NARRATIVE MACRO-STRUCTURES Logical and Cognitive Foundations*

1.1. It seems generally agreed upon that the structure of stories cannot adequately be accounted for in terms of their sentence structures alone. Notions such as plot, scheme, theme and plan have been used, both in classical literary scholarship and in structural analysis of myths, folktales and other simple stories, in order to denote more global narrative structures. At the same time a modest syntax of such macro-structures has been proposed, using such categories as Introduction or Setting, Complication, Resolution, etc. (cf., e.g., Labov & Waletzky, 1967). Similar categories have been used in structuralist work inspired by Propp. It is the aim of this paper to show briefly that a more explicit account of such narrative macro-structures and their categories requires a logical analysis of action and action discourse. Furthermore it will be argued that such (narrative or other) macro-structures have psychological reality in that they correspond to cognitive plans for complex semantic information processing. Recent work in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence has demonstrated, for example, that macro-structures are involved in our ability to summarize stories (Rumelhart, 1974; van Dijk, 1972, 1974a,b; van Dijk et al., 1975; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1975). More particularly, in this paper I would like to discuss the relationships between these formal, i.e., action logical, and empirical, i.e., cognitive, properties of narrative discourse. Although the results are partially valid for discourse and discourse processing in general, we will be concerned primarily with narratives.