| The Clause | Structural Type |
|---|---|
| And how bout the particular field? | Abstract furnished by interviewer's request |
| That was more or less an accident. | Evaluation of entire narrative |
| Uh, I started out in Renaissance studies, | Orientation |
| but I didn't like any of the people I was working with, | Orientation/Evaluation |
| and at first I thought I would just leave Y and go to another university |
Narrative (main verb "thought") |
| uh but a medievalist at Y university asked me to stay or at least reconsider whether I should leave or not, |
Narrative (main verb "asked") |
| and um pointed out to me that I had done very well in the medieval course that I took with him and that I seemed to like it, |
Narrative (main verb "pointed out"). Absence of subject indicates that the verb is closely tied to the previous verb, and may be simultaneous with it. Also Evaluation of speaker's university career. |
| and he was right. | Evaluation |
| I did. | Evaluation |
| And he suggested that I switch fields and stay at Y. |
Narrative (main verb "suggested") |
| And that's how I got into medieval literature. | Coda: summarizes the narrative and marks its end |
Notice that all the main verbs are in the narrative past tense, as is usually the case for such narratives of personal experience.
It is not difficult to formalize what we will call the Labov narrative structure as a sign system, in much the same style as the sign system gven for a fragment of English grammar in An Introduction to Algebraic Semiotics, with Applications to User Interface Design. The top level sort is of course for narratives, lets denote it Narr, and the second level sorts include Cls, for narrative clauses, which we take as potentially including evaluative material, Eval for a stand-alone evaluative clause, Open for the opening section, which may include an orientation and/or an abstract, and Coda for the closing section. There are several constructors for building narratives from other material, corresponding to various options for leaving out some material; the priority on these corresponds to how common or ordinary they are.
The easiest way to summarize this situation is to give a general syntactic expression, the instances of which correspond to the structures for narratives that can be built according to the rules of this sign system. The following uses an "extended BNF" notation,
It is a very good exercise to write out the formal details of the sign system of which this is a summary; it will of course include the priorities etc. that are left out of the above purely syntactic description. Note that in general regular expressions cannot suffice, because sign systems can define context free languages, and axioms can further restrict these, resulting in context sensitive languages, or even general recursive languages.