In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

TORTOISE, HARE, CHILDREN: Evaluation and Narrative Genre in Québec Sign Language Marion Blondel, Christopher Miller, and Anne-Marie Parisot In a seminal paper, Labov and Waletzky (1967) bring the analysis of narrative structure to bear on vernacular, unplanned narratives of personal experience. Before their paper, these types of narratives had received less attention than the planned, literary narratives that were traditionally the object of such analyses. Alongside the thematic and temporal structure of narratives, Labov and Waletzky propose that a second, evaluative function of structure is related to the two principal functions that narratives fulfill. A first and obvious function is referential, which is simply the function of referring to or reporting a sequence of events that transpired (or are claimed to have transpired) in the past; this function thus gives rise to the thematic and temporal structures referred to above. However, a text that contains merely a reported sequence of events fails to fulfill a second essential function of narrative: it must have a point. In other words, the narrator must in some way show how the reported events are relevant to the experience of the audience or, put differently, must show the value of the information being communicated. The degree to which a narrator succeeds in communicating this second function, the evaluative function, is central to the effectiveness of a narrative. To our knowledge, analyses of sign language narratives have not yet addressed this aspect of narrative structure. The present paper is thus 188 This article is a synthesis and expansion of three papers (Blondel and Miller 1998; Miller 1998; Lajeunesse and Parisot 1998) delivered at the sixth Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research conference (TISLR 6) at Gallaudet University. Earlier versions of this synthesis have been presented by the second author to audiences at the Universities of Tours and Toulouse-Le Mirail in France in 1999; in Lausanne, Switzerland, the same year; the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, in 2002; and at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2003. TORTOISE, HARE, CHILDREN : 189 conceived as a preliminary exploration of the ways the evaluative function can be realized in two kinds of narratives in one sign language. We hope that the findings we report here will serve as a basis for comparison in subsequent research both on other sign languages and on the variety of narrative types that may be encountered in sign languages. The LSQ88 corpus (Dubuisson 1988) contains a number of narratives of personal experience, of which perhaps the most interesting, both for its intrinsic content and in linguistic terms, is one that occurs at the very end of the last recording in the series of conversations in Quebec Sign Language (henceforth LSQ, for the French name Langue des signes québécoise) that make up the corpus. At the end of this video, the facilitator of the conversation remarks that she is tired and has a long bus trip in the morning to a summer festival where she has a job teaching children sign language. At this point, she starts describing the situation to her interlocutors, explaining how and why she was hired to teach signs to the children; in other words, she begins recounting a narrative of personal experience. What is most interesting about this story and what sets it apart (besides its length) from other such narratives in our corpus, is the fact that in the middle of the story, she launches into the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare or, more precisely, her adaptation of this traditional fable into LSQ. The fact that the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, a formal performance narrative, is embedded in a spontaneous narrative of personal experience, is relatively unusual in itself. More interesting yet is the fact that the narrator does not suspend the narrative of personal experience, retell the fable in a single block, and then return to the original matrix narrative. Instead, she retells the story of the Tortoise and the Hare as an illustration of how she told the story to the children, within the context of the main story. The overall impression one gets is that she weaves the two stories in and out of each other like the strands in a rug. In this paper, we will compare the ways the narrator encodes evaluation in her two narratives. To do so, we will first need to describe the overall structure of each of the two narratives. Despite the temporal overlap between the two...

Share