Fixed Sentence Patterns Of Traditional Stories

Most traditional stories are transmitted orally from one generation to another, thus there did not exist an identifiable storytellers being the authors of those stories (actually every storyteller could be one of the authors of the traditional stories). Meanwhile, the contemporary stories always have one claimed author to them in this all-rights-reserved modern society. Compared to the modern writers, who are entirely responsible for their stories, storytellers of the traditional stories seem to be more detached to their stories. However, as the traditional stories were transmitted face-to-face from the storytellers to the listeners while the contemporary ones need a medium intervening them, the contemporary storytellers seem to be more detached …show more content…
The traditional stories show more narrative features. We can easily find that there are always some fixed sentence patterns in traditional stories, such as “that is all” serves as an ending symbol in Turtle Goes to War(Deloria, 1932) and “once upon a time” as a beginning sentence in the Yellow Women stories. By using these fixed sentences, the traditional storytellers put themselves merely as transmitters, not owners, of their stories. At the same time, traditional stories were expressed in a way with more oral habits, like more repetitious and parallelism sentences. For example, in the beginning of Evil Kachina Steals Yellow Woman (Allen, Paula Gunn,1989), two continuous sentences have repeated exactly same words, “then Yellow Woman went for water. With her jar Yellow Woman went for water.” Or different sentences with the same meanings, like “He had lost his wife. She was not there.” There are more parallelism sentences expressed a strong feelings in