What is narrative according to Labov?
Michael Gray
Updated on April 04, 2026
Labov (1972:359-360) defines narrative as “a method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which actually occurred”. He investigates the nature of linguistic devices used to observe verbal skills while evaluating an experience through narrative.
What are Labov’s narrative categories?
As suggested by Labov, these narrative structures fall into the following categories: (1) abstract, (2) orientation, (3) complicating action, (4) evaluation, (5) result or resolution and (6) coda.
What was Labov’s hypothesis?
Labov believed that the higher the social class of a speaker, the more frequent the occurrence of rhotic /r/ in speech. Labov’s sample of participants included a variety of social classes.
What is narrative discourse analysis?
A narrative discourse is a discourse that is an account of events, usually in the past, that employs verbs of speech, motion, and action to describe a series of events that are contingent one on another, and that typically focuses on one or more performers of actions. Folk stories.
What is Labov model?
The six main parts of Labov’s model are: abstract; orientation; complicating action; evaluation; resolution; and coda. “Evaluation” refers to the point, or reason, the narrative is being told, and it can be done in a number of ways. “Evaluations” may be specifically and clearly stated, or they may be implied.
What is mode of narration?
Narrative modes in fiction are the methods that writers use to tell their stories. In general terms, narrative mode could encompass some basic storytelling elements (it’s these that some writers would include as narrative modes and others would not)—narrative point of view, narrative tense, and narrative voice.
What is narrative and non narrative?
Narrative includes short stories, novels and autobiographies; non-narrative includes cookbooks, technical manuals, dictionaries and maps—all very different kinds of texts that require different reading skills.
What did Labov do?
William Labov (b. 1927) is an American linguist who pioneered the study of variationist sociolinguistics. Labov’s early research was greatly influential and inspired many scholars to carry out similar projects in other communities. The paradigm came to be known as variationist sociolinguistics.
What is an example of narrative discourse?
Narration is a type of discourse that relies on stories, folklore or a drama as a medium of communication. Stage play, story, and folklore are narrative discourse examples.
How are narratives structured?
Narrative structure is about story and plot: the content of a story and the form used to tell the story. Plot refers to how the story is told. Story is about trying to determine the key conflicts, main characters, setting and events. Plot is about how, and at what stages, the key conflicts are set up and resolved.
Can We prove anything at the discourse level?
The discussion of narrative and other speech events at the discourse level rarely allows us to prove anything.
What is the difference between a narrative and a discourse?
Narrative is a material form of discourse. Narrative texts have an inner concatenation of events and actions, and then a narrator voice, which delivers narrative discourse, the discourse of the narrative in question. This distinction is of course essential to literary analysis. Neuroscience provides a clear distinction.
What is the goal of discourse analysis?
Since you are in political science, it seems like that the forms of discourse analysis you have encountered are most likely to be versions of Critical Discourse Analysis, where the goal is to understand how it is that social issues come to be be discussed in some terms rather than others.
When did Labov publish his studies of Narrative Research?
Since that time I have published only a few studies of narrative (Labov 1972, Labov and Fanshel 1977, Labov 1981). This is not because I have lost interest in the subject, for I have written and delivered a great many unpublished papers in the area.[1]