This paper describes current theoretical work in a cognitive anthropological approach to the analysis of oral literature. A theory of narrative grammar is presented along with the description of a computer program, SAGE, that is currently under development. SAGE facilitates the labelling of clauses and sentences by different types of semantic features. It maps and counts the occurrences of these in the stories analyzed.Specialized areas of culture can be described in terms of grammars or compositional rules. One can, for example, derive a cultural grammar from a particular expressive form-an art form or narrative genre-if it is within a small enough community of individuals who share the same language and cultural presuppositions. These grammars have the potential for providing insight into processes of the larger culture system. A narrative grammar, for instance, can yield information about cultural dynamics on a broad scale because it constitutes both a cultural logic and a vast set of expectations about objects and events in the world. These objects and events are linked to motivations, goals and values that are common to the social group that uses the narrative. In addition to narrative are other cultural forms, all communicative in nature, which have been described by grammars or rules: body painting (Faris 1972), writing systems (Watt 1986), folk tales (Colby 1973), divination (Colby andColby 1981) and classroom interaction routines (Mehan 1979).Of the many possibilities for grammar-like descriptions the most interesting are to be found in narrative grammars of plot structure. The Rus- The phenomena Propp analyzed, while not described as a grammar, can be reanalyzed and described in terms of grammar-like rules. Such a grammar can account for all the folktales or stories (as specified by the grammar) during some period in some locality of culture users, as indeed the data seem to do in Propp's corpus. The key process in writing a grammar, therefore, is in the testing of the grammar with new narrative productions in the same genre. That is, some areas, such as Ireland, have several distinct types of folktales. Each type can be described as a particular genre and would, presumably require a slightly different grammar to cover all of the examples of that genre. Testing is critical for the validation of cultural grammars of any type, whether they be trickster stories, hero tales or some other type.
EIDOCHRONIC ANALYSISWe are using the term, eidon, for the basic unit in narrative grammar. In earlier work (Colby 1973) an eidon was described as an "eidochronic unit," a unit in time or sequence such as exists in a narrative. Since that time we have come to use the term more broadly to cover other areas of what Bateson characterized as the "eidos" of a cultural system (Bateson 1936). In this wider application eidon can be conceptualized as any cognitive image or concept which exists in a postulated cognitive system that has cultural reality--that can be readily communicated among the members of some culturally defin...
