NARRATIVES AS CONSTRUCTIONS
NARRATIVES AS CONSTRUCTIONS

Summary/Abstract: Narratives are one of the best researched discourse genres. This article addresses the question of whether narratives can also be described as constructions in the sense of construction grammar. First, the potential status of narratives as constructions is discussed against the background of narratological research and existing work in construction grammar on other discourse genres. The morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic and interactional properties that would have to be taken into account for a constructional description are then demonstrated using an exemplary Serbian narrative. It is shown that there are features on all linguistic levels which mark the individual parts of a narrative (abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, coda) and thus also the narrative as a whole on both the formal and the content side. On this basis, narratives can be described as clearly recognisable, structured and non-compositional linguistic schemas with an identifiable function. However, the most important characteristic of narratives - the reportability constructed interactionally in the communicative situation - cannot be captured with the help of construction grammatical methods

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