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Units in the production of

narrative discourseJames Paul Gee

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Published online: 11 Nov 2009.

To cite this article:James Paul Gee (1986) Units in the production of narrativediscourse, Discourse Processes, 9:4, 391-422, DOI: 10.1080/01638538609544650

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DISCOURSE PROCESSES 9, 391-422 (1986)

Units in theProductionof arrative iscourse

J A M E S P A U L G E EBoston University

Psycholinguistics is interested in discovering what linguistic units people use on-line in the production of speech. At the level of the sentence, almost all investi-gators have agreed that words and phrases are important units (Clark & Clark,1977; Fodo r, B ever, & Garrett, 1974). How ever, it is not yet clear whether theseunits, as they are used in the production system, should be defined purely insyntactic term s, or partially also in phonological terms (Gee & Grosjean, 1984;Selkirk, 1984). Above the level of the sentence, at the discourse level, there ismuch less agreement about what the important units might be. Linguists disagreeas to what units should be posited in a competence theory for discourse, and theyeven disagree as to whether the theory of competence should in fact be extendedbeyond the level of the sentence to the level of discourse at all (Cho m sky, 1975;Givon, 1979a, 1979b; Williams, 1977). Both at the levels of competence andperformance, work on story grammars, schemas and scripts, macrostructures,text grammars, and several sorts of conversational analysis have yielded a be-wildering array of suggestions about discourse structures (Gumperz, 1982;Kintsch, 1977; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Labov & W aletsky, 1967; Lehnert,1981; M andler, 1978, 1982, 1984; M andler & Go odm an, 1982; M andler &Johnson, 1977; Perfetti, 1982; Propp, 1968; Reiser & Black, 1982; Reiser,

I am much in the debt of Sarah Michaels from Harvard University for supplying me with taperecordings and transcripts of the two narratives of the young black child who se stories are analyzed inthis paper. I have followed, in almost all cases, herp roso dic transcription of the data. I am also in thedebt of Peggy Hoyt from Boston University for the transcript, with measurements of temporalstructures, of the narrative by an elderly New England school teacher which I analyze and comparewith those of the young black c hild. I am also indebted to both for discussion of ideas relevant to thispaper. Comments from Dell Hymes on a paper of mine that discusses some of the same data as thisone, though in different term s, have been very helpful in the formulation of som e of the ideas in thispap er. In part, I follow an approach he first sug gested to me . Of course , none of the above necessarilyagrees with what I have to say here, or with the use I have made of their data or suggestions. Storiesby the child studied he re, or similar sorts of stories by other children, hav e been discussed in Caz den ,Michaels, & T abors (1985); Collins (1985 ); Collins & M ichaels (198 6); Gee (19 85); Michaels (1981;1985); Michaels & Cazden (in press); Michaels & Collins (1984); Michaels & Cook-Gumperz(1979). Th ese papers discu ss in some depth the educational relevan ce of the sort of story constructiondiscussed here.

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to James Paul Gee, AppliedPsycholinguistics Program, Boston University, 605 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215.

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392 GEEBlack, & Lehnert, 1985; Rum elhart, 1975 , 1977; Schank & Ab elson, 1978;Schank & W ilensky, 1978; Scollon & Sco llon, 1979, 1981; Stein & G lenn,1979; Th orndy ke, 1977; van D ijk, 1972, 1980; van Dijk & K intsch, 198 3;Wilensky, 1982, 1983a, 1983b). However, though much of this work is quitesuggestive, there is, as of yet, little empirical evidence for any of these proposedstructures (however, for one approach, see Gee & Grosjean, 1984; Gee & Kegl,1983).

There are several sources of information about discourse structures that psy-cholinguists have not paid much attention to. This is probably because thisinformation has tended to come from anthropologists or anthropologically ori-ented linguists. One such source of information is the use of various sorts ofdiscourse markers in a variety of languages across the world (Hinds, 1979;Hopper, 1979; Longacre, 1979, 1983). English is particularly impoverished indiscourse particles and other formal discourse m arkers, but som e other languagesare rich in them. It is, of course, an open question as to what extent thesemarkings reflect underlying processes in the actual production of the discourse.A second source of information are the oral pe rfo rm an ce s found in so-called or al c ul tu re s, that is, cultures that are relatively uninfluenced b y writtenlanguage and the speaking practices that are concomitant with written language(Goody , 1977, 1982; Ha velock, 1963; Lord , 1960; O ng, 1982; Pattison, 1982).Such performances, oral narratives for instance, appear to wear a good deal oftheir discourse structure on their sleeve, so to speak. They have been shown touse a variety of prosodic, morphological, syntactic, and discourse markers todelineate structures at a variety of levels beyond the sentence, in fact, the sen-tence as such may not be a unit at all in these performances (Baum an & Sherze r,1974;Bright, 19 81 , 1982; Finne gan, 1967, 1977; H ym es, 1977, 1981 ; Scollon& Scollon, 1979, 1981 ; Sherzer, 1983; Ted lock, 1978, 198 3). A gain, it is anopen question as to what extent these devices indicate units actually constructedon-line in the production of the disco urse, o r to what extent they can tell us abou teveryda y, less formal sorts of speech. Such performances are sometim es, thoughnot always, memorized or, at least, constructed out of traditional subparts orformulae. Nonetheless, it is possible that such performances overtly mark dis-course-level units that are not as clearly marked or as rigidly defined, in morecausal everyday speech, but which exist there nonetheless. A third source ofinformation is oral language in general, when it is least under the control ofwritten language norms, whether this is the speech of residually oral cultures(Ong, 1982), the speech of children (Sutton-Smith, 1980), or the speech ofanyone caught up in the oral mode. Such language tends to have rich prosodicand temporal markers of structure, much of which is tied to discourse, not thesyntax of the sentence (Chafe, 1979, 1980, 1982; H eath, 1983; La bov , 1972;Ochs, 1979; Tan nen , 1982, 1984a, 1984b).

These three sources of information immediately bring up the question of theextent to which discourse-level structures will vary across cultures and Ian-



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PRODUCTION OFNARRATIVE DISCOURSE 3 9 3gua ges, and to what extent they w ill show uniformity (Hea th, 1983; Kintsch &Greene, 1978; Scollon & S collon, 1979, 198 1, 1984; Scribner, 19 79;S cribn er&Co le, 19 81; Ta nne n, 1980, 1984c ). Surely the level of discourse is the level oflanguage at which w e expect a great deal of influence of cultural variation. A t thesame tim e, it seems hardly likely that there is n't a great deal in comm on with theproduction of language in context across cultures, given that the same humanbrain, with its processing strengths and limitations-, is producing this language inall cases.

Spontaneous oral language, in any culture, bears some overt markers of itsstructure. For instance, there is ample evidence that the longer pauses in adiscourse will be at the ends of clauses or clause-like units, with yet longerpauses at the ends of independent sentences or sentence-like units (Cooper &Paccia-Cooper, 1980; Gee & Grosjean, 1983; Go ldman -Eisler, 196 1, 1968,1972;). Indeed, this is one way one can find such units in the case of languageswhich are not written. In fact, there is now som e evidence that the longest pausesof a text correlate well with important discourse breaks in the text (Gee &Grosjean, 1984; Gee & Kegl, 1983; Scollon & Scollon, 1981). For example,major transitions or breaks in the plot of a story tend to have longer pauses thanmore minor transitions or breaks. If this is indeed true, we can use pausing asevidence of larger units in the construction of a text or, put another way, asevidence of major discourse-level transitions or boundaries in the text.

In this paper I will look at the oral language of a young black girl (7 years old)telling sharing-time narratives at school (M ichaels, 1981; M ichaels & Co llins,1984; Michaels & Cook-Gumperz, 1979). As a child, and as a child from aculture that still retains rich connections w ith an oral-culture he ritage (Abraham s,1964, 1970, 1976; He ath, 1983; Jackson , 197 4;L abo v, 1972), her speech is richin markings of discourse structures. From the surface markers in her narrative Iwill try to induce the structures that seem to underlie and shape its production. Itwill turn out that, though her performance is spontaneous and in no sense memo-rized, it bears a great deal of similarity to performan ces in strictly or alcu ltu re s. Of course, this will, at best, tell us directly about only the units thatappear to be operative in the language of (part of) one particular cultural group.But it will raise the question of how these units might show u p in the language ofother sorts of speakers. To begin to consider these questions, I will close with abrief consideration of the speech of an elderly, middle-class white woman (aretired school teacher).

In the analyses that follow, I will refer to the little girl as L e o n a ( L , forshort).Tw o of her sharing-tim e narratives are given in the App endix. Each on e isreprinted twice. In Cakes-1 and P u p p y - 1 , I have given the narratives in prettymuch the form they were spoken; in Ca ke s-2 and P u p p y -2 ,1 have given them ina somewhat clea ne d u p version that reflects what I take to be some of theirunderlying structure. Cakes-3 and Puppy-3 are diagrammatic representations ofthis structure. Before we start, it is important to raise the question: How can we



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394 GEEargue for the presence of underlying structures in the production of a text fromthe surface performance of that text? We cannot, in fact, offer demonstrativeevidence. All we can do is appeal to various sources of evidence and show thatthey converge on the same analysis. We will borrow techniques from literaryanalysis (stylistic analysis: Ch atm an, 1978; Cluysenaa r, 1975; Jakob son, 1960,1978, 1980; Jakobson & Po m orska, 1983; W iddow son, 1975); anthropologicalapproaches to oral narratives (H ym es, 198 1; She rzer, 1983 ; Ted lock, 1983); andlinguistic discourse analysis (Brown & Y ule, 1983; Stubb s, 1983), together withprosodic analysis (Ben nett, 198 1; G um perz, 1982; Gee & G rosjean, 1983; Gee& K egl, 1983; see also S elkirk, 1984), to construct a set of hypotheses abo ut thediscourse-level units that appear to lie behind the production of the text. Ofcourse, once having a set of hypotheses about what units emerge, we can deviseexperimental tests for them, as well as look for other sorts of markers in otherlanguages or dialects for the same structures.

There is a characteristic prosodic pattern in L's style that can serve as aninitial cue into the structures behind her narrative performance. Her speechappears to be made up of a series of relatively short sequences of words, eachsequence having a single, continuous intonational contour. Most of these se-quences end on a nonfalling pitch glide, often also with some other indication ofjuncture (e.g., a brief pause or hesitation or lengthening of the final syllable).After several of these sequences, we finally get a sequence that ends on a fallingcontour. In the texts (Cakes-1 and Puppy-1) I have numbered these sequencesand placed each on a separate line . Sequen ces that end on a falling contour havethe symbol / / at the end of the line. In m iddle-class, m ore or less literatespeech, falling contours (roughly speaking) mark the ends of sentences. This isclearly not the case in L's speech, how ever. For exam ple, the opening of P u pp y-1 is 17 sequences long before it gets to a falling contour, and this material doesnot constitute a sentence under any syntactic description (even correcting forhesitations and false starts). This is, in general, true in both texts. In fact, thefalling contours in L's speech have discourse-level functions, not syntactic ones.(These functions are not fully understood at this pointwe will discuss the issuebelo w , see M ichae ls, 1 981 ; M ichaels & Co llins, 1984, for a fuller description ofthe prosody of these sorts of texts.) The numbered sequences in the text look agreat deal like what Chafe (1980) has called id ea un its (see also H alliday,1967; Grimes, 1975; Kroll, 1977). For Chafe, an idea unit is a single focus ofconsciousness. Th e v ast majority of these idea units are a single clause , with onepiece of new infromation towards the end of the clause, information that bearsthe pitch glide (for m ore information on the relationship betw een p itch glides andfocus, see Bolinger, 1972; Brazil & Coulthard, 1980; Ladd, 1980; Selkirk,1984). It is only when the subject of the clause, or an adverbial element, is newinformation that it constitutes an idea unit byitself. Some examples:(1) todayit's Friday the 13th



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PRODUCTION OF NARRATIVE DISCOURSE 3 9 5(2) an ' my grandm other's birthday is onbad luck day(3) an ' . . . my mother

my mothermy mother's bakin' a cake(4) we bof

went over my mother's house(5) last night

my grandmother snuck out(6) last

yesterdaymy fatherin the morning

(7) my puppyhe always be following me

Once the agent or an adverbial element is introduced as an idea unit, it can thenbe incorporated as old information in the following idea unit(s). Once this hap-pens, idea units tend to be clauses with an old or given agent, and with newinformation at or towards the end of the clause. (Kreckel, 1981, gets a similarresult in face-to-face interaction, using a quite different methodology.) This is,of course, a very typical and unmarked discourse pattern in English (and acrosslanguages, see Givon, 1979a, 1979b). Thus, it appears that L is aiming at aseries of short clauses as her ideal idea units. Fu rtherm ore, each of these clausesis marked by an opening a n d (or some other conjunction, though a n d isthe overwhelming favorite; in addition, verbs of saying can count as openers,too). If we remove obvious false starts and repairs from the text and collapse thefew subject nouns or noun phases that are idea units by themselves into theclauses they belong to, we get an ideal realization of the text, which is given inC ak es -2 and P u p p y- 2 . Each of the idea units in this ideal text I will refer to as a l i n e . I call them l in e s bec ause it seems that their mo st salient properties(discussed below) have little to do with their being clauses per se. In fact, forother sorts of speakers (or in other genres) they could be somewhat shorter orsomewhat longer than they are for L, and they need not always be clauses (seethe text by an elderly school teacher in Christmas-1 in the Appendix, discussedbelow, for example). Nonetheless, both Halliday and Chafe have argued that theunmarked idea unit is a clause. I also use the terminology of li n e s because Iwish to make contact with the literature on oral narrative in oral cultures(Bauman & Sherzer, 1974; Bright, 1981 , 1982; Hy m es, 1981; Sherzer, 1983;Ted lock, 1983). Such narratives often transparently ha ve a structure in terms oflines, much like the lines in poetry, which are not always clauses (though here,again, they often are). Before delineating the properties of these lines, let me

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396 GEEpoint out that idealizing these texts by omitting false starts and hesitations, aswell as collapsing subjects back into their clauses, does not mean that we areignoring these phenomena or saying that they are mere perform ance phe-no m ena and of no relevance. In fact, w e can appeal to these phenom ena asevidence for higher order structure. We will point out below that an increase infalse starts, hesitations, and nonclausal idea units coincides with major bound-aries in the narrative. That is, when L has finished a major segment of thenarrative and must move on to (plan) the next one she displays these sorts ofphenomena, perhaps because of cognitive load at these points or because herattention is shifting from content back to audience (or both). The refore, wh ereassuch phenomena are meaningful, they are meaningful at a higher level than theline.Lines have several related structural prop erties, properties that we can indeeduse as cr i ter ia for the ident i f icat ion of l ines . These proper t ies are:(1) Lines are relatively short.(2) Lines start with a n d (or some other conjunction or a verb of saying).(3) Lines have one pitch glide that terminates the line.(4) Lines often terminate with some sort of junctu ral pheno m ena hesitation , syllablefinal lengthening, a short pause, and so forth.(5) Lines tend to be simple clau ses.(6) Lines display a good deal of syntactic and semantic parallelism w ith the linesadjacent or near to them.Notice, then, that lines tend to be marked at the beginning ( and ) and at theend (the pitch glide and junctural phenomena) and in terms of their internalstructure (syntax and parallelism). Because lines are characterized by prosodic,syntactic, semantic, and discourse properties, there is converging evidence forline structure in a text.

For L 's te xts , it is the parallelism between lines that is the mos t helpful featurein identifying lines, just as it is in biblical poetry and in the narratives of manyoral cultures. And it is the syntactic/semantic parallelism across lines that alertsus to another unit in L 's p erform ance , a unit that appears to be the next larger oneafter the line. L tends to group her lines into series of lines that have parallelstructure and match each other either in content or topic. Furthermore, pros-odically, these lines sound as if they go together, by tending to be said with thesame rate and with little hesitation between the lines. I will call these units st a n z a s. They are very often four lines long, though they are sometimes twolines long . O ccasion ally, a single line seem s to function as a stanza byitself.Butin no case does L appear to use a three-line stanza. Stanzas show intricatestructure and patterning, taking on some of the properties of stanzas in poetry.Let's look at some examples.

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PRODUCTION OF NARRATIVE DISCOURSE 3 97an' my mother's bakin a cakean' I went up my grandmother's house while my mother's bakin' a cakean' my mother was bakin' a cheese cakemy grandmother was bakin' a whipped cream cup cakes

No t i ce t ha t eve ry l ine he re ends w i th c a k e . Fu r the r , t he s t anza ha s an ababs t ruc ture : the f i r s t and th i rd l ine involve mother bak ing a cake , and the secondand four th l ines involve grandmother . But they a l so have an aabb s t ruc ture : thesecond l ine ends by repeat ing the f i rs t , the third and fourth are (grand)motherbak ing a spec i f ic ty pe of ca ke . T hu s , the l ines a re fu lly sa tura ted w i th pa t te rn andare t ight ly kni t together . That th is paral le l ism is real ly par t of the product ionprocess is shown by the speech error in the four th l ine . Each of the f i rs t threel ines has end ed on a X c a k e , and L end s the fourth line th i s wa y desp i te theplural c a k e s . I t i s as if she is op era t ing with s lots that are to be f il led in wa yspa r t i a l l y de t e rmined by wha t ha s come be fo re . Le t ' s t ake ano the r example :(9) an ' we bof went over my m othe r's housean' then my grandmother had made a chocolate cake

an' then we went over my aunt's housean' she had made a cakeThis s tanza has a c lea r aba b s t ruc ture : l ines one and th ree a re w e . . . wen t overm y X ' s h o u s e , w h e r e a s in l in e s t w o a n d f o u r, s o m e o n e h a d m a d e a c a k e .No t i ce , t oo , t he l i ne s end ho us e . . . c ake . . . house . . . c a k e ( abab ) . An -o ther example , involv ing a pa i r o f re la ted s tanzas i s :(10) an ' then my puppy camehe was asleep

he tried to get upan' he ripped my pantsan' he dropped the oatmeal all over him

an' my father camean' he said ' 'did you eat all the oatmeal?he said w he re ' s the bo w l?I said I think the dog took i tWell I think I' ll have t ' make another bowl

Here L i n t roduces one s t anza by t he l ine a n ' my puppy c a m e and t he nex t by a n ' my fa ther c a m e , se t t ing pu pp y and fa ther in to con t ras t . T he f ir st s tanzahas four ac t ions , whereas the second has four speak ings . Not ice tha t , in thesecond s t anza , t he firs t two l i ne s hav e h e s a id and a r e que s t i ons , wh e rea s t helast tw o l ines repea t I th in k , g iv in g it som eth ing of an aabb s t ruc ture .(11) an ' he followed me all the way to the bus stop

an' I hadda go all the way back

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398 GEE(by that time it was seven-thirty)an' then he kept followin' me back and forthan' I hadda keep comin' back

Here L interjects the line b y that tim e it w as sev en -thirty into the m iddle ofwhat appears to be a tightly knit stanza (giving some evidence that the four-linestanzas are really m ade up of subunits of two lines ea ch ). This interjection servesa dramatic purpose in the story noting how late it is getting and thus how muc hdeepe r into trouble L is getting. Th e stanza has a clear abab structure: Lines 1 and3 involve fo ll o w in ' and lines 2 and 4 involve having to go back. But thestanza is also aabb: The first two lines are simple past tens e, the last two lines a rein the iteractive aspect ( k e e p doing som ething).I do not argue that all stanzas are so transparently patterned as these. R ather, Iargue that these transparently patterned stanzas give us the clue we need toidentify stanzas as operative in the production of the text. We can then go on toidentify stanzas that are not so transparently patterned. For example:

(12) an' I went t'the bakery with heran' my grandmother ate cup cakesan' an' she finally got sick on todayan' she was growling like a dog cause she ate so many cakes//

These lines are clearly set off in the text. They are preceded by a series of non-narrative statem ents, the first line of the stanza constitutes a change of location inthe story, and the stanza ends on a falling-pitch contour. The stanza is followedby a concluding couplet that parallels the opening of the story. Thus, we can bereasonably sure the four lines belong together. One line leads to another in thestanza by simple relations of cause and effect. We do not get much overtpatterning, though the first two lines are about the bakery and the last two aboutthe sickness. Nonetheless, we can clearly identify a four-line unit here. It isinteresting to note, too , how at the third line L has two a n ' s . Once again, itseems that there is a bigger juncture between the second and third lines in astanza than betw een either the first and second or the third and fourth, that is, thatthe stanza is made up of two two-line units.

Sometimes in these stories, two stanzas that occur next to each other seem toform a unit together. In these cases the second stanza basically repeats thecontent of the first or it furthers the na rrative line in only a very small wa y. I w illcall these two-stanza units, for want of a better wo rd, st ro p h e s. Let me giveone exam ple here ; I print the stanza s, w hich are adjacent to each o ther in the text,side by side here:(13) last night an' we was sleepin'my grandmother snuck out an ' she went in the rooman ' she ate all the cake an' gobbled em up

an' we hadda make more an' we hadda bake a whole bunch more//

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PRODUCTION OF NARRATIVE DISCOURSE 3 9 9

The first stanza starts with a temporal adverb because we have moved to a newpart of the narrative (the preceding part is under the aegis of to d a y and endedwith a falling con tour). This is m atched by the line a n ' we was sleepin' in thenext stanza, which again suggests nighttime. Grandmother sneaking out in linetwo of the first stanza is directly m atched by g randm other going into the kitchenin the second. Grandmother eating all the cake in line three of the first stanza ismatched in the corresponding line of the second stanza by grandm other gob blingthe cakes all up . Finally, w e hadda make m o re is matched by w e haddabake a whole bunch m o re . N otice, once again, that though neither of thesestanzas separately displays much internal parallelism, the relationships betweenthe two stanzas gives us clear evidence that each is a four-line unit (because theymatch each other nearly perfectly, line for line). The strophe ends on a fallingcontour, and the following lines clearly do not pattern with these, as they con-stitute an acting out of the grandmother's delight. Thus, these two stanzas areisolated for us as a clear structure with its own integrity. We may note, also, thatin oral narratives across various oral cultures it is not uncommon to see aretardation of the narrative line caused by repetition and redundancy (see Sher-zer, 1983, but also Scollon & Scollon, 1984). Such repetition perhaps aidsproduction by slowing down the narrative pac e, but we also should not discountthe aesthetic appeal such retardation seems to have for many, perhaps all,cultures (see Shklovsky, 1965; Stac y, 1977).

If we consider the properties of the units we have so far identified, that is,lines and stanzas (and strophes), an overall property of L's narrative style be-comes clear: Movem ent forward narratively is always done by holding a good bitof the structure and con tent constant. T his suggests that it would be interesting tolook at major transitions in her stories. H ow doe s L get from one place to anotherwhen she has to cross a major border, so to speak? In these cases there w ould beless structure or content that could be held constan t, and this should raise prob -lems for the flow of the n arrative. Th is brings us to the unit abov e the level of thestanza and strophe.

If we look at the content of L's narratives as wholes, they clearly fall intolarger units that we could call e p is o d e s. Ho we ver, in keeping with the termi-nology of lines and stanzas we have adopted so far, I will refer to them as s e ct io n s. Sections are defined by a set of converging criteria:

A. They tend to be large topic units, definable by one topic or them e.B . They involve no internal changes of place , time , or major characters.C . W ithin sections stanzas tend to fall into particular structures or patternsdefinable on the basis of parallelism.D. They tend to end on a line with a falling-pitch glide ( / / ) .E. At their ope ning, there tends to be a good num ber of hesitations, false

starts, and idea units shorter than a clause.

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narrative lines preceding the conclusion of the story are linguistically ratherdifferent from the rest of the na rrative part of the tex t, a point w e will com e backto . Turning to the Puppy Story (Puppy-3), we see that it has in Section 1, twotwo-stanza strophes. Section 2 has a two-stanza strophe that leads to a non-narrative stanza that is reminiscent of the non-narrative part of the Cakes story(and linguistically different from its surrounding n arrative text as w ell). Th e finalsection of the Puppy story has a two-stanza strophe that leads to the concludingcouplet of the story. The Puppy story does not contain summaries, but bothstories contain an intriguing non-narrative portion close to the ending of thestory.

Stanzas crucially loo k both w a y s : They organize the lines of the texts,while at the same time they constitute the internal structure of the sections. Theyseem to be a crucial switching device that mediates between the line and thelarger narrative structure of the text. W e do not wa nt to be particularly definitiveabout overall structure here. We are not claiming that L knows the overallstructure of the text before she starts; rather, we are claiming it is emergent by aprocess of incremental addition that is somew hat broken or thrown into c r is isat larger breaks in the text. The Cakes story gives us a good insight into therelationship betwe en the story as a who le and its em ergenc e part by part. There isa great deal of hesitation and a number of false starts and repairs in the finalsection of the story and in the concluding couplet. L seems to be trying both tocarry the story forward and to plan its ending . S he m anages to construt the finalnarrative event and to conclude with a couplet that immediately returns us fullcircle to the opening fram e, thereby con structing a closed and unified structurebut the hesitation seems to indicate that this is partly an on-line and retroflectivedecision.

Also relevant to the question of the relationship between the story as a wholeand its on-line unfolding in real time is the fact that the two stories display similarstrategies at a global level. They both open with a temporal adverb, they bothhave three major sec tions, they both have a non-narrative portion close before theending, and they both conclude by a rapid switch to a new and different locale(the bakery, the hospital). Further, they both have themes that run like stronglycolored threads through out the entire text, especially baking and eating in Cak es,and coming and going in Puppy. These global or abstract strategies may beschemas or global templates that L does in fact have as a pregiven resource orplan in constructing the story, a resource that is used together with her strategy ofincremental addition, parallelism, and retardation.

Before moving on, I would like to comment on the non-narrative portions ofthe two texts, which are reprinted below:(17) Cakes:

an' nowtoday's my grandmother's birthday

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402 GEEan' a lot o'people's makin a cake againbut my grandmother is goin' t'get her own cake at her bakery//an' she's gonna come out with a cakethat we didn't make//cause she likes chocolate cream

(18) Puppyan' he always be followin' me when I go anywhere' he wants to go to the storean' only he could not go to places where we could golike to the stores he could go but he have to be chained up

These portions involve generic statements, stative verbs, or statements lumpingmany discrete events together, all of which depart from the narrative line (whichinvolves statem ents of discrete even ts). There are several things to note about thelanguage of these portions. First, it is more complicated syntactically than theother parts of the text. Seco nd, it does not by any m eans fit as nicely the line andstanza structures we have been using (in fact, we have purposely rather forcedthings, here). Third, the language gets rather m ea nd er in g, as if L is delaying.I would suggest the following hypo theses: These sections come close to the endof the stories. They serve as what Labov (1972; Labov & Waletsky, 1967) hascalled ev al ua tio ns (which he points out often occur before the ending in thenarratives of black teenagers), giving an indication of the point of the stories andwhat L considers makes them te lla b le . Further, they serve as transitionsbetween the body of the story and the end ing, giving L space and time to plan theendings. They, thus, serve as aids both to the listener and to the speaker.

The fact that the style of the non-na rrative portions is different (mo re com pli-cated syntactically, less typically poetic in oral-language terms) suggests that Lhas two linguistic styles that she mixes in these stories. I will call one style p o e ti c , the other, the one found in the non-narrative portions, p ro sa ic . Iwill appeal to this same distinction when I consider briefly below the style of anelderly, white, middle-class retired school teacher.There is a great deal of sim ilarity between the structures we have found in L 'sstories and those that have been found in oral narratives from oral cultures around

the world. It is certainly possible to account for this by saying that L is from a residu ally oral co m m un ity , that is, a com m unity that is less influenced bywritten-language styles than m iddle-class c om m unities, and on e that still retainsties to an oral tradition. But the deeper question is why these structures of lines,stanzas, and sections exist across so many diverse cultures and genres. It seemsto me that the beginnings of an answ er are to be found in the hypothesis that thesestructures reflect units of human narrative/discourse competence. Of course,they will be marked in surface performance in different ways in different

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PRODUCTION OFNARRATIVE DISCOURSE 4 0 3cultures, and , h ere , oral cultures and cultures influenced by an oral tradition m aybe more perspicuous than some othe rs. The ke y, the n, is to abstract what is basicto these units and thus what may be universally part of the human nar-rative/discourse competence.As a first tentative s tep , let us hypo thesize that the following units exist in anynarrative performance:A . Idea units that converge on a unit that w e have called theline.Such units arerelatively short and contain one piece of new, or better, focused, informa-tion. They w ill often, though not alwa ys, be clauses. The language will usewhatever it uses to mark focused information to mark them (e.g., pitch

glides),as w ell as junctura l phenom ena such as short pauses or hesitations.B. Lines will cluster into them atically constant units that we have calledstanzas.Stanzas will have a unitary perspective, not just in terms of largerelements like time, location, and character, but also in terms of a quitenarrow topic or theme.

C . Larger topic/them atic units that we have called sections. Sections will bedefined by a unitary perspective in terms of elements like location, time,and character.

The amount of structural parallelism across lines and stanzas will be culturallyspecific, though the phenom ena itself is quite pervasive across cu ltures. W here itexists, it will be a crucial marker of line and stanza structure. Where it doesn'texist, we may be tempted to believe that the above units do not ex ist, as they willsomew hat hidde n. In fact, I will suggest a distinction between p o e ti c nar-rative performance and p ro s a ic narrative performance in terms of this (andrelated) features. Na rratives that m ark out these units with structural parallelism,I will refer to as p o e ti c ; those that do not, I will refer to as p ro sa ic . L 'snarrative is obviously p o e ti c . Prosaic narratives have the same underlyingunits,but they do not mark them in the same way. The stanza is, in many ways,the crucial unit. It mediates between the single focus of the line and the extendedtopical organization of the section. In more prosaic narratives, the term pa ra -gr ap h may be mo re approp riate, though stanzas are rarely liable to get as longin speech as paragraphs can in writing.In order to suggest some of the ways we might discover line and stanzastructures in prosaic narratives, let me look briefly at a performance that is quitedifferent, on the surface, from L's. This is a short narrative by an elderly, retiredNew E ngland school teac her. Oral narratives from elderly persons are interestingfor our purpose, because at least some elderly people tend to pause somewhatmore and somewhat longer than younger subjects (Sabin, Clem me r, O 'Con nell,& Ko w al, 1979; but see Go rdon, H utchinson, & Allen, 1976, as well). I assumethat any pause in a text is relevant to meaning and structure (at least until proven

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404 GEEotherwise). This is not an assumption always made in psycholinguistics but,interestingly enough, it is one made by some students of oral-culture discourse(especially Tedlock, see Tedlock, 1977, 1978, 1983). Furthermore, there issome psycholinguistic evidence that the pauses in a text pattern somewhat hier-archically: The smallest ones occur between phrases (perhaps, phonologically,rather than syntactically defined), longer ones occur at clause and sentenceboundaries (or boundaries of units that converge in the unm arked case on clause sand sentences), and the longest occur at the major episodic or thematic bound-aries in the narrative (Butterworth & Goldm an-Eisler, 1979; Gee & G rosjean,1984; Go ldma n-Eisler, 19 61, 196 8, 1972). In any case, pause s can be used toarrive at hypotheses about structure, though these hypotheses obviously have tobe considered in light of other independent evidence.

In C hristm as-1 in the App endix, I have given the text of the retired teacher,indicating all the pauses in the text and giving their values in terms of millisec-onds.For the most part, there is, between any two pauses, one concept or idea,where concept or idea here basically amounts to one piece of substantive, infor-m ation-bearing, lexicalized information, information that is usually n e w inthe discourse. Below, I indicate how this works, pointing out how certain infor-mation is old, given the co ntext, and italicizing the new ideas (in cases w here it isobvious that, and how, the unit between pauses has one piece of new, lex-icalized/substantive information, I just annotate the line with [o b v io u s] consult the Appendix, Christmas-1):

1. Probably2. the funniest3 . was4 . was when I wasfirst teaching in New Ham pshire [the speaker knows

that the listener know s that she was a teacher in New Ha mp shire, sothe new information here is when it happened]5. there were many6. interesting but7. funny happenings [ happ en ing s is a vacuous noun]8. I think one of the most interesting [The rest of the material herecarries no real information]9. I taught in Woodstock [ I tau gh t is given in (4) above]

1 0 . -1 3 . [obvious]14. eight grades in all with two teachers [exceptional in having at leasttwo pieces of new information]15 . -24 . [obvious]25. [exceptional]26. [obvious]27. and they had pushed an old-fashioned sleigh [ they had pus hed isalready implicated by sl e ig h and so is redundant]

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PRODUCTION O FNARRATIVE DISCOURSE 4 0 52 8 . - 2 9 . [obvious]

30. get in itwith all our presents [ g et in it is already implicated by thecontext]3 1 . - 3 3 . [obvious]34. school that mo rning [no new information]

This is a good example of a text where the ide a un its are not clausal. W esaw that L had a strategy of chunking out short, n onclausal idea units only at thebeginning of an episod e, w here the information wa s being introduced for the firsttime. Thereafter, this information, often referring to an agent, was prosodicallyreduced and made part of an idea unit that was a clause long. The teacher puts alot of emphasis on lexical and syntactic resources. Her lexical and syntacticresources are more complex than those of L, and thus we get many more smallidea units, w here L would h ave had single clauses with a pronom inal subject andnew information in the predicate. This difference in style is due to three factors:(a) The teacher is an adu lt L is only in the first grade; (b) m iddle-class, literatespeakers tend to put more emphasis on syntax and the lexicon to communicate am essage , whereas speakers m ore influenced by oral traditions put more em phasison prosody and discourse connections to carry the message; and (c) elderlyspeakers tend to have more elaborated syntax than younger speakers, evenyounger adults (Ob ler, 1981 ; Ob ler & Albert, 1977; Sm ith, 1955). How dee p isthe difference between the teacher and L? In fact, I would argue that it is not aslarge as one might at first think. It is also the case that the teacher's idea unitsconverge on ( ap pr ox im ate ) lines, lines that are, by and large, clausal. But wecan see this only if we look at at the teacher's text in terms of three layers orlevels of pauses. I would argue that, in the text, which I take to be only oneepisode or section long, idea units are separated by short pauses, that lines areseparated by middle-sized pauses, and that stanzas are separated by the longestpauses in the text. T o get at this structure , le t's set some arbitrary values and seewhat happ ens. I will define a small pause in this text as a pause less than 600 m s,a middle-sized pause is one 600 ms or greater, and a long pause is one 1000 ms(1 s) or longer. Below, I have written out the text again, numbering each line(i .e. , each segment ending in a pause 600 ms or greater), and leaving spacesbetween each stanza ( i.e ., each unit ending on a pause of 1000 ms or greater). Ofcourse , we hav e no guarantee that these values are the right ones; all we can hopeis that they are close enough that, for the most part, the right units em erge . W hatwe see emerge are lines that are rather clause/sen tence -like. T he teacher does notgive equal focus to all her idea units. Rather, a line combines several idea unitswith one of them being focused. The focused idea unit carries foregroundedinformation, information that is important to the flow of the story. This focusedidea unit carries the m ain pitch glide in the line . In the printing of the text below Ihave tried to indicate (by comments in brackets) how certain of the informationin a line is give n, o ld, or less focused, because it has already been implicated or

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406 GEEsuggested in some way in a previous part of the text. In the case of both theteacher and L, the speakers integrate their idea units into lines that areclause/sentencelike and that have one piece of salient information together withinformation that is given, redundant, or less foregrounded. We might say, how-ever, that L's given information tends to be more given and redundant, and thusm ore prosodically red uced , than the tea ch er's. T his is, in fact, just the discourseside of the teac her's greater syntactic and lexical elaboration. The re is, how ever,no very deep difference between the two. They both have idea units that con-verge on lines.

1. Probably the funniest w as when I was first teaching in New Ha m pshire(.670 m s) [ fu nn iest was in the question the teacher was asked]2. There were m any interesting [happenings] but (.770 m s)3. funny happenings (.660 ms)4 . I think one of the m ost interesting (.600 m s)5. I taught in W oodstock my first year (.810 ms)[ first y ea r is implicatedin (1) already]6. and uh had a group of children there w ere eight grades in all with tw o

teachers (1.150 ms) [this appears to be a side comment]7. and on C hristma s, on the day before Christmas (.770 ms)8. at that time you could celebrate Christmas w ith presents and trees and so on(.680 ms) [ celeb rating C hr istm as is already implicated in (7)]9. and the other teach er and I lived about a m ile from the school (1.546 ms)

[ other teacher and I is partially given in (6)]10. and about (.760 m s)11. an hour before school began w e heard a lot of children (.980 m s) [theforegrounded information is he arin g lots of ch ildre n ]12. shouting and so on and they had pushed an old-fashioned sleigh (.950 m s)[the shouting is implicated already in (13)]13. to our house (1.18 0 m s)14. and had us get in it with all our presents and pushed us (.760 ms)15. to school that m orning

The presence of lines in the text seems to be clear, then. It can hardly be anaccident that abstracting segments that are separated by p auses 600 m s or longeryield units that are so clausal. If this value was truly random, it should lead to arandom assortment of units from a linguistic point of view. But what aboutstanzas? L used semantic and structural parallelism to demarcate the stanzastructure of her text. But the teacher does not appear to. This could indicate that



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PRODUCTION OF NARRATIVE DISCOURSE 7she does not have an intermediate unit between the line and the section (here, thewhole text). On the othe r hand, it could just b e that the teacher does not mark herstanzas as overtly as L d oes. I will hypothesize that the units dem arcated by thelargest pauses in the text (1000 ms or longer), which are separated by spaceshere,are the teach er's s tanzas . Unfortunately, at first sight, there does not appearto be any evidence for this. These units do not even appear to be narrowlyconstrained to one specific topic/theme, as we would expect stanzas to be.No netheless, I believe that they can be shown to be quite narrowly constrained,and, furthermore, that they are organized by a type of seman tic/structural paral-lelism. Each stanza mentions, and is organized around, (a) a time, (b) a place,and (c) a topic/th em e. In fact, the first line of the first stanza mentions a them e, at ime,and a location. The rest of the first stanza goes on to once again mention atheme, a time, and a location. Each of the subsequent stanzas mentions onetheme, time, and location. In Figure 1, I lay out this structure, treating the firstline of the text as an introduction to the story as a whole. I display not only theparticular theme , tim e, and location mentioned in each stanza, but also the orderin which they are given in each stanza.

In the first stanza, the first line states a general time, location, and theme.INTRODUCTION (line 1)Theme Time Locationfunniest happeningSTANZA 1Themeinteresting, but funny

happeningsSTANZA 2Timethe day before ChristmasSTANZA 3Timean hour before school

STANZA 4Themepushed us with all our

presents in the sleigh

when first teaching

Locationin Woodstock

Themecelebration

Themeshouting & pushing old-

fashioned sleigh

Locationto school

in New Hampshire

Timemy first year

Locationa mile from school

Locationto our house

Timethat morning

FIG . 1. A diagram ma tic representation of the stanza structure of the teac her 's text. Note that S1S4 and S2 = S3.



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408 GEEThen the rest of the stanza repeats the theme, giving a more specific time andlocation. The first stanza ends on some nonnarrative, expository information.Notice that there is a great deal of patterning in how the information is laid outacross the stanzas. B oth the introductory line and th e rem ainde r of the first stanzastart with the theme. The second and third stanzas, the two internal ones, haveidentical structures. The theme is placed between the time and the location. Theconcluding fourth stanza returns to the order of the first stanza (theme, location,time). Furthermore, notice that across the first three stanzas, the theme, time,and location each narrow d ow n, getting m ore and more specific, going from thegeneral to the specific, step by step: Theme:funniest h appen ing interesting butfunny happeningscelebrationshouting and pushing sleigh; time: when firstteachingmy first yearthe day before Christmasan hour before school;location: New HampshireWoodstocka mile from schoolour house.

Thus, it looks as if these elementstheme, time, and locationare thehinges around which the teacher organizes her stanzas. Interestingly enough,then, although she does not have the overt parallelism that L h as, she does use aform of parallelism to organize stanzas. Further, the parallelism involves themention of a single time, location, and theme, giving almost the definitionalcontent elements of a stanza. The entire piece (one section lon g, I would argue)is given coherence by having each stanza exemplify these elements at pro-gressively m ore specific leve ls, until the final sum m ing up in the last stan za. It isinteresting to note, too, that the teacher uses the same strategy L does forclosurethe final stanza moves us to a new location (away from home toschool).

The point, then, is that there is a great deal of pattern to be found in theteacher's stanzas. Thus, there perhaps is reality to a unit that is intermediate insize between the sentence and the section or episode (he re, the text as a wh ole).Further, although there seem to be many differences between the style of theteacher and that of L , at a deeper level they appear to be operating with the sam esorts of principle s. Their superficial differences have the quality of the differencebetween poetry and prose. L uses a great deal of parallelism, a device tradi-tionally associated w ith poetry across m any cultures. Of cours e, it is a m atter ofdegree; the teacher has parallelism too, it is just less transparent.

In this paper I have tried something of a new approach to the discovery ofunits of planning in discourse, though aspects of the approach are fairly tradi-tional by now in ethnographic work on oral discourse. I have tried to useconverging evidence from proso dy, pa using, structural and semantic parallelism ,and stylistic analysis to argue for a series of hypo theses about units that appear toorganize the construction of discourse. At the lowest level, idea units convergeon lines, units that are often, but not always, clausal, and which contain onepiece of new or foregrounded information. At the highest level, the text isorganized around sections tha t are like, the acts of a play . In be twe en, and



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PRODUCTION OFNARRATIVE DISCOURSE 4 0 9crucially mediating between the two levels, are stanzas, clusters of lines that arenarrowly constrained in structure and topic. It is with stanzas that discourse takesits most definitive step beyond syntax. L's text suggests the possibility thatstanzas may sometimes cluster into strophes, while it also suggests that theremay be certain subsection structure to sections. 1 have further sug gested thatdifferences between styles may be located in the superficial ways of markingthese units, rather than in the deeper principles of their existence and construc-tion. We may want to make a distinction between more poetic and more prosaictypes of oral discourse (a continu um ), even for discourse that is not p o e tr y inthe technical sense. Finally, I am suggesting that there is a level at which thediscourse of children like L is not so much different from m iddle-cla ss, hy pe r-litera te speech as it is all the more transparent to what hum ans m ay have incomm on in the construction of sense in discourse. This hypothesis is, of co urse ,not proven, but I think it is nonetheless worthy of consideration and seriousattention, even if it does go against a current trend towards dichotomizing andstressing differences in this domain.

Appendix: Cak es -11. Uh today2. is . . . thir . . . i t 's Friday the 13th3 . an' i t's BREA TH bad luck day4 . an ' my grandm other's birthday is on5. bad luck day6. an ' . . . my m other7. my mother8. my m other's bak in' a cake //9. an ' I went up my grandm other's house

10. while my mother11. ' s bak in a c a k e / /12. an ' my m other's was bakin' a chee:se cake13. my grandmother was bak in'a whipped cream cup cakes14. an' my15. we bof16. went over my m other's house17. . . . an then my grandmother18. had made a chocolate cake19. an' then we went over my aun t 's house20. an ' she had made a cake21. an' everybody had m ade a cake for nana22. so we cam e out with six cakes / /



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410 GEE23. an'24. every last ye25. last night26. m'my grandmother snuck ou:t27. an' she ate all the cakes28 . an' we hadda make mo:re29. she knew w' we was makin' cakes an' she30. an' we was sleepin'31. an' she went in the room32. an' gobbled em up //33. an' we hadda bake a who:le bunch more //34. she said mmmm35. she had all chocolate on her face36. cream37. strawberriesCLASS: GIGGLES38. she said mmmmCLASS: mmmm39. =that was goodCLASS: that was good4 0 . an' then an' then my gran' (each) all came out4 1 . an' my grandmother had ate all of it//42 . she said what's this cheese cake doin' here4 3 . she didn't like cheese cakes44. an' she told everybody that she didn't like cheese cakes//45 . an' . . we had a:ll46 . an' then she then she47 . an' we kept makin' cakes48 . an' she kept eatin' em49 . an' an' last night50. an' we finally got tired of makin' 'e cakes51 . an' so/ an' so52 . we a:ll ate 'em// SOUNDS FINAL53. an' no:, now54. today's my grandmother's birthday55. an' only one . . person . . is56 . a lot o'people's makin' a cake again57 . but my grandmother . . is . .58. goin . . . t' . . . get her own cake59 . at her bakery//



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PRODUCTION OF NARRATIVE DISCOURSE 4 1 160. . . . an ' she's gonna come out with a cake61. that we didn't m ake //62. cause she likes chocolate cre am //63. an ' I went t ' the bakery with her64. an ' we had65. an ' we66. an ' my grandm other ate cup cakes67 . an ' an ' she finally got sick on68. on today//69 . an ' she started70. she was growrling like a dog71 . cause she ate72 . she ate so many ca ke s//73. an ' that 's why74. t '75. I told her76. an' I finally told her today was77. ApApri l78. . . . it w a s79 . . . . I finally told her that i t was80. . . . it was Friday the thirteenth81. bad luck da y//

Appendix: C a k e s - 2Frame

1. Today2 . it 's Friday the 13th3. an ' its bad luck day4 . an ' my grandm other's birthday is on bad luck da y//

Part 15. an ' my m other's bakin a cake6. an ' I went up m y grandm other's house while my m other's bakin' a ca ke //7. an ' my mother was bak in' a cheese cake8. my grandm other was bakin a whipped cream cup cakes9. an' we bof went over my m other's house10. an ' then my grandmother had made a chocolate cake

11. an ' then we went over my aun t 's house12. an ' she had make a cake



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412 GEE13. an ' everybody had m ade a cake for nana14. so we came out with six cak es//Part 215. last night16. my grandmother snuck out17. an ' she ate all the cake18. an' we hadda make more(she knew we was makin' cakes)19. an' we was sleepin'20. an ' she wen t in the room21 . an ' gobbled em up //22 . an ' we hadda bake a whole bunch more / /2 3 . she said mm mm24. she had all chocolate on her face/ cream / strawberries/25. she said mm mm26. that was goo d27 . an ' then an ' then all cam e out28. an ' my grandm other had ate all of it//29. she said w h a t 's this cheese cake doin' he re sh e didn't l ike cheesecakes30. an ' she told everybody that she didn 't l ike cheese ca ke s//31 . an' we kept m akin' cakes32. an ' she kept eatin ' 'em33. a n' we finnally got tired of m akin ' cakes34. an ' so w e all ate 'emPart 3Nonnarrative section (3 5 -4 1 )

35. an ' now36. toda y's my grandm other's birthday37. an' a lot o'pe op le's m akin' a cake again38 . but m y grandmo ther is goin t 'get her own cake at her bakery//39. an ' she 's gonna come out with a cake40. that we didn't m ake //4 1 . cause she likes chocolate cream

42 . an ' I went t 'the bakery with her4 3 . an' my grandmother ate cup cakes44. an ' an ' she finally got sick on today4 5 . an ' she was growling like a dog cause she ate so m any cak es //


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Frame46 . an ' I finally told her that it was47. it was Friday the thirteenth bad luck da y/ /

Appendix: C a k e s - 3The Cakes StoryFrame: Bad Luck D ay: STA NZ A 1 (four lines, non-narrative)Part 1: Baking Cakesa. STA NZA 1 (four lines) # STA NZA 2 (four lines)

b . STAN ZA 4 (two lines) Sum maryPart 2: Grandm other Eats the Cakes

a. STA NZ A 5 (four lines) # STA NZA 6 (four lines)b. STA NZA 7 (four lines) # STA NZA 8 (four lines)c. STAN ZA 9 (four lines) Summ ary

Part 3: Grandm other and the Bakerya. Non-N arrative Section: STA NZA S 10, 11 , 12b. Final Episode: STA NZ A 13 (four lines)

Frame/moral: Bad Luck Day: STANZA 14 (two lines, non-narrative)Appendix: Puppy-1

1.2.3.4 .5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.

L:a:stlastyesterdaywhenuhm' my fa.therin the morningan' hethere was a ho:okon the top o' the stairwayan' my father was pickin' me upan' I got stuck on the hookup there

14. an ' I ha dn 't had breakfast

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414 GEE15. he wo uldn't take me down =16. until I finished a:ll my breakfast =17. cause I did n't like oatmeal either //18. an ' then my puppy cam e19. he was asleep20. an ' he wa s he was21 . he tried to get up22. an ' he ripped my pa:nts23 . an ' he dropped the oatme al 'all over hi:m24. an '25. an ' my father cam e26.. an ' he said d id you eat all the oa tm ea l27. he said w he re 's the bo :w l / /28. he said I think the do29. I said30. I th ink the dog . . . took i t / /31 . wel l32. I think I'll have t ' make another c a n //33. an ' so I did n't leave till seven34. an ' I took the bus35. an '36. my puppy37. he always be following . m e38. he said39. uh40 . my father said41 . um42 . he you can ' t go / /43 . an ' he followed m e all the way to the bus stop44 . an ' I hadda go all the way back45 . by that time it was seven thirty //46 . an ' then he kept follow in' me back and forth =47 . an ' I hadda keep com in' back //48. an ' he always be follow in' me =49 . when I go anywhere50. he wan ts to go to the store51 . an ' only he could not go t ' pla xe s52. whe:re53 . we could go54. like

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55.56.5 7 .58.59.60.61 .62.63 .64.65.66.67.68.69 .70.7 1 .72.73.74.75.76.77.78.79.80.

to:liket' the storeshe could go =but he have t ' be chained upan' we took him to the emergencyan' see what was wro:ng with himan' he got a sho:tan' then he was cry:in'a n ' . . . lalast yesterda:yan 'nowthey put him asleepan 'he's still in 'e ho:spitalan' the doctor said that he hastahe got a shot because he:he washe was ne:rvousabout my home that I hadan' hean' he could still stay buthe thought he wasn't gonna be ahe thought he wasn't gonna be ablet let him go: //

Appendix: Pu p p y -2Part 1: Hom ePart JA: Opening SceneBreakfast

1. Last yesterday in the morning2. there was a hook on the top of the stairway3 . an ' my father was pickin' me up4 . an I got stuck on the hook up there5. an ' I had n't had breakfast6. he wo uldn't take me down =7. until I finished all my breakfast =8. cause I didn 't like oatmeal either //


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416 GEEPart IB: The Puppy and the Father

9. an ' then my puppy came10. she was asleep11. he tried to get up12. an ' he ripped my pants13. an ' he dropped the oatme al all over him

14. an' my father came15. an he said d id you eat all the oa tm ea l?16. he said w he re 's the bo w l? / /17. I said I think the dog took it //18. W ell I think I ' ll have t 'mak e another bo w l //

Part 2: SchoolPart 2A: Going to School19. an ' so I did n't leave till seven20. an ' I took the bus21 . an ' my puppy he always be following m e22. my father said he yo u can 't g o //23 . an ' he followed m e all the way to the bus stop24. an ' I hadda go all the way back

(25. by that time it was seven thirty) //26. an ' then he kept follow in' me back and forth =27. an ' I hadda keep com in' back //Part 2B: Non-narrative Section28. an ' he always be followin' m e = when I go anywhere29. he wants to go to the store30. an ' only he could not go to places wh ere we could go31. like to the stores he could go = but he have to be chained upPart 3: HospitalPart 3A: The Ho spital32. an ' we took him to he emergency33 . an ' see what was wrong with him34. an ' he got a shot35. an ' then he was crying36. an ' last yesterda y, an ' now they put him asleep37. an ' he 's still in the hospital38. (an ' the doctor said . . .) he got a shot because39. he was nervous about my home that I had



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Part 3B: Ending4 1 . an ' he could still stay but42 . he thought he wasn 't gonna be able to let him go //

Appendix: P u p p y - 3

The Puppy Story

Part 1: At Homea. Part 1A: Opening SceneBreakfastSTA NZA 1 (four lines) # STAN ZA 2 (four lines)b. Part IB: The Puppy and the FatherSTA NZA 3 (four lines) # STA NZ A 4 (four lines)

Part 2: Going Placesa. Part 2A Going to School

STA NZA 5 (four lines) # STA NZ A 6 (four lines)b . Part 2B: Non-narrative SectionSTANZA 7 (four lines)Part 3: At the Hospital

a. Part 3A: The HospitalSTA NZA 8 (four lines) # STA NZA 9 (four lines)b . Part 3B: The Ending

STANZA 10 (two lines)Appendix: Chirs tmas-1

1. Probably (.280 m s)2. the funniest (.140 m s)3. was (.250m s)4 . was when I was first teaching in New H am pshire (.670 m s)5 . there were m any (.480 m s)6. interesting but (.770 ms)7. funny happenings (.660 ms)8. I think one of the m ost interesting (.600 m s)9. I taught in W oodstock (.100 ms)

10. my first year (.810 ms)11. and uh had a (.390 ms)12. grou p of children (.490 m s)

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418 GEE13. there were (.330 ms)14. eight grades in all with two teachers (1.15 0 ms)15. and on Christmas (.210 ms)16. on the day before Christm as (.770 ms)17. at that time (.470 m s)18. you could celebrate Ch ristm as with (.130 ms)19. presents and trees and so on (.680 ms)20. and (.510 ms)2 1 . the other teacher (.300 ms)22. and I lived about a m ile (.350 ms)23. from the school (1.540 m s)24. and about (.760 ms)25. an hour before school began we heard a lot of children (.980 m s)26. shouting and so on (.540 ms)27. and they push ed an old fashioned sleigh (.950 ms)28. to our house (1.180 ms)29. and had us (.120 ms)30. get in with all our presents (.290 m s)31. and pushed (.160 m s)32. us (.760 m s)33. to (.100 m s)34. school that m orning.

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