Linguistic strategies serving evaluative functions: a comparison between Japanese and Turkish narratives

Abstract

The main task for a speaker asked to “tell a story” based on a sequence of pictures in a book is to spell out and inter-relate the events depicted in discrete frames, and to package the contents into a set of successive utterances. In Ruth Berman’s (1995:295) terms, picture-based storytelling involves representing a “visual, static, spatial” kind of knowledge in a “verbal, dynamic, temporal” form. As summarized in the introductory chapter of Relating events in narrative, Berman and Slobin (1994), along with their collaborators, set out to identify different linguistic means used by narrators of different ages and speaking different native languages in inter-relating pictorially depicted events in the form of a story. For this purpose, they used a wordless picture-book story called Frog, where are you? (Mayer 1969). The focus of the original research endeavour was to study how narrators put into words the thematic progression represented in the series of pictures, using linguistic devices such as tense/aspect markers, voice alternations, inter-clausal connectives, and relative clauses. The efforts culminated in uncovering patterns of event encoding and sequencing which narrators of different ages and speaking different languages display in their narratives.