The narrative arc : exploring the linguistic structure of narrative
type: CreativeWork
description: Over the millennia, philosophers and scholars have theorized on the building blocks of narrative. Until now, a reliable methodology to quantitatively investigate narrative structure has not been unavailable. The Narrative Arc Theory (NAT) was developed to investigate whether or not a common structure existed for narratives. To do this, the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) text analysis program was used on a corpora composed of over 5,000 narratives. A five equal sized parts segmentation strategy was developed to track how narratives develop. Simple word count analyses of function and emotion words identified five common narrative dimensions that were shared across diverse narrative text.
abstract: Over the millennia, philosophers and scholars have theorized on the building blocks of narrative. Until now, a reliable methodology to quantitatively investigate narrative structure has not been unavailable. The Narrative Arc Theory (NAT) was developed to investigate whether or not a common structure existed for narratives. To do this, the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) text analysis program was used on a corpora composed of over 5,000 narratives. A five equal sized parts segmentation strategy was developed to track how narratives develop. Simple word count analyses of function and emotion words identified five common narrative dimensions that were shared across diverse narrative text.
author: Blackburn, Katherine Geraldine
language: en
keywords: Narrative, LIWC, Text analysis
date published: 2015-12
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:01:04Z
provider: University of Texas
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The University of Texas at Austin

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2152/33260

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.15781/T20X1R