The discursive categories of oral narratives from the perspective of enaction

Abstract

This article discusses the structural part of oral narratives through the lens of pragmatics with the aim of demonstrating the narrator’s discursive attitudes arising from the organism/environment relationship. Enaction
is taken into account as a pragmatic factor in the production of meaning. Since perfective and imperfective verbal expressions structure the narrative text in discursive categories, we have Figure and Background, Intermediate, Direct Speech and Foundation in the grammatical field. The discussion showed that the grouping of informational units that interrupt the course of the story shapes the intensity of the impact of the events for the narrator, reinforces the highlighting of the narrated facts and brings the presence of the interlocutor/listener into the scenes, suggesting a discursive instance in the semantic dimension of the text.