Another story of grammars: Comments on Beaugrande's “The story of grammars and the grammar of stories”

Jou~tal of Pragmatics 6 (1982,) 433-440 North-Holland Publis.hing Company

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ANOTHER STORYOF GRAMMARS:COMMENTSON BEAUGI~,NDE'S "THE STORY OF GRAMMARS AND THE GIIAMMJ,R OF STORIES"*

JEAN M. lVlANDLER

The six possibilities for the status of story grammar rules th,~t Eleaugrands offers are discussed. Because most of the possibilities conflate the notion of a story gr~Lmmarand a story s.::hema, they do not appear to represent viable interpretations. A sto~¢ schema is a mental structure derived from sensitivity to structural regularities in stories; these regularities in turn can be described by a story grammar. When the distinction between a story grat~waar and a story schema is maintained, many of the di~fficultiesBeaug~Fandefinds with the ~rarmnars disappear or become less troublesome. Some of the successes of the story grammar approach to text analysis in relation to text processing are discussed and two cautions about theory in this area are memioned. First, the distinetior between a story schema as explicit knowledlle and as an implicit processing mechanism must b~ kept firmly in mind. ~iecend new theory has the obliigation of being cumulative in the sense oi incorporating the findings inspired by prior work in addition to forging new ground.

B,~augrande expresses a good deal of ambivalence about the statu.~ and u.,,efulness of story gra::ua~:s. On the one ha~d, he believes that they have contributed greatly to the advancement of ~theory in the area of discourse processing; on the other, he finds their formal status to be troubling. To some extent, his complaimr, a oout story grammars, such ~:~the lack of constraints on d:~eprofiferation of rules, are complahits we al~!ha're about most psychological ff~eories. But in addition, I think too much is made of the comparison of story ~'ajlrmiars to senter~ce, grammars. Perhaps it was a mistake to use the term "grammar" when describing the structure of sl!ories in the first place. It was t'e&en to mean a closer rdafionship between sentence grammars and story grarrunars than was in,tended. Because a rule system used to describe a kind of text resembles the rule systems of finguistics, that does not mean that th~ two enterprise~ a~re the s~ame or that they inherit the ~ame problems. Linguistics doesn't own thLeno~ion of a grammar; it is a ~fype of formalism which can be adapted to raany ~es. For example, the granunar that Johnson and I for* Preparation o~fthis p.'aper was supported in part by NSF Rcsearda Grant BNS.8109657. Requests for reprims shouic! be sent to Jean M. Maadler, 'i3epartment of Psychology, '10 University of Ctlifolnia, San Di~.o, La Jolla, CA 920!)3, lu,~,,. "

0378.2166/82/0000-0000/$02.75 © 1982 N~mh.Holland

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J.M. Mandler / Another st,,~.' o/~amolars

muiated (Mandler and Johnson 1977; Johnson and Mandler 1980) does ~omething not found in a Chomskian transformational grammar: it uses a single notational system to combine syntactic and semantic dements. The use o~~ a particular kind of formalism (in this case rewrite rules) does not constrain the type of domain to which it can apply or the meaning of the symbols, nor does it mean that the problems linguists have had with the [ormalism in their domain will be the same for other content areas. In the realm of traditional stories, for example, there are relatively tew variations on the order in which events are mentioned. Since there are relatively few deletions and movements of constituents, a transformational system is a reachable me:hod of representation, and one that does not have ,he many complexities and problems that have been found in the much more complicated transformational grammars of sentences. Let us con~ider the six possibilities for the status of story grammar rules that Ikaugrande offers. Two of them can b¢ rejected out of hand. The rules t,;,:.re never intended to be "stipulated solely by the formal construction of the g:ammar" (2.7.1.). Nor were the rules intended to "stipulate the: ideal toward ~zhlch stories evolve ihrough repeated retellmgs" (2.7.7.). Johnson and 1 did ~peculate that the relatively small number of units found in stories from the ~ral tradition and the ~,ma!!number of units found in each epi:~ode in such ~tc,ries migh~be due to limitations on human memory. We also specula,!ed that :,tori,:s might drift toward an ideal (easily remembered) form over tii,~e in a ::o'.ta'~, that lacks the wr,:tten word. We did not say thai there was only one pattern for stories, which is clearly not the case, although we were surprised to find me number of forms to be rather small. But thest: comments were merely s~:uhtions and in no sense were meant to represen~ the function of or the basis for the grammatical rules. BeaL~grande's chief comender in his set of possibilities is that ILhe rules represent "human operations carried out when producing or comprehending a ~t~)~:' (2.7.3.). in :~pite of its attra:tiveness, he finds that this suggestion is prone to al! the ills that have plagued psychologists attempting to adopt ~ntence gratamars as, models of psychological processing. In this I agree with him. A story g.,'ammar is not a mo~d oi' human processing Although near the end of his p,~.per Beau~,~randementions the distinction that has been made bet,,,.-een a stot3~gramma: and a story schema (Mandler in press; Mandler and Go~dman in press), it is ~ crucial point that must be kept in mind throughout an) discussion of what a~ story grammar is about. A story grammar is a d~:ription of the structural regularities in a particular kind of text, exemplified by folktales and fables from the oral tradition and by new stories com:eived m ~_is mode. A ~:,toryschemer is a mental data structure which is usec in various kinds of processing. T~e tg~o co~2pt,ions are obviously related, because story schemata are deri~e_d from the strttcture of ~tories. People incorporate knowledge about the

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typical structures of traditional stories through listenir~g to or reading them. The psychdogiist's interest in a story grammar arises because a careful specification of text regularities provides an informa@e way to investigate the characteri¢'s 0~f a story schema and how this kind of proces~ling mechanism might work. At the simplest level, the rules describing the regularities m the texts can be assumed to be reflected in the slory sch,~ma~,, but a literal translation of those rules into the head is neither necessary nor is it ass,,med. People hold expectations about story structure which are useful for comprehension and memory; they can also recognize when ~ story constb.uen~, has been deleted or moved from its normal position. They ¢:an thus use thuqr story schema to infer what is missing or to understand thali the order in ~vl"iiclaa story is told does not match the underlying sequence of the evenl:s being described. However, the choice of a transformational rule system ~.o ,~esc,.ibe well-formed stories does not imply that people under'~;tztnd stru~..,=.i ,~aria'tion merely by invoking the rules of transformations;. People are sensitive to transformtions on canonical form, and processing slows down when ~uch transformations occur (Mandler and Goodman in press). However, the time that is taken for this kind of processing does not reflect time to ran through a transformational cycle or the like; rather, it reflects the need to make appropriate inferences to bridge the gaps formed when something is deleted or move. Thus, there is a relationship between tr'ansformational rules and inference processes, but ir~ spite of Beaugrande's fervent wish (2.7.33, I do not believe that the story grzm~nar rules can be considezed as direct descriptions of human processiing. The distinction betwe ~,na story grammar and a s~o~ryschema also eliminates the problem ot' recursioa with which Beaugrande wre:~tles. A ,story grammar allows an unlinfited number of certain kinds of recursion; index;d, it would be possible to write such a story given an unlisted amount of time. But this characteristic olf a story grammar is not a characteristic of a story schema, since human memory is limited. As an aside it is of inte~est to note that people can comprehend more center-embeddings in stories thazl they can in ser~tences. Most people get lost after two such embeddings in sentences, but can ~aintain up to seven nested episodes if they represent subgoal~, wi~thout losing track of the overall pla~ of ,,he story. The comparison is not quite fair, sincethe classic examples of difficult ~entence embeddings are usually presented its. isolation. Neverth,~less, file ~'ea~ regularity in the structure of cen!:er.embedded stories (such as the orilginal ta~e from which Rumelhat~t (1975) mated the Olc ~Farmer story), in conjunction with the maintenance of a top-level goal throughout, makes thi:~ kind of rec~rsion easier tc understand! ,~n,d keep iin mind than the recursion i:a "The gjri the boy the man kicked hit yelled". One of the s~ixpossibilities ihat Beaugrande rejects comes cl.o.,;esttc, what we envisage a story grarmar to be useful for, namely as an analytic tool of the investigator. It is only one means of representing language, but witl~:out it we

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,l. M. Mandle~/ 4notherstory o/ grammars

would have little hope of determin~ing the bases on which a story schema is built. It is useful, of course, only insofar as it does a good job of capturing the regularities that exist [1]. 8eaugrand~::suggest,,; that entities .~;uchas "theme" are not welt eaough specified for investigators to agree ~bout tlhem with ease. This category i:~ one used by Thorndyk~:,' (1977), and I agree that it is not only somewhat indefinite, but suffers from what Fillmore (this issue) describes as a conflalion of a constituent analysis with an analysis based on a content organization. The theme of a st.ory has to d.~ with its content and not with its cor~stituent structure. It would usually be difficulit to point to a particular set of sentences a~ld say "That is the story's theme", and often there will be no such ~t of sentences in the story's surface structure. Howeva~ ! do not believe that the same objection can be leveled against the ~0"~er grammars, including Johnson's and mine. The coastituents we have identified can all be represented by :;pecific sets of sentences, and in the main they are rela ively easy for the investigator to identify. Granted, they are not as e a s y. t o u~su~gu~sn J"-': . . . . :_L as a raun, vero, , or aavero. , , This is due in part to their greater and more variable length, and their lack of visible boundaries; or identifying rrorphemes, but also is due to their context-dependency. We did nt~t ~,,ay, a~ a~:rib.:d to us by Beattgrande (2.6), that nouns and verbs also cannot be distinguished without reference to sentential contexts, only that such mdeterminac3 doe~ occur in sentences ~.z":rtheless, it is true that man)' story c~tcg~ nes are difficult to recognize in isolation because the same string can function as a Beginning constituert or aa Outcome constituent, depending up~,n ~,~ p~sition within the episode as a whole. It is this dependency upon c,~ntext, by tl'e way, which accounts for the relatively rare occurrence of t,:mporal displacements from the cartonical lorm of stories, and the absolute ~cc:ssit~,, for ~me form ,~f markinlg to be provided when such displacement,. d o ~g:cur.

Another possibility that Beaugr~nde rejects is that the rules stipulate only prognoses "dealing with the order of sto~ constituents" (2.7.5.). Keeping in mi~d our distinction betwcc~-~ stc,ry gr~mmar rules and the psychological mechanisms involved in using a story schema, it is nevertheless instruchve to examine the ,ar~ous grammars to see if they have genuine sequencing rules. As Be:~ugrand¢ points out, the Thorndyke grammar doe~; not, for the reasors di~:u,,sed above But the other glammars do have the discrete constituents ~ecessars' to allow sequencing rul~. These rules, however, are ,between, not ~thin story constituents. Thus, it ~,s irrelevant to these :rules whdher within a b;etr:mg cor.'~tituer~t, the protagoni~.t, time, or location is mentioned first. The ~rderiag of consti~:uents themselves, however, is fairly rigidly determined in ~!J F o i ~ m g ~ar~ine~ ~19f2), Beaugrande states that a major problem inherent in structuralisr~ is ~h~ the m ~ o ~ r c,eate~ structures ratl',er than dL~covering them (!.8). This situation is true,' of ~l ~ ~ is ha_,diy unique to structutalism.

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traditional stories by the temporal and causal order of the events being described. That is, in traditional stories the canonical form i:~ the one in which the order of the narrative is identical to the order of even~fs. Flashbacks are ,~xtremely rare, and complex deviations from the equation of narrative and ~vent order, such as sometimes found in novels (for example. Lord Jim), appear to be nonexistent in stories !from the oral tradition. the oral tradition" hat~ r~othing to do Incidentally, the phrase "stories :rom " with mode of presentation in an experiment or the use of condensed versions of stories, as Beaugrande suggests (3.2). The oral tradition refers to a body of folktales, fables, and myths that arose in nonliterate societie:~. Only anthropologists hear such stories in their original form today; most of the corpus has been collected in countl:'.ss volumes, undoubtedly changed by translation to another lan[ual,e and or~to the page. Many of them have been reworked by artists such ;ts the Brothers Grimm. Yet surprisingly, in spite of these vici:gsitudes, the struc~tural tyl:es remain remarkably uniform. Because of the restriction of story grammars to storie:~ ~,ro.t . . . . the "- oral tradition, the quest for a grammar that would have "in its scope all those texts which a given culture regards as stories" (3.,I) is probably doomed to failure. Novels and literary short stories may have evolved from the oral tradition, but if so they have become structurally increasingly remote from their sources. This is not surprising. One of the advantages of the written word is the luxury it allows in terms of comprehending and remembering. Clne can always ge back and clarify obscurities, or reread a pass;~tge when hter events cast it in a different light .- an impossibility when merely lis~Iening. ,~.nd as a society"s literary productions become more and more sophisticated, tinkering with basic structure becomes a positive aesthetic goal, as Beaul!;r~nde points out (3.12.3) -given the support that a book provides to allow oJ~e finally to make seJase of what is being said. To the extent that a w'itten story or novel deviates from traditional structures, one's story schem~tta become h:ss and less useful Most: of our reading must be more data-driver,~ - and slower - than reading a fairytale. The last of Beaugrande's six possibilities is that l.he rule:~ ,no not account for processing but "only for abstract expectations about stories" (2.7.6). From what has been said above, the reply to this suggestion is clear. A story schema, not a story grammar, ~.ccounts for abstract exp~ctatio~; about .s'*ones. ' A,,; indicated earlier~ the p~ychological question of interest is the relationship between differen~ struc~ares and the schemata to which they give rise. It is not obvious that all the structural regularities that occur ia stories will be incorporated into a schema; thi~ is an empirical question. ]indeed, research with young children suggests that although simple story sc~emata develop early, only gradually are the forms of complex stories di~;covered (e.g., Botvin and Sutton-Smith 1977; Stein and Glenn 1982). Beaugrande sugg,,ests (3.25) that a story grammar is derived from a story schema, but the ~2rder of derivation is

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the other way mound. We do not invent story structure from inspection of our story schemata; we create mental structures on the basis of teguhrities experienced in our environJ~nent:;. ~fore turning to a brief discussion of the conclusions the resder might draw from •eaugrande's six cheLracteristics,it is important to makl: one other clarification. Beaugrande J,s also unhappy about the use of tr~ diagrams to illustrate rewrite rules. I lx'fieve he makes too much of this convenience, for it is simply that. The tr~e diagrams, including the numbers identifyinl~ particular sentences from the text in question, have no formal status of th~firown - ~hey are merely a visual aid to the reader. They allow the reader to see al a glance whether the surface ~itucture ot' the story follows the posited underlying structure and whether any constituents have been dele,~ed. In tddition, it should be noted that the height in the tree of any particular cc,,nstituent is rely,ant to its scope, bu, has no hierarchical implications either in terms of importance or degree of detail In this regard these visual aids ale similar to t~

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tree diagram than a muir, clause, but that does r,:~t mean it is less important or subsidiary to the meaning of the sentence a~ a whole. Nt~v, what should we conclude about the status of story gramrr ars.911: is not entirely clear front Beaulp'ande" aper which of the six possibiliti~:she believes to be most usefu! or c,)rrect, t suspect he might find the view that I have propo-~:! here t~o limited in .,;cope to be satisfying. So be it. I think that people have tried to make stou grammars do too much, account for too much. The grammars are tools of limi,.~d capacity but should no', be scorned on that account. Identification of the constituents of stories has been a major step in our understanding of ,lext structure. One can hardly begin a psychological theory of text processirg without being able to specify ihe equivalents in texts of words and phrases m :~entences.The ability to analyze stories into meaningfvl parts has also be¢::t: a boon to studies of comprehension and memory because it allows a pri,cipled way of camparing different storiet; and different populations. Until sucl~lmethods were developed we had only ad hoc methods o.~ dividing stories into units, such as the pauses that occur when reading or s~aking (Johnson 19;0). These methods were,• specific to the individual stories u~er study ar.d made i: difficult to generalize from study *o study or to un~:over regularities i~ processing across different materials. At the .same time, Beaugrande worries &bout the unlimited power of ihe transformational gran~mal'in which these rubes have been couched. I think the fear is exaggerated, giag~istic theory, has attained a degree of complexity ~°herein such a fear may be lc~timate. But the analysis of text~ is not that far advanced. As ia a:~2~theoo', ot~e starts tinkering wah the rules when one begins to M Mrra~ed ~ith exceptions. This may wall hap~n in anolyses of stories, and story grammars will then fall of their own weight. In the meantime we ~ho,aM welcc.fme~ cont~mders. It may be possible to find a single theory

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w~ch both describes the structure of texts and provides a set of mechanisms by which texts are processed. Story grammars, as presently formulated, are not set up: to a~omplish both goals in a sophisficaLed way. Some headway was made by following the simple assumption disc ass~t earlier - that the grammar rules and the processing rules map fairly directl~ onto each other - but we must mow, ahead from that overly simple view. What form new theory in this area will take i~s unclear at this tim~,. I will close s:rith two caveats about possible n,ew directions. First, we must always keep in mind t,he difference between p,~ople's co ns~:iousjudgments about what makes a good or an interesting storr and a story schema as a processing mechanism. Processing mechanisms are rarely av~/ilable for conscious reflection; they ope~rate automatically and beyond the reach of awareness (which is one of ~he reasons, of course, why our science re!~e '3n methods of measurement different from the intuitkns favored by ling,~ists). Explicit judgement is not the same as implicit processing, yet the two are often not clearly distLIJLJl~l~,~.t~l|, ; n n , . ; e k ~Wr l b y .,r~.bc.re ;n thi~ I 44JLLLLL a m ~L&S~,/~;qML&~.I.JLID' e,tmna, t|u:~ir, t,-, . ,, ~ ' 4 ~ , ZaJLl,~'a~'L:~, ;.,~,,.,~t LL.~,~ ;~ t~'Ik,BX&~k.V&O &Jl,& Ik&&JI.Q lat'~a i4JL~e t k l t , . Jth e ~ L L .~ D

conceptg of surprise, suspense, emotional va!tue., and judgments of story quality. But much recent discussion of the incompatibility of th~se concepts with a story.grammar approach ignores the distinction between explicit knowledge and impliicit processing. Seco~d, whatever new theory of story structure and story procesging is devised, it has the obligation to take into acoaunt the large anaoun~l~ of empiric~d data which has ~lready e~ccumulated. It is not enough to say thal the old the.~,ry ignored interest or svrprise, which is indeed the case. One can add these variables; to a theory, but one must not substitute these notions at the expense of the old. One must create a clear method <~ftext anall/sis that allows comparisons across stimuli m~d populations; one mu~st account for the ease or difficulty of comprehension of different kinds of stories:, one must account for the distortioas and changes in memory for stories over time. We have a ]lot of dater by now. If new theory does not account for tlae old data as well as for the new data, our science is not cumulative. As a single example of detailed data tha~tneed to be, acco~:Lntedfor. we ha,~e used our theory to predict (and to find) fluctuations; in reading spe,~ in complex stories (Mandler and Goodman in press). Sp~:ifically, people slow dow~ when they cro~s the boundaries of story consti!uents. "l~ey also slow down when ~,ny of thse constituents are deleted or moved, even when the move]~ents arc given ~:lear temporal markings as to the "real-tir,~e" sequence. Exactity the same resui~s aze found in the spee,g and/er accuracy with which stories~ are recalled. ~ believe these finding~ tell us ~;omcthing both about meaai~agf~l units in s~i,:s and how these ~,,its are processe& I fuilly agree that another theory may do a better job of a~.ounfi,g for such data (indeed, it's highly likely), but it will not help us to de, rise a r,,:w theory wkich accounts for something else unless i~ also accounts for what we already knov,. Tiifis means

J M. Mand/er / Another story of grammars

that the new ~:heories ,iil have to be more complex and detailed, not just different, than the simple ones we have now. 1 have cont:entratM my remarks on those aspects o' Beaugrande's paper with which I am in disagrcemnt or which I thought needed clarification. I do not wish to lea~/e the reader ~th the impression that I di:~agreewith all that he has said. 1 concur with many of his arguments, such as the futility of pitting structure against content when talking about stories, and that the early writings on story grammars were clear neither about the relation between story gram. mars and sent:nce grammars nor between story grammars and story schemata. It is ~dl to point out infelicities and lacunae. In addition, he has interesting suggestions for wa;,s in which current theories about :aory structure can be expanded. New we should re!am to our armchaks and ~o our laboratories and get on with the job.

ilef~eaees Bot~,ln, G.J. and B. Sutton-Smith. 1977. The development of complexity in children's fantasy narrati,,-es. Developmental Psychology13: 377-388. John~n, N S, and J. Mandler, 1980. A tale of two structures: underlying and surface forms in stone.~. %etac~9:51-86. Johnson, RE 1970. Recall of prose as a function of the st'ructural importance of the linguistic units. Jcmrnalof Verbal Learningand Verbal Behavior 9: 12-20. Mandle:, J M. In press. 'An analysisof story grammars'. In: F. Kli~, J. Hoffman and E. Van ,tier M:er, e:ls., Coding ~md kaowledg,.• representation: prxesses and struct¢r~.sin human memory. At~terdam: Barth lind Eis~vier blor~h.Holland. Mahomet. J.M, and M.S. Goodman. In press. On the psychological validity of story, structure. JoumaJ Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. Mandi~r, LM and N.S Johnson. 1977. Remembranceof things par.,ed: story structure and recall. Cogmt~,,e Psychology9: 111-151. M..rtir~t. A 1962. A functionai view of language. Oxford: Clarendon. Rum~lhar,. D.E. 1975. 'Notes on a ~che"nafor stories', ln: D.G. Bobrow and A. Collins, eds., Represema,ton and understanding: studies in cow, tire science New York: Acaden~ic Press. pp. 211-236. Se~n, N.L and C G G~emJ. 1982. 'Children's concept of time: the development o~ a story ~hema' In: W.J. Frietman, ed., The developmental psychologyof time. New York: ~cademie Pre~. pp 2S5- 281 Tho~ndyke°P.W. 1977 Cognitive str~ctures in comprehensionand m¢,nory of narrative aiscourse. Co~il~e PsychokgL' 9: 77- 110.

Jean M gander rec~ve~lthe B.A, in pMosophy from Swarthmor¢ College in 1951 and the Ph.D. m p~ych~k,~ from F2~,ard Unnrersitym 1956. She is currently Professor of Psychologyat the Lm~erm~ of California, San Diego (La Jolh, California). Her res¢arch interests are in the d~,ek~mc, g d rep~:~ntaxion ~,d nvaaory, with particular etlrtphasis on the orgar.ization of krdm~le.d~a ~ i ~ attd ~¢ttt SequenCeS,