Narrative detector: what you can learn about the narrator from his speech

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For many centuries, linguists have studied only written language, and there is an explanation for this. Texts fixed on paper are easier to collect, analyze, store - subject to any necessary manipulations. But at the beginning of the 20th century, the attention of scientists was finally attracted by oral speech, which, as it turned out, lives according to completely different laws. Dream stories, a story about a robbed farmer, a story with a missing frog.

One of the first to study oral speech was the American linguist Gladys Borchers. In 1927, her dissertation was published, where she compared the written and spoken languages of ten famous English and Americans, including Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. It turned out that in oral speech they often use the imperative mood, as well as interrogative and exclamatory sentences, and vice versa, less often - complex and declarative sentences.

The result is quite expected, but since then scientists have conducted many more experiments with much more interesting conclusions. For example, in 1980, again, American linguists Price and Graves published a study on the gender differences between oral and written eighth-grade stories. Surprisingly, it turned out that boys use more words in conversation than in writing, while girls do the opposite.

Dream stories and traces of neurosis​

Dream Stories is a study carried out in the 2000s by a group of linguists from the Russian State Humanitarian University, Moscow State University, the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, together with neuropsychiatric specialists from the Medical Academy named after VI Sechenov. Scientists wanted to know what the stories of children and adolescents about dreams can serve as a litmus test for neurotic disorders. They had 114 subjects at their disposal - 78 with neuroses and 36 healthy ones. Immediately after awakening, scientists asked them to talk about their dreams and recorded their stories on tape for later transcript and analysis.

It is well known that sleep disorder is one of the side effects of neurosis. Therefore, an experienced psychoanalyst can understand a lot about his patient through his dreams. But will his view be objective? One psychoanalyst will say one thing, another another, and the third will not establish contact with the patient at all. Therefore, in order to obtain a more reliable picture of the patient's internal motives, it is not superfluous to approach the interpretation of dreams from another, linguistic, side.

Take, for example, the story of a healthy child recorded in an experiment:

“We went somewhere with the class. We went into the house. And there were steps. And water. We got on a big raft and moved to the other side, then we went out the door. There was a door, so yellow, we opened it and went out, and we ended up at the fair. And there were ... all kinds of toys were on sale ... And there were sellers there were animals. Then we went to one more door. There was a path. We walked along this path and went to school. "

The dream consists of five episodes: the beginning of the journey - in the house - out the door - the fair - back to school. Events follow one after another in the correct chronological order - the plot unfolds without ragged jumps from topic to topic.

And here is the dream of a child with a depressive disorder:

“Mm ... I was at home with my mother, brother. Well ... well, there, I still dreamed of my cat. Well, well, well. For a long time there I dreamed about how we were just at home there, doing our business. Yes. Then I felt something alarmed, looked out the window, there was a fire engine at our entrance. I look, from there the flame is so blazing, well, here and there ... I didn't know what to do: my dad was gone, well, for some reason it seemed to me that I had to decide everything, I didn't know how to save us. That is, it would be possible to run up the stairs, the elevators could no longer work, but with my mother ... my mother is sick! So I suffered for a long time ... Then I woke up. "

This sleep is much longer than a "healthy" one. Its essence is not in the events themselves, but in the torment of the heroine, who is trying to build logical connections in an incomprehensible situation. Dream and reality are mixed here. After all, the narrator clearly goes beyond the bounds of a story about a dream in the words "My mother is sick!" In addition, she constantly evaluates everything that happens and often uses the preposition "but". In neurotic stories, he appears twice as often: as if the child knows about the normal order of things, but constantly draws attention to the fact that it is being violated.

One of the stages of story analysis is to highlight key words in it. And at this moment neurotic stories, as in panoramic books, stand up to their full height. Almost always, this is a description of interrupted, meaningless actions and not achieved goals. And if there is no action at all in the story, then it is worth waiting for a description of body parts and organs, wild animals and criminals, exotic and mystical creatures and, of course, details of the relationship with the mother. The category of “typical neurotic” also includes stories where one can see a bias towards words with negative meanings and topics like “Illness”, “Death”, “Extreme events”, “Moral characteristics”.

Pear theft and cultural differences​

Perhaps the most famous study of oral speech was the experiment of American linguist Wallace Chafe, "Stories of Pears." In the mid-70s of the last century, he decided to see how the same plot would look like in the retelling of different people and what this could clarify regarding their characteristics of perception of information, the choice of linguistic material or cultural differences. To do this, Chafe shot a six-minute film about a boy stealing a basket of pears from a farmer.

The action of the video takes place in an abstract warm country, and its heroes do not say a word. The subjects must explain everything they saw themselves. And here the storytellers run into painstakingly placed obstacles: the visual field of the film tests the viewer's attention and way of interpretation. For example, in the second minute a man with a goat appears, he walks past the pear picker and disappears from the frame. Whether he was or was not - it is absolutely unimportant for the plot, but his inclusion or non-inclusion in the retelling will show how people process such secondary information.

Or a scene where a boy, after staring at a girl he meets, runs into a stone and falls off a bicycle - this is a test of how the viewer will tell about events from the "cause-effect" category. Or a strange ping-pong toy in the hands of a passerby? It has no name in any language in the world - the speaker's task is to somehow overcome this problem. And here is the final, full of drama, scene: the farmer finds himself robbed and sees children leaving into the horizon, chewing his pears. She forces the narrator to bring morality to this story and finally throw out his emotions.

Chafe tested his experiment in more than 15 languages (including the exotic Maya language Sakapultec), 20 people each. To move on to analysis, he and a group of his colleagues deciphered the recordings of stories, broke them into elementary statements, marked pauses, speech failures like a staggering "uh" between two thoughts, intonation features.

So they saw that the speaker thinks and puts the thought into words almost simultaneously, while the writer involuntarily maintains a distance between these processes (the writing speed is 10 times lower than the speech speed). But oral speech does not flow in a single stream, but advances in jerks, intonation units, as Chafe called them. Each such unit introduces one element of new information and reflects the focus of the narrator's consciousness - that on which his thought is concentrated at each moment of time.

In addition to linguistic laws, the narrator is also influenced by his cultural background. For example, Americans spoke of a film as a film - they used cinematic language to comment on the quality of the filming. Poor sound design, poor costume design, or unnatural colors were noted. In a word, they tried to show themselves as connoisseurs of cinema. Whereas the Greeks believed that they were experts in life, and spoke precisely about the events of the film: they talked about the characters of the heroes, about morality, about the quiet joy of working on the ground. Without dwelling on the form, they talked only about the content - and as a result, the length of the stories of the Greeks (84 words) was almost half the length of the stories of the Americans (125 words).

Time perception and grammar​

The average person may not pay attention to this, but linguists know for sure: oral stories can be completely different. One thing is “spontaneous speaking” (telephone conversations, retelling of dreams, or discussions of professors about scientific work), another is a retelling of a film, and, finally, a completely different thing is a description of static pictures. It was the last type of oral speech that the American psycholinguist Dan Slobin took up in the 80s of the last century.

He wondered how time would be expressed in stories in English and Hebrew? Indeed, in Hebrew one can only say about the past, present and future (as well as in Russian), while English has an abundance of verb forms. For the experiment, the scientist prepared a book of 24 pictures about a boy, from whom a frog galloped away, and he and a dog went in search of her. There were no verbal clues in the book, only the inscription "Where are you, frog?" - and the one on the cover.

Slobin asked children and adults to retell this story to him. And in the process of research, he was so carried away that, in addition to the British and Jews, he began to attract more Spaniards, Germans and Turks. As a result, Slobin saw that the grammar of the language forces the English to note the duration of the action, the Spaniards - completeness, the Germans - to describe in detail the trajectory of the heroes, the Jews - to be indifferent to temporal nuances , and the Turks - to the peculiarities of the characters.

“I am convinced that the events of this little book are experienced in different ways by people who speak different languages. But there is nothing in the pictures themselves that would make them describe them this way and not otherwise, "Slobin writes, which automatically includes him among scientists who believe that language forms a way of perceiving reality (there are also those who hold the opposite opinion on the independent existence of language and consciousness).

To prove his theory, Slobin notes that a person does not experience grammatical categories in everyday experience. Of course, things happen to people at a certain time and in a certain place. But only language makes us perceive them, for example, as finished or continuing. It is worth remembering at least an elementary example from English - after all, nothing from the outside world will tell us when to translate the Russian “She left” into English “She went”, and when “She has gone”. This is what is in our head and can only be realized through language.