A Discourse Analysis of the Chinese Narratives

Abstract

Story-telling is a universal phenomenon and it seems that the plot structures of western and Chinese stories are very similar. Longacre in analyzing the linguistic structures of the story has proposed a formula for analysis of the narrative discourse. The paper tries to use the model to study two well-known Chinese stories retold in the modern Chinese; Change E Flew to the Moon and Selfcontradiction. The chinese stories seem to have followed the same line of development, beginning with the Pre-peak, followed by the Peak, and finally concluded with the Post-peak. The whole structure is also compared with the traditional approach to Chinese writing: Chi, cheng,jwan, he. The paper also attempts to offer a better understanding of the narrative discourse by analyzing how cohesion within the stories is achieved: the use of chronological succession in the event-line, participants as topic of the sentence and participant and pronominal references each plays an important role.