Narrative Style: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Oral Personal Experience Narratives

Abstract

Personal narrative, a very important subgenre of narratives, is usually developed in a particular style. To know its specificity, in this study, oral personal narratives have been analyzed. For this purpose, twenty oral narratives, collected from twenty students of BS English, have been analyzed. In order to understand the macrostructure, i.e., narrative categories, Labov’s (1972) model of sociolinguist features of narratives has been used. For the analysis of microstructures, Halliday’s and Hasan’s (1976) five key cohesive ties: references, conjunction, substitution, ellipses, and lexical ties have been used. It was found that with little variations, most of the personal experience oral narratives follow the Labov’s structure of narrative analysis, i.e., abstract, orientation, complicating actions, resolution, evaluation, and coda. Likewise, while doing microanalysis, it was found that the narratives were well-compact with the help of elements of cohesive ties. The study shows that oral personal experience narratives can have the same structure as those of written narratives.