Sociological and linguistic analysis of narratives

Abstract

Apart from classical ways of using narrative analysis in everyday communication as well as in linguistics and sociology, it is conceivable to detect the narrator’s interest constellations and a central stock of his general action capacities and specific institutional skills by way of his retrospective interpretation in verbal off-hand narratives of his own past conduct. His willingness to tell about personal experiences gets him into constraints to become more specific on the one hand, for if events are being told their respective consequences as new events have to be revealed etc. This constraint to become more specific brings up the narrator’s former and partly (at the time of the narrative) still existent actual interest constellations, because those are motivating, constituting elements of the events to be told about. On the other hand personally experienced stories point at wider action contexts and interrelationships (due to their retrospective character), and the kind in which narrators take account of these action contexts and interrelationships reveals something about their different degrees of action capacities. Both questions are only legitimate if we have the pre-condition of the sociological narrative analysis as proposed here: that the action contexts in the narrative are not just subjectively or even fictiously self-experieneed, but really accomplished. This pre-condition of sociological narrative analysis can be justified as a plausible imputation by the following aspect: as long as personally experienced stories are really told as off-hand narratives, the telling of them has to keep up the red line of temporal and causal linkage of past experiences in their respective relationship with the narrator, who at the same time is one of the central persons of action or at least of suffering in the story. In that respect telling those stories reproduces the existential conditions and orientations of the actual action system in important dimensions (except the layer of actual definitions of the situation).