The Plotting of Criminal Relevance in the Story of Crime: Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs

The way a cause-and-effect relation between events is organized in a plot-based crime story depends upon a hinge point in the discourse, which unravels a competing story logic that shapes a “story of intentionality” embedded first in the story of crime and second in the story of investigation. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the “intent.” If intent is considered as a hinge point against which the causality of events takes place, then it is necessary to work out the causation. Following a ‘‘discoursebased’’ frame analysis, an “intent frame” is evaluated using an “inference-making” process. The intent frame is then mapped along the horizontal and vertical axes of a narrative frame in the application of a logical fallacy. Such application of narratological concepts with stylistic strategy is effective for the revelation of participant relevance to an offense in the story of crime adapted from Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs

The crime-culture connection in a crime fact story: An applied approach

This paper explores “crime” as cultural and not simply an individual act. The aim is to contextualize a transgression as an outcome of a social “phenomenon” that happens in real-time, is reported in the newspaper and TV documentaries, and is adopted for analysis as a “crime fact story”. Using a “discourse-based” frame analysis of the non-linear narrative characteristic of offender engagement discourse, I reorganize the narrator’s experience. Secondly, in the narrative act of the “double function” of a narrator as a character, I reveal an “unreliable” stance when the narrator, like the transgressor, is the victim of the interpretations the actors make of their surroundings in the 1st story of crime. In reorganizing the narrator’s experience, there are “microcontexts” which, as alternative storyworld, emulate the causes leading to the transgression left unnarrated in the 2nd “story of investigation”. Consequently, a “perpetrator-culture” nexus is conceptualized in the dichotomy of social factors and criminal behaviour, which is a phenomenon and represented as antecedentless pronouns and inanimate nouns in the text, stylistically “repeated” for emphasis in the discourse. The paper emphasizes the need to consider the impact of factors that influence society and inform deviance within a context of “culture” that is of shared value and behaviour and situates an offence to the interpretations the actors cognitively make of their surroundings

Offender Theme Analyses in a Crime Narrative: An Applied Approach

There is a great deal of research on the structure of narrative and its mode, and on the narrative positioning and counter positioning of the actor in legal and social contexts. In offender narratives, personal experiences are embedded for observation and analysis of particular realities that contextualize a disposition of the perpetrator being ‘an undergoer’ rather than an ‘effector’ of actions. This is evaluated in the shift from a narrated action to a speaker utterance in prospection and also in anticipation of the criminal act. Using ‘grammatical logic’, it is also possible to demonstrate how the crucial event (the crime) is not a cause, but an effect of a personal theme that encapsulates pattern of circumstances when the narrative outcome in criminal narrative becomes the product of its discursive practices. This is the ‘story of intentionality’ (my term) in crime narratives, characteristically embedded within the 1st the story of crime, the 2nd is the story of investigation [14, 20]. Using techniques from functional grammar and critical stylistics for discourse analysis, I intend to show an effective approach for the search of offender theme that underlies an act of crime. These disciplines provide the analyst with the linguistic material to analyse intersentential cohesion in a chain of semantically linked sentences (in written or spoken discourse) that explore the ways in which things are ‘made to look’ in the structure and functions of the English language. As a case study, I am using an offender narrative from Tony Parker’s book Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers (1990) showing an effective approach for the search of personal themes underlying the act of crime. Offender theme analyses are also valuable for evaluating the changing nature or development of offender characteristics pre or post crime