Educating Seth: An Ecosophical Conversation

Most accounts of human activity have a particular structure that supports the accounting. Education as a human activity has over centuries, and particularly in the past century, developed a narrative structure that, while seemingly "neutral", privileges accounts of a certain kind. The authors suggest that if ecosophical education is to find a presence in today's schools, the now dominant narrative structure needs to be challenged. By revealing an alternate narrative structure embodied in the particularities of a grade 4 classroom, the authors hope that such a narrative structure can provide ecosophical education with an authentic home in today's schools

Heavy Hero or Digital Dummy? Multimodal Player–Avatar Relations in Final Fantasy 7

This article analyses the player-avatar relation in Final Fantasy 7, drawing on multimodality theory to analyse textual structures both in the game and in the discourse of player-interviews and fan writing. It argues that the avatar is a two-part structure, partly designed in conventional narrative terms as a protagonist of popular narrative, and partly as a vehicle for interactive game-play. The former structure is replete with the traditions and designs of Japanese popular narrative, oral formulaic narrative and contemporary superhero narratives; and is presented to the player as an offer act – a declarative narrative statement. The latter is a construct of evolving attributes and economies characteristic of roleplaying games; and is presented to the player as a demand act – a rule-based command. Though these two functions separate out in the grammar of player and fan discourse, it is their integration which provides the pleasure of gameplay and narrative engagement

Narrative Realities and Optimal Entropy

This talk will focus on cognitive processes between conscious and subconscious awareness in order to present a slightly different definition of narrative. Rather than simply accepting that narrative is a conscious selection of stories subject to bias, I will argue that biases are the primary structure of narrative and that their success is explained in painfully simple terms

The use of narrative to provide a cohesive structure for a web based computing course

Narrative has long been used as an educational tool. This article explains how narrative, in the form of popular accounts, has been used to provide context, structure and broad appeal to a large-scale, entry-level university course on Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This course is delivered via the web with online tuition. Students' responses to the use of narrative and the scope of the material has been encouraging. It is argued that narrative performs an enculturation function that is often under-utilised in ICT education

Global coherence, narrative structure, and expectations of relevance

A topic for both literary studies and discourse analysis is the global structure of texts. Studies of global text structure have largely been focused on narrative structure, where a major strand of research has been devoted to the role which grounding (sometimes called information staging or foreground-background articulation) has for discourse structuring. It is often claimed that grounding is an important aspect of the notion of global coherence, that the overt realisation of grounding effects in texts depend on their genre and that this is generally reflected in the verbal system of natural languages (e.g. Caenepeel 1995; Hooper 1998; Hopper 1979; Fleischmann 1985; 1990; Longacre 1983; 1989). However, the notions of foreground and background are notoriously vague. In this paper I will argue for an alternative account of grounding effects based on the relevance-theoretic claim that the fine-tuning of the addressee's expectations of relevance is an essential part of the on-line processing of complex ostensive stimuli such as texts (Unger 2001). Linguistic and non-linguistic clues can be used to point the addressee to gradations in information grounding within a text in ways which far extend the coding resources of natural languages. This account may provide an explanatory account for Gumperz' (1992) "contextualization clues" and thus open up a new line of interdisciplinary interaction of relevance-theoretic pragmatics with some strands of research in ethnomethodology. It also suggests the idea that the emergence of literary form may be facilitated by the relevance-orientedness of cognition and communication which suggests that the more clues the communicator can give for fine-tuning the addressee's expectation of relevance in complex stimuli, the better chance of successful communication he has, which in turn motivates the use of communicative clues far beyond the coding resources of given natural languages as well as adherence to cultural conventions regarding the form of texts

Focus or narrative constructions? : Morphosyntactically marked focus constructions in some Gur and Kwa languages

0. Introduction 1. Observations concerning the structure of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions 1.1 First observation: SF vs. NSF asymmetry 1.2 Second observation: NSF-NAR parallelism 1.3 Affirmative ex-situ focus constructions (SF, NSF), and narrative clauses (NAR) 2. Grammaticalization 2.1 Cleft hypothesis 2.2 Movement hypothesis 2.3 Narrative hypothesis 2.3.1 Back- or Foregrounding? 2.3.2 Converse directionality of FM and conjunction 3. Language specific analysis 4. Conclusionary remarks Reference

Talk Me Home: Visibility in Shared Narrative

Cultural inclusion requires locations in which people can ‘discursively’ gather and reside. One method of creating a lesbian-specific location is through the reiterations and repetitions of narratives. Narrative structure is an effective heuristic in what could be called a naturalisation process. Using a well-known lesbian gossip column this paper demonstrates that a sense of cultural groupmemory is produced and shared through the narrative of gossip. The degree of assumed knowledge subsequently attained is textually inscribed in the trajectory of gossip over time. In this gossip column, celebrities, through their ongoing coming-out processes, are participants in the naturalisation process, informing and normalising a historical background for lesbian community. Inclusion operates through this narrativisation to produce a cultural memory that becomes an assumed aspect of social interactions. Visibility is the predominant experiential choice of the writer in all of the individual recount segments around which the narrative structures of gossip are built. In this way, the intimate details of a celebrity’s ‘visibility’ process become the basis of the ‘unfolding intimacies’ of this social group’s ‘main characters’ (Dunbar, 1995: 5). The ‘synchronic’ moment through reiteration in gossiped-about visibility creates a diachronic collective memory to support an inclusive culture. In the instances of a lesbian gossip column this is accomplished through the established and everyday paradigms of narrative structure which produces a shared and mutually understood experiential meaning

Inferring Interpersonal Relations in Narrative Summaries

Characterizing relationships between people is fundamental for the understanding of narratives. In this work, we address the problem of inferring the polarity of relationships between people in narrative summaries. We formulate the problem as a joint structured prediction for each narrative, and present a model that combines evidence from linguistic and semantic features, as well as features based on the structure of the social community in the text. We also provide a clustering-based approach that can exploit regularities in narrative types. e.g., learn an affinity for love-triangles in romantic stories. On a dataset of movie summaries from Wikipedia, our structured models provide more than a 30% error-reduction over a competitive baseline that considers pairs of characters in isolation