The language of stories: Modelling East African fiction and oral narratives

Abstract

Few corpus-based studies have looked at the linguistic features that co-create narrative focus in a text. In this article, a corpus-based narrativity model with four feature groups is proposed that reflects the underlying structure of narratives: Agency, contextualisation, evaluation and causation. Agents affect events or are in turn affected by them; events are contextualised in space and time; the affective impact is reflected by evaluative language; and cause and effect give the narrative momentum. The aim was to illustrate how the narrativity model could be used to identify and map linguistic features associated with narratives in a corpus of East African English. A quantitative approach was followed to analyse and compare East African English fiction and oral narratives. The four feature groups included 16 linguistic features and WordSmith Tools 4.0 was used for the analyses. The results show that eight linguistic features frequently co-occur in fiction and oral narratives. However, some of the features are more frequent in fiction, whereas others are typical of oral narratives. First, fiction and oral narratives are discussed independently and then these registers are compared. Overall, the model is sufficiently robust to identify texts with a narrative focus.