Naslov
Methodological challenges of analysing narrative discourse

Autori
Podboj, Martina

Izvornik
Zadar Linguistic Forum

Vrsta, podvrsta
Ostale vrste radova, ostalo

Godina
2017

Ključne riječi
narrative analysis ; discourse analysis ; qualitative research ; corpus methods

Sažetak
In this paper I aim to discuss problems and challenges of developing efficient methods and techniques to analyse narratives of personal experience. Narrative analysis usually falls under broad notion of discourse analysis, which is traditionally qualitative and problem- oriented, aiming to investigate various aspects of language in use. The recent narrative turn, i.e. the proliferation of works on narrative in a variety of disciplines within humanities and social sciences, meant that narratives as data and narrative analysis as method are employed for investigating a broad range of socio-cultural phenomena (Baynham and De Fina 20005). In the structuralist tradition, Labovian sociolinguistic theory of narrative focused on the syntactic properties of narratives and the orderly sequence of events in narrative structure (Labov 1972). Postlabovian approaches, however, dealt with neglected aspects of narrative as linguistic interaction, such as universal and culture- specific aspects of narrative, intertextuality, audience participation, etc. Furthermore, the conception of narrative as discursive genre within the critical discourse analysis paradigm (Fairclough 1989) underlined the need to relate narrative construction with issues such as power and inequality. Evidently, narrative is a phenomenon that resists straightforward definitions that every researcher would agree upon. It is certainly a versatile text-type that can fulfil more than one discourse type (Georgakopoulou and DeFina 2012), so there is no one-size, fit-for-all method for analysing narratives. Since narrative analysis deals with a broad array of inquiry topics, methodological choices often combine insights and techniques that come from different disciplines ; sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, and psychology, just to name a few. Consequently, methodological challenges regarding issues such as data- gathering techniques, representation of text and talk (transcription conventions), analysis of gathered data, and triangulation, inevitably emerge. Here I want to discuss how qualitative investigation of narratives can be improved by applying quantitative techniques associated with corpus linguistics, in order to triangulate research findings and reduce over- or under- interpretation.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija, Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti

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