The narrative arc : exploring the linguistic structure of narrative

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communication Studies

Grantor

The University of Texas at Austin

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Blackburn, Katherine Geraldine

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• McGlone, Matthew S., 1966-
• Pennebaker, James W.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Peña, Jorge
• Dailey, Reñe
• Vangelisti , Anita

• Narrative
• LIWC
• Text analysis

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier

doi:10.15781/T20X1R

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/33260