NARRATIVE AND DISCOURSE

NARRATIVE AND DISCOURSE

Author:  V.Z. Demyankov

Affiliation:  Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract: 
Ideas of “knowing” and of “being known” are traditionally ascribed to the Latin ‘gnārus’, the commonly recognized etymological source of the Latin ‘nārrō’ which normally meant “I am telling”. A prototypical narrative’s main property is cohesion, because narratives typically present chains of events and/or describe states of affairs which are not invented on the spot: prototypically, the narrator already ‘knows’ and the audience ‘learns’ them from the narration. At the same time, a prototypical discourse is coherent, consistently proving or disproving a certain line of ‘discursive’ thinking. Narrative discourses have both properties.
A corpus investigation of the word ‘narrative’ and of its cognates and derivatives is here exposed, in several Romance languages (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish), in Germanic (English and German) and in Russian. It shows different tendencies of development of the meaning ‘narrative’ in the course of several centuries. There are three groups of languages, depending on which the lexeme statistically prevails in the corpus: verb-oriented Latin and Italian, narration-oriented French and Spanish, and narrative-oriented English, German, and Russian. Therefore, a critical look is necessary at the existing definitions of the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘discourse’, thus narrowing their semantic scopes and delimiting them from each other.

Keywords:  cognitive linguistics, contrastive corpus linguistics, narrative and cognition, narrative vs. discourse, narrative cohesion, discourse coherence, inner form of terminological items.

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Acknowledgments:  The research is financially supported by the Russian Foundation for Humanities, project No. 19–18–00429 (section 1) and project No. 19–18–00040 (sections 2, 3, and 4).

For citation:  Demyankov, V .Z. (2022). Narrative and discourse. Voprosy Kognitivnoy Lingvistiki, 4, 5-16 (In Russ.).

Pages:  5-16