Comparing Labov And Waletzky

In Labov and Waletzky's (1967&1997) view, the complicating action contains the main body of the narrative constructed by narrative clauses and serves the aim of delivering a series of events. As Labov and Waletzky (1997) maintained, it is often difficult to locate the exact end of the complicating action without relying on semantic criteria. The end of the complicating action often coincides with the resolution part.
2.2.5.4. Evaluation According to Labov and Waletzky (1967&1997), the evaluation is a narrative element that highlights the point of the story. It serves the evaluative purpose of conveying to the listener the worthiness news of the story. Since narratives are told in response to some stimulus from outside to establish some point of personal interest or to confirm …show more content…
185-186). Johnstone (1990, p.33) even believed that evaluation is a dimension of all choices storytellers make about how to encode events. In her view, every clause included in a story is impacted by how the teller evaluates the story. The complexity of this issue, indeed, is mentioned in the original paper by Labov and Waletzky (1967&1997), as they cautiously stated that evaluation is definable only in semantic terms, because an evaluative clause can suppose a great variety of surface forms. Such forms consist of direct statements, lexical intensifiers, modal expressions, subordinate clauses, repetitions, lexical expressions that contain symbolic actions, and judgment expressions of a third person. In general, depending on the degree of explicitness or structural embeddedness, an evaluative clause can suppose a more explicit (structurally external) or implicit (structurally internal) form. Labov and Waletzky hypothesized that evaluative expressions with different degrees of explicitness comprise a continuum as illustrated