Fundamentals of Story Logic.

Abstract

This work concerns itself with narrative roles and events and recurrent episodic units through a complete reconstruction and recreation of the theoretical foundation of Greimas' narrative semiotics. It is divided into two major parts which mirror the two key actantial categories and axes, subject/object and sender/receiver and anchor the 'situational logic' of a textualized representation of a social system. The general discussion of the semantics of event and role relationships, the analysis of the subject and object and their link to the sentential case grammar demonstrate conclusively that the subject and object are not derived from sentence syntax. They are conceptual categories stemming from action as a pattern of practical reasoning and its inversion as a teleological explanation. The inferential patterns uncovered in the relation of the textual subject and object actants link it to research on narrative structures in cognitive science and to models of story comprehension based on logical semantics. The analysis of the second major actantial axis, sender/receiver, within the complete narrative schema of the Proppian functions and Greimas' functional analysis of this chain bring to light a surprising finding glossed over in narrative semiotics. The contractual and communication events take place within a domain of mutual agreement or consensus and involve the element of promise, trust, and morality, a normative and legal conduct regulating interaction. The complete contractual sequence of the tale--a breach of contract initiating the tale followed by four established contracts--point to an inherent normative or legal conflict between the hero's desire and the sender or manipulating agent: between desire, on the one h and , and law, on the other. It allows us to confirm H. White's proposition that narrativity is impossible without some notion of the legal subject who can serve as the agent of a story militating against or on behalf of a legal system. The closure of the story which consists of the Justice of the Situation raises the hypothesis that narrative, on the whole, has to do with topics of justice, law, legitimacy or, more generally, authority.