Considerations on "time" in narrative discourse

Resumo

Narrative is a feature of human experience. Language users develop from a very early age, notions or intuitions about what constitutes a 'story'. Children can understand and produce narrative structures, and through the retelling of their stories, they organise and interpret their world experience and reality, which will then be systematically ordered. Over the last two decades, the study of Narrative, in the field of Linguistics and in Literary Criticism, has developed greatly. French theoreticians, like Barthes, Todorov, Bremond and Genette, to name just a few, have concentrated on narratives in such a way that the term Narratology is now used to describe the analysis of narrative texts. Linguists like Labov, Grimes and Longacre have also been concerned with narratives. The study of spoken, factual and fictional narratives is promising both as a study of language and as a study of human experience.