Narrative style

The influence of culture on discourse style also becomes apparent in the differential
distribution of orate and literate features of speech in story telling. For example, using
the short 'pear narrative' film by William Chafe, Tannen asked native speakers from
Anglo-American and Greek background to retell the film in their own words. Here is
how Tannen tells the film:
It showed a man picking pears from a tree, then descending and dumping them into one
of three baskets on the ground. A boy comes by on a bicycle and steals a basket of pears.
As he's riding away, he passes a girl on a bike, his hat flies off his head, and the bike
overturns. Three boys appear and help him gather his pears. They find his hat and return
it to him and he gives them pears. The boys then pass the farmer who has just come
down from the tree and discovered that his basket of pears is missing. He watches them
walk by eating pears.
(Tannen , Deborah. 'What's in a Frame?' in Framing in Discourse. Oxford University
Press 1993, page 21).
In comparing the narratives told by American women in English and Greek women in
Greek, Tannen reports that each group had a distinctive narrative style. The Greeks told
'better stories', by often interweaving judgments about the character's behavior (for
example, the boy should not have stolen the pears or should have thanked his helpers
sooner), or about the film's message (for example, that it showed a slice of agricultural
life, or that little children help each other). In contrast, the Americans reportedly gave a
'better recollection' of the original sequence of events, and' gave all the details they
could remember. They used their-judgment to comment on the filmmaker's technique
(for example,; that the costumes were unconvincing or the soundtrack out on
proportion). The Greeks seemed to draw upon an interactive; experience which was
focused more on interpersonal involve ment: telling the story in ways that would
interest the interviewer,;' interpreting the film's human message. The Americans seemed
to7 draw on their willingness to approach a school task for its own demands. They were
focusing on the content of the film, treating it i as a cinematic object, with critical
objectivity. Each group made differential use of orate and literate features according to
the;; expectations their culture had prepared them to have of the task at hand.
It would be dangerous, of course, to generalize this example to all Greeks and all
Americans, or to suggest that Greeks in general tell better stories than Americans. As we
discussed in Chapter 1, every culture is heterogeneous, i.e. it is composed of a variety of
subcultures, and every situation elicits a variety of responses, even within the same
national culture. The only conclusion one ca4 draw from examples such as this one is
that, given the same situation and the same task, people from different cultures will
interpret the situation and the demands of the task differently and thus behave in
different ways. Nevertheless, because the definition of what makes a 'good' story varies
from culture to culture, we can expect storytellers to conform to those models of the
genre that were available to them in the culture they grew up; in.

Summary
The ways in which language means, both as sign and as action, differ according to the
medium used. The spoken medium, in particular, bears the marks of more or less
morality, more or less - literacy, as measured against the characteristic features of
conversational-spoken vs. essayist-written language. Cultures them-:,; selves are more
or less orate, more or less literate according to the 1 uses their members make of the
spoken and the written language I in various contexts. Through the social organization
of talk, |' culture is constructed across day-to-day dialogues, through the 1 choice of
frames and footings that speakers adopt vis-a-vis their i own and others' discourse, and
through the way they collaborate I in the necessary lacework within a variety of
discourse types. i Culture puts its imprint on the conversational and narrative styles of
the members of a social group. These styles are generally | considered to form part of
people's cultural identities.