中文摘要
本論文旨在探討中文口說故事敘述文之結構，以便了解故事組成要素(narrative elements)之間的銜接，以及說故事者如何突顯故事之主旨(point)。受試者是二十位中文流利的成人(其職業皆為老師)，他們在非正式的面談情境下，各敘述一個難忘的教學經驗。以Labov發展出的英語故事結構為理論依據，再將這些語料做質與量的分析。研究結果顯示，中國人在說故事時，大多按時間的先後順序敘述，且故事組成要素的銜接乃依照下列次序﹕序曲(abstract)-背景介紹(orientation)-主要情節(complicating action)-評語(evaluation)-結局(resolution)-尾聲(coda)。然而，中文的故事結構較英語故事展現出更複雜的包接鏈(chains of embedding)，且各故事組成要素出現的位置及頻率之變異性較大，因此，中文故事結構除了有線性發展，亦呈現不同層次的組織。在說故事的過程中，說故事者會運用各種不同形式的語言策略(linguistic devices)來評論(evaluate)故事情節以傳達故事的主旨。此外，言談標記(discourse markers)是界定故事組成要素時的重要依據，也是連接故事組成要素的重要功臣，它們能引導聽者，使其明瞭故事的發展。本研究之發現可幫助不擅口語表達之國人改善其說故事的技巧及敘述能力，而對於學習中文的外國人及敘述能力未成熟之孩童，亦能有所裨益。

ABSTRACT
The present study aims to investigate how a narrative is constructed and sequenced in spoken Mandarin and what linguistic devices are employed to indicate the point of the story and to mark the transitions of story elements. The entire corpus, consisting of twenty narratives produced in an informal interview setting by mature Mandarin-speaking teachers recounting their unforgettable teaching experiences, is given a qualitative analysis first based on Labov's model of narrative structure. A quantitative analysis is then performed to closely examine the frequency of occurrence of narrative elements in different positions and the distribution of various linguistic devices. The results of the study show that in Mandarin narratives, past experiences, in general, are recounted in chronological order and the organization of stories follows the sequence delineated by Labov, namely abstract-orientation-complicating action-evaluation-resolution-coda. However, similarities aside, Mandarin narratives differ from their English counterparts in that they exhibit more complex variations both in the position and frequency of occurrence of narrative elements. Chinese speakers usually show more complex chains of embedding to create a layered organization out of the linear sequence in their narratives. In the process of narration, both external and internal evaluative devices are frequently employed to direct the listener to the point of the story. In addition, discourse markers are an important device in the organization of Mandarin narratives. Some correlations between opening markers and narrative elements are found in the study. The findings of the study can provide useful guidelines for those who are verbally less skillful in storytelling and foreign Mandarin learners to improve their narrative skills and thus become more competent storytellers in Mandarin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ainsworth, Nancy. 1981. Oral Narratives of Bilingual Mexican-American Adults Enrolled in Adult Basic Education. Final Report. Michigan State University, East Lansing.
Beaugrande, Robert-Alain de & Wolfgang U. Dressler. 1981. Introduction to Text Linguistics. London: Longman.
Bennett, Gillian. 1986. "Narrative as Expository Discourse," Journal of American Folklore, 99:394, 415-434.
Chafe, Wallace L. 1980. (ed.) The Pear Story: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Chafe Wallace L. 1982. "Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing and Oral Literature," Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, D. Tannen (ed.) 35-53. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Chafe, Wallace L. 1984. "Speaking, Writing, and Prescriptivism," Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications, D. Schiffrin (ed.) 95-103. Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press.
Chafe, Wallace. 1987. "Cognitive Constraints on Information Flow," Coherence and Grounding in Discourse, Russell S. Tomlin, (ed.) 21-51. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Chan, Yu-ching. 1998. Background and Foreground Structures in EFL English Written Narratives: A Case Study in Senior High School. Unpublished PH. D. dissertation, National Taiwan Normal University.
Chao, Yuen-ren. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chen, May M. 1990. Cohesive Devices in Spoken Chinese Narrative Discourse. Unpublished M.A. thesis, National Taiwan Normal University.
Coulthard, Malcolm. 1985. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Longman.
Coulthard, Malcolm. 1992. (ed.) Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge.
Du Bois, J.W., S. Schuetze-Coburn, S. Cumming, & D. Paolino. 1993. "Outline of Discourse Transcription," Talking Data, J. A. Edwards & M. D. Lampert, (eds.) 45-89. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Edwards, D. & D. Middleton. 1986. "Joint Remembering: Constructing an Account of Shared Experience through Conversational Discourse," Discourse Processes, 9, 423-459.
Erbaugh, Mary S. 1990. "Mandarin Oral Narratives Compared with English: The Pear/Guava Stories," Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 25, 2: 21-43.
Georgakopoulou, A. 1997. "Women, Men, and Conversational Narrative Performances: Aspects of Gender in Greek Storytelling," Anthropological Linguistics, 37: 460-486
Glock, Naomi. 1986. "The Use of Reported Speech in Saramaccan Discourse," Pragmatics in Non-Western Perspective, George Huttar & Kenneth Gregerson, (eds.) 35-61. The Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Grice, H. P. 1975. "Logic and Conversation," Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, P. Cole & J. L. Morgan, (eds.) 41-58. New York: Academic Press.
Gulich, E. & U. M. Quasthoff. 1985. "Narrative Analysis," Handbook of Discourse Analysis, T. Van Dijk, (ed.) 2: 169-196.
Hinds, John. 1984. "Topic Maintenance in Japanese Narratives and Japanese Conversational Interaction," Discourse Processes, 7, 465-482.
Hopper, Paul J. & Sandra Tompsom. 1980. "Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse" Language, 56: 251-99.
Jefferson, Gail. 1978. "Sequential Aspects of Storytelling in Conversation," Studies in the Organization of Conversation Interaction, J. Schenkein, (ed.) 219-248. New York: Academic Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 1989. "The Concept and Varieties of Narrative Performance in East European Jewish Culture," Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, R. Bauman & J. Sherzer, (eds.) 283-353. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Labov, W., & J. Waletzky. 1967. "Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience," Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, J. Helms, (ed.) 12-44. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Labov, William. 1972. "The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax," Language in the Inner City. 354-396. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lai, Rebecca S. 1998. Anaphora in Chinese-Speaking Children's Spoken Narratives. Unpublished M. A. thesis, National Taiwan Normal University.
Levinson, S. C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lin, Amber S. 1993. Intensity Devices in Spoken and Written Chinese Narrative. Unpublished M. A. thesis, National Taiwan Normal University.
Lin, Hsueh-o. 1999. Reported Speech in Mandarin Conversational Discourse. Unpublished PH. D. dissertation, National Taiwan Normal University.
Mayes, Patricia. 1990. "Quotation in Spoken English," Studies in Language, 14: 325-363.
McCarthy, Michael. 1991. Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mishler, Elloit G. 1986. "The Analysis of Interview-Narratives," Narrative Psychology, T. R. Sarbin, (ed.) 233-255. New York: Praeger.
Ochs, Elinor. 1997. "Narrative," Discourse as Structure and Process, T. Van Dijk, (ed.) 185-207. London: Sage Publications.
Philip, S. U. & A. Reynolds. 1987. "The Interaction of Variable Syntax and Discourse Structure in Women's and Men's Speech," Language, Gender & Sex in Comparative Perspective, S. U. Philips, S. Steele, & C. Tanz (eds.) 71-94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Polanyi, Livia. 1982. "The Narrative of Meaning of Stories in Conversation," Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, 6, 1-2, 51-65.
Polanyi, Livia. 1985. "Conversational Storytelling," Handbook of Discourse Analysis, T. Van Dijk, (ed.) 3, 183-201. London: Academic Press.
Polanyi, Livia. 1989. Telling the American Story. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Polanyi-Bowditch. 1976. "Why the Whats are When: Mutually Contextualizing Realms of Narrative," Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Prince, G. 1982. Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative. The Hague: Mouton.
Propp, Vladimir. 1986. The Morphology of the Folktale. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Quirk et al. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Redeker, Gisela. 1984. "On Differences between Spoken and Written Language," Discourse Processes, 7, 43-55.
Renkema, J. 1993. Discourse Studies. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Robinson, J. A. 1981. "Personal Narratives Reconsidered," Journal of American Folklore, 94:371, 58-85.
Ryave, Alan L. 1978. "On the Achievement of a Series of Stories," Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, J. Schenkein, (ed.) 113-132. New York: Academic Press.
Sacks, H. 1971. Lecture Notes. School of Social Science, University of California at Irvine.
Sacks, H. 1972. Lecture Notes: Stories in Conversation. University of California.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1981. "Tense Variation in Narrative," Language, 57,1: 45-63.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1982. Discourse Markers: Semantic Resource for the Construction of Conversation. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scollon, R. & S. W. Scollon. 1995. Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.
Shuman, Amy. 1986. Storytelling Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stubbs, Michael. 1983. Discourse Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stein, N & C. G. Glenn. 1979. "An Analysis of Story Comprehension in Elementary School Children," New Directions in Discourse Processing, 53-120. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Szatrowski, Polly E. 1987. " 'Pastness' and 'Narrative Events' in Japanese Conversational Narratives," Coherence and Grounding in Discourse, Russell S. Tomlin, (ed.) 409-433. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Tannen, Deborah. 1980. "A Comparative Analysis of Oral Narrative Strategies: Athenian Greek and American English," The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, Wallace L. Chafe, (ed.) 51-88. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Tannen, Deborah. 1982. "Oral and Literate Strategies in Spoken and Written Narratives," Language, 58, 1: 1-21.
Tannen. Deborah. 1982. "The Oral/Literate Continuum in Discourse," Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy, D. Tannen, (ed.) 1-16. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Tannen, Deborah. 1984. Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Tanen, Deborah. 1993. Framing in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tao, Hongyin. 1996. Units in Mandarin Conversation. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Thompson, Sandra A. 1987. " 'Subordination' and Narrative Event Structure," Coherence and Grounding in Discourse, Russell S. Tomlin, (ed.) 435-454. Amesterdam: Benjamins.
Tsai, S. I. 1996. Gambits in Mandarin Spoken Discourse. Unpublished M. A. thesis, National Taiwan Normal University.
Van Dijk, T. 1984. Prejudice in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Wade, Elizabeth & H. H. Clark. 1993. "Reproduction and Demonstration in Quotations," Journal of Memory and Language, 32: 805-819.
Wales, Katie. 1989. A Dictionary of Stylistics. London: Longman.
Wald, Benji. 1987. "Cross-Clause Relations and Temporal Sequence in Narrative and beyond," Coherence and Grounding in Discourse, Russell S. Tomlin, (ed.) 481-512. Amesterdam: Benjamins.
Wang, Li. 1959. Zhongguo Xiandai Yufa (Chinese Modern Grammar). Hongkong: Zhonghua Shuju.
Wang, Xiaoping. 1998. A Developmental Study of Acquisition of Narrative Skills by Children in Taiwan. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Fu Jen Catholic University.
Watson, Karen A. 1973. "A Rhetorical and Sociolinguistic Model for the Analysis of Narrative," American Anthropologist, 75: 255-35.
Wolfson, Nessa. 1976. "Speech Events and Natural Speech: Some Implications for Sociolinguistic Methodology," Language in Society, 5: 189-209.
Wolfson, Nessa. 1982. CHP The Conversational Historical Present in American English Narrative. New Jersey: Floris Publications.