NARRATIVE MODELLING OF AMERICAN AND AUSTRALIAN FAIRY NARRATIVES FOR CHILDREN IN A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Narration as a widespread speech activity can be observed in many spheres of life: in everyday conversation when one speaks about some experience as a sequence of events story, one can hear narratives on TV when a reporter tells us something based on cause-and-effect relationships. Narratives are the stories that we read to our children for the bedtime. Human brain is constructed in such a way that it captures complex reality, experience, life episodes in the form of narratives 1 . So, what is narrative? Narrative is a story about some events(s), presented as a sequence of events story, united by cause-and-effect relationships 2 . Narratologists try to create basic narrative explanatory models in order to understand the nature of storytelling 3 . How are the stories created? If there exists a set of typically structured stories with a number of participants and settings, there should be some abstract patterns in their background. The first scholar, who suggested to the philological world explanatory patterns, underlying Russian folktales, was Vladimir Propp. In his Morphology of the Folktale 4 the author explains a typical structure of a folktale (here fairy folktales are meant), which follows the chronological order of the linear sequence of elements in the text as reported from an informant (i.e. it means the syntagmatic structure). Another pattern of a paradigmatic nature was suggested by Propp’s opponent Claude LeviStrauss 5 . He proposes that all possible pattern elements are taken out and regrouped in one of the analytic schema. Propp’s functions refer to the building blocks of the tale’s plot and correlate with typical characters of folktales. Propp understands functions as character’s actions, defined from