Editing William Labov (section)

==Language in use==
In "Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience", Labov and Joshua Waletzky take a sociolinguistic approach to examine how language works between people. This is significant because it contextualizes the study of structure and form, connecting purpose to method. His stated purpose is to "isolate the elements of narrative".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Nair |first1=Rukmini Bhaya |title=Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture |date=June 2004 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-134-39792-1 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Vud_AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA33 |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Labov |first1=William |last2=Waletzky |first2=Joshua |title=Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience1 |journal=Journal of Narrative and Life History |date=1 January 1997 |volume=7 |issue=1–4 |pages=3–38 |doi=10.1075/jnlh.7.02nar |s2cid=143152507 |url=https://doi.org/10.1075/jnlh.7.02nar |language=en |issn=1053-6981|url-access=subscription }}</ref>{{rp|12}} This work focuses exclusively on oral narratives.

Labov describes narrative as having two functions: referential and evaluative, with its ''referential'' functions orienting and grounding a story in its contextual world by referencing events in sequential order as they originally occurred,<ref name="Labov, W. 1997 p. 32">Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 32.</ref> and its ''evaluative'' functions describing the storyteller's purpose in telling the story.<ref name="Labov, W. 1997 p. 41">Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 41.</ref> Formally analyzing data from orally generated texts obtained via observed group interaction and interview (600 interviews were taken from several studies whose participants included ethnically diverse groups of children and adults from various backgrounds<ref>Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 13.</ref>), Labov divides narrative into five or six sections:<ref name="Ouyang">{{cite book |last1=Ouyang |first1=Jessica |last2=McKeown |first2=Kathy |title=Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14) |chapter=Towards Automatic Detection of Narrative Structure |date=2014 |publisher=European Language Resources Association (ELRA) |location=Reykjavik, Iceland |pages=4624–4631 |chapter-url=http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~ouyangj/OuyangMcKeown2014.pdf |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230327195041/http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~ouyangj/OuyangMcKeown2014.pdf |archive-date=March 27, 2023}}</ref>

* ''Abstract'' – gives an overview of the story.<ref name="Ouyang"/>
* ''Orientation'' – Labov describes this as "referential [free clauses that] serve to orient the listener in respect to person, place, time, and behavioral situation".<ref name="Labov, W. 1997 p. 32"/> He specifies that these are contextual clues that precede the main story.<ref name="Ouyang"/>
* ''Complicating action'' – the main story, during which the narrative unfolds. A story may consist of multiple complication sections.<ref name="Ouyang"/>
* ''Evaluation'' – author evinces self-awareness, giving explicit or implicit purpose to the retelling of the story. Thus evaluation gives some indication of the significance the author attributes to their story.<ref name="Ouyang"/> But evaluation can be done subtly: for instance, "lexical intensifiers [are a type of] semantically defined evaluation".<ref>Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 37.</ref>
* ''Resolution'' – occurs sequentially following the evaluation. The resolution may give the story a sense of completion.<ref name="Ouyang"/>
* ''Coda'' – returns listener to the present, drawing them back out of the world of the story into the world of the storytelling event. A coda is not essential to a narrative, and some narratives do not have one.<ref name="Ouyang"/>

While not every narrative includes all these elements, the purpose of this subdivision is to show that narratives have inherent structural order. Labov argues that narrative units must retell events in the order they were experienced because narrative is ''temporally sequenced''. In other words, events do not occur at random but are connected to one another; thus "the original semantic interpretation" depends on their original order.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Pratt |first1=Mary Louise |title=Toward a speech act theory of literary discourse |date=1977 |publisher=Indiana University Press |location=Bloomington, Indiana |chapter-url=https://english101fall2013.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/pratt-1977-narrative.pdf |chapter=Natural Narrative |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230327200352/https://english101fall2013.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/pratt-1977-narrative.pdf |archive-date=March 27, 2023}}</ref><ref>Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 21.</ref> To demonstrate this sequence, he breaks a story down into its basic parts. He defines ''narrative clause'' as the "basic unit of narrative"<ref>Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 22.</ref> around which everything else is built. Clauses can be distinguished from one another by ''temporal junctures'',<ref>Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997). "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience". p. 25.</ref> which indicate a shift in time and separate narrative clauses. Temporal junctures mark temporal sequencing because clauses cannot be rearranged without disrupting their meaning.

Labov and Waletzky's findings are important because they derived them from actual data rather than abstract theorization. Labov, Waletzky, &c., set up interviews and documented speech patterns in storytelling, keeping with the ethnographic tradition of tape-recording oral text so it can be referenced exactly. This inductive method creates a new system through which to understand story text.{{cn|date=December 2024}}