Event schemas, story schemas, and story grammars
William F. Brewer, Edward Lichtenstein · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1980
The present paper investigates aspects of the individual's story schema.A theory is proposed relating structural characteristics of narratives to the reader's affective response and to the reader's intuitions about what constitutes a story.Two levels of narrative structure are distinguished: the event structure (the chronological sequence of events) and the discourse structure (the order in which events are presented in the narrative).An experiment was carried out to examine the story theory.Subjects read differently organized versions of the same event structures (i.e., different discourse structures), rated them for suspense and surprise at four points in the passages, and made judgments about the extent to which the narratives were stories.As predicted by the theory: (a) Different discourse arrangements of the same event structures produced different patterns of affective response.(b) Discourse structures which produced suspense and resolu-tion, or surprise and resolution, were judged to be stories, whereas narratives which did not show these affective patterns were not judged to be stories.The results were interpreted as suggesting a reinterpretation of the story grammar literature.No.