NARRATIVE AND DISCOURSE

Abstract

Ideas of “knowing” and of “being known” are traditionally ascribed to the Latin ‘gnārus’, the commonly recognized etymological source of the Latin ‘nārrō’ which normally meant “I am telling”. A prototypical narrative’s main property is cohesion, because narratives typically present chains of events and/or describe states of affairs which are not invented on the spot: prototypically, the narrator already ‘knows’ and the audience ‘learns’ them from the narration. At the same time, a prototypical discourse is coherent, consistently proving or disproving a certain line of ‘discursive’ thinking. Narrative discourses have both properties. A corpus investigation of the word ‘narrative’ and of its cognates and derivatives is here exposed, in several Romance languages (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish), in Germanic (English and German) and in Russian. It shows different tendencies of development of the meaning ‘narrative’ in the course of several centuries. There are three groups of languages, depending on which the lexeme statistically prevails in the corpus: verb-oriented Latin and Italian, narration-oriented French and Spanish, and narrative-oriented English, German, and Russian. Therefore, a critical look is necessary at the existing definitions of the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘discourse’, thus narrowing their semantic scopes and delimiting them from each other.