Annotation Guideline No. 7 (revised): Guidelines for annotation of narrative structure

Abstract

Analysis of narrative structure can be said to answer the question "Who tells what, and how?". The key part of our annotation scheme is related to the "who?", and to this end we distinguish between narration and fictional dialogue. Furthermore, with respect to the latter we keep track of turns, lines, identities of speakers and addressees, and speech-framing constructions, which provide the narrator's cues about the circumstances of the speech. We also annotate voice, that is, whether the narrator is ever present in the story or not. Our annotation of the "what?" includes embeddings of narrative transmission levels to capture stories in stories, and embeddings of fictional dialogue to capture characters quoting other characters. Our annotation of the "how?" includes focalization, that is, the perspective from which the narrative is seen and how much information the narrator has access to. RationaleAnalysis of narrative structure can be said to answer the question "Who tells what, and how?" 1,2 The first part of the question thus concerns aspects such as who is narrating, whether it is a character in the story or not, and if it is in the first or third person. The second part is related to the story and its basic elements: characters and events, and how the sequence of events forms a plot. The third part concerns how the narrative text is constructed: ordering of the events, the perspective from which the story is seen, how much information the narrator has access to, etc.