can be combined with any other discourse structure to form a complex discourse. Most discourses are complex. Few are made up entirely of one discourse structure.
In this study, I am concerned with configurations which are narrative discourses.
As a story is told, its meaning is constructed.
As James Paul Gee remarks in Introduction to Discourse Analysis:
We continually and actively build and rebuild our worlds not just through language, but through language used in tandem with actions, interactions, non-linguistic symbol systems, objects, tools, technologies, and distinctive ways of thinking, valuing, feeling, and believing. Sometimes what we build is quite similar to what we have built before; sometimes it is not. But language-in-action is always and everywhere an active building process.
Whenever we speak or write, we always and simultaneously construct or build … areas of "reality" (12-13)
A discursive world is one that is built by language and, though it may describe aspects of the world in which we live, it is only a fabricated possible world.
In his Text Worlds, Paul Werth argues that discourse analysis investigates the various ways in which the participants in the situation construct it for each other through texts.
Consider the following sentences:
- Francis Macomber had, half an hour before, been carried to his tent from the edge of his camp in triumph on the arms and shoulders of the cook, the personal boys, the skinner and the porter.
- The gun bearers had taken no part in the demonstration.
- When the native boys put him down at the door of his tent, he had shaken all their hands, received their congratulations, and then gone into the tent and sat on the bed until his wife came in. (Hemingway 1947/1964: 413). [Taken from Werth 1999, 10.]
As the reader moves from one sentence to the next, the scene emerges. The distance is from the edge of the camp ground to Macomber’s tent. The second sentence informs us of two groups—those who carried Macomber and the gunbearers who are separated from each other. In the third sentence Macomber goes into his tent. The reader not only constructs a mental space (text world) but also a temporal sequence—a half hour in which several actions take place: carrying, demonstrating, not-demonstrating, putting down, shaking hands, congratulating, going into a tent, sitting down.
Though many aspects of the situation are not verbalized, they are nonetheless necessary to the construal of the situation. For example, the presence of a cook, personal boys, a skinner, a porter, gun-bearers fit in the frame of a hunting expedition. They do not fit in the frame of a baseball game or an opera. Moreover, since the gun-bearers did not participate in the celebration and the persons most likely to have remained in camp did, whatever happened on the hunt set the gun-bearers apart from Macomber and the “triumph” the group in the camp was celebrating.
The text world Werth describes in the above passage is not a “story” world; it is lacking a crucial element—a resolution. (Of course, it is a passage taken out of the context of Heminway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” which does have a resolution.) For a narrative to be a story it has to have at least three principle components: an initial situation involving a desire and or a conflict, a pivotal action, and a final situation that resolves the desire or conflict.
Hemingway’s story is based on a conflict between Franics Macomber, his wife Margot, and their safari guide, Robert Wilson. Margot detests Macomber and Wilson despises him because he behaved in a cowardly manner while hunting a lion. Margot sleeps with Wilson sending Macomber into a rage. He confronts a rampaging buffalo and is killed putting an end to his conflict with Margo and with Wilson.
A story world is a text world which is the setting for telling a story. Since configurations are narrative discourses that are structured as stories, I will use the term "story world" instead of the term "text world." However, Worth's linguistic model of how text worlds are constructed informs the concept of an instructure.
Every component of a communication situation leaves its mark on the discourse. Obviously the author's intention informs it. But the reader is marked in the discourse as well. This discourse, for example, does not imply a mathematician as its audience. It implies someone interested in the study of communication. The audience is explicitly marked in the previous sentence but also in sentences such as: "We can say that discourse is a string of sentences structured by a purpose, usually a communicative one." This sentence also explicitly refers to the purpose of the entry--to describe how discourses are structured. My discourse employs a "code system" and there are many "instructions" about decoding it, such as "such as" above.
Instructure refers to the ways the textual structure of a story instructs its audiences to build a story world inhabited by various figures interacting with each other. I refer to the instructive aspects of stories their “instructure” and the dynamic telling as “instructuring."
syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of a discourse
The structure of a discourse needs to be considered dynamic. Discourses are constructed by their audiences as they unfold. Let's consider what happens as a person reads a text. Watch the following text unfold and consider how sentence frame subsequent ones.
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To find some coke,
But Jack was broke
So Jill was rumbling for a pill
syntagmatic frames and paradigmatic frames
jjs
Notes:
. [(Chatman's view of language is based on DeSaussure, Jakobson, and Chomsky—a structuralist tradition. Though I agree with his comments on narrative structure, I do not share his view of language. My view is based on Cognitive Linguistics.)] ... 
. [(Discourse analysts have distinguished numerable types of discourse. In many cases, the distinctions are based on situations: psychoanalytic discourse, sports casting discourse, sermonizing discourse. In other cases they are based on structural features: non narrative discourse vs. narrative discourse. ...)] ...
_ . [(In his Introduction to Discourse Analysis, James Paul Gee argues that "discourses can split into two or more discourses," "two or more discourses can meld together," discourses can be hybrids of other discourses." He also remarks that "there are limitless discourses and no way to count them." (21-22))] ...
last revised: June 12, 2010
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