About this Issue

Abstract

Our new issue deals with grammatical aspects of narrative. Linguistically oriented analyses of narrative texts in general and of fictional narration in particular have a long tradition. In the 1950s, Käte Hamburger’s reflections on the specific meaning of the preterite and the speaker’s origo in fictional texts triggered a controversial debate (Harald Weinrich et al.). In the 1960s and 1970s, there were various text-linguistic approaches to modeling macrostructures of narrative texts in the vein of generative transformational grammar (Claude Bremond, A. J. Greimas, Teun van Dijk, and others). Parallel to this, conversational linguistic and sociolinguistic theories of narrative in everyday life emerged (William Labov, Konrad Ehlich, Elisabeth Gülich, and others). Such theories, which looked for features of the narrative at sentence level, as well as in the text structure or in the pragmatic context, have been resumed in conversational linguistics in recent decades (‘oral storytelling,’ ‘small narratives’; De Fina, Georgakopoulou, and others). However, grammatically oriented approaches in the narrower sense also continue to attract attention or are attracting renewed attention. These include recent studies on the use of personal pronouns in ‘second-person narratives’ (Monika Fludernik) and ‘we-narratives’ (Natalya Bekhta) as well as analyses of the linguistic representation of speech and consciousness (free indirect discourse), perspectivization/focalization (Manfred Jahn) and the use of tense (Carolin Gebauer). Although an increasing differentiation and distance between the disciplines of literary studies and linguistics as a whole has been under way for decades, our issue shows that linguistic perspectives on narrative phenomena are also valuable and connectable across disciplines.

This issue gathers five articles that approach the topic of "Narrative and Grammar" from different perspectives. Rutger J. Allan uses battle scenes from the Iliad and Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme to show how linguistic phenomena such as tense, aspect, negation, deixis, speech rendition, perspective, and lexis among others create immersion effects. In their empirical study, Stefan Hinterwimmer and Christopher Saure explain, in regard to the grammatically ambiguous phenomenon of free indirect discourse, which grammatical factors determine whether utterances are assigned to the narrator’s or the character’s perspective. Anne Holm describes the function of nominal phrases for the stylistic phenomenon of ‘lyrical narration,’ which is evident in the backgrounding of eventfulness in favor of the representation of memory processes. Horst Lohnstein explains the fundamental function of finiteness for narrative and analyzes the morphological structure of finite sentences. Roman Widder discusses manifold types of negations and gaps in narrative texts in an exemplary analysis of Theodor Storm’s novella Immensee.

In our interview section, the renowned Hamburg narratologist Peter Hühn sums up his personal view of narratology. And in an interdisciplinary featured article, Eva von Contzen, Stefan Pfänder, Uta Reinöhl, and Maria Sulimma deal with forms and functions of repetition from a range of prespectives from linguistics, cultural, literary, and media studies.

In the review section, Philippe Carrard discusses an anthology on historiographical narratives (Stefan Berger / Nicola Brauch / Chris Lorenz (eds.): Analyzing Historical Narratives. On Academic, Popular and Educational Framings of the Past), Dunja Dušanić the monograph Life Storying in Oral History. Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity by Jarmila Mildorf and Florian Scherübl Cornelia Pierstorff's study Ontological Narratology. Narrating the World with Wilhelm Raabe.

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