Reflections on linguistic approaches to the study of oral narrative

Abstract

The ubiquity of narrative discourse and its textual characteristics allow for the analysis of relationships, both within the space created by the narrators in the story world, and between the participants of the communicative event where it arises. Within modern linguistics, this attention to narrative has fomented several approaches and methodologies. This article proposes a theoretical reflection on the linguistic approaches that have been proposed to the study of narratives, which starts with the, then innovative, Labov and Waletzky (1967) article, moving on to interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and the current approach to the study of ‘small stories’ (Georgakopoulou, 2007).