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Chapter 8 Conclusion The goal of this research was to describe how ASL users package experiences and convey them to others in the form of personal narrative. Signers and speakers select among different possible grammatical structures to convey their experiences. These structures can simultaneously express “what happened” along with the narrator’s perspective on this experience. Narratives are a means of connecting with others. The involvement of the audience in a narrative is evidence that a connection has been made. I described two different types of narration. In textual (T) narration, the narrator uses lexical signs to grammatically encode information. The eye gaze is directed toward the addressee and the utterances do not use surrogate or depicting blends. In perceived (P) narration, the narrator does use surrogate and depicting blends. Through blending the signer demonstrates or depicts the actions of a past event in the immediate environment. The eye gaze during P narration may be directed in ways that depict the eye gaze of the surrogate. P narration demonstrates a concrete instance of an event although the signer is not actually repeating the event as they occurred. Bringing past events into the immediate environment allows the addressee to partially witness and interpret the past events. Such active participation creates the involvement necessary for a connection to be made between the narrator and the addressee. Distinguishing between T and P narration throughout a narrative clarifies the narrator’s focus at particular points. Whereas T narration focuses attention on the story, P narration focuses on the narrator’s experience of the past events. Narrators use the different types of narration as the information they need to convey changes. An analysis of the common structure of ASL narratives shows that there is a pattern to the use of T and P narration. The Ordered Sections of ASL Narratives All 12 of the ASL narratives I analyzed are structured in the same way. Narratives begin with an introduction, which serves two purposes: to 145 146 : c o n c l u s i o n secure the floor or mark the beginning of a new story, and to introduce what the narrative will be about. The background section follows the introduction . Its primary function is to orient the addressee, providing basic information such as the topic, the participants in the event, and where the event took place. The narrator then identifies and describes the events in what I have labeled the main-events section. The narrator describes a temporally ordered set of events, providing details about these events with elaborations. The explication section follows and expands or clarifies one of the narrative events. In the reflection section, the narrator comments on how he or she felt about what happened in the main-events section. The narrator then concludes the narrative with a signal that it is finished. Table 8.1 charts the different sections that appeared in each narrative. All the narratives include introduction, main-event, and conclusion sections; however, background, explication, and reflection are not always present. The absence of a section does not imply an incomplete narrative but suggests that the presence or absence of these sections reflect the range of information that may be included. The specific information within each section varies, but the function of each section and the narrator’s use of T and P narration within the sections does not. The labels that I have given to the sections (introduction, background, main events, explication, reflection, and conclusion) reflect the type of information expressed. They differ from those of Labov and Waletzky (abstract , orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, and coda) in that they more closely reflect the information I found conveyed in the narratives analyzed. For example, complicating action as defined by Labov and Waletzky consists of narrative clauses that recapitulate a sequence of events leading up to their climax, the point of maximum suspense. I did not find that the ASL narrators always build toward a climax; in fact, the location of the climax within the narrative varies. A climax can occur at the beginning of the main event or at the end, and in some narratives the narrator simply conveys a series of events and there is no single climactic point. (I did find consistent the identification of an event and then an expansion of that event.) I did not find examples of codas, or short summaries of the narrative. I propose new labels to highlight that these stories are not rehearsed, carefully structured narratives. Terms such...

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