The Elements of Narrative: A formalism for analyzing story structure

摘要

This paper distinguishes between the content and the structure of linguistic meaning. I assume the content of meaning is given by the definitions of individual words, and that the structure of meaning, or narrative structure, is given by the noun, verb, and adjective relationships, together with some simple operators for combining them that are introduced and studied here: sequence, transition, contrast, sub-part, and implicit sub-part. Using these operators, we can diagram many simple story structures and ideas, so the patterns or "formulas" that can be written with these operators will be our subject.