| Chapter 2: | Narrative and Its Structures |
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Thus, it is important to understand the logic of events in a broader sense, in other words, as a course of events that is experienced by the reader as natural and in accordance with the world.
Chatman (1978) also suggested contingency as one of the organising principles for events, besides sequence and causality. He claimed that what is important to a general theory of narrative is not the precise linguistic manifestation but rather the story logic. Chatman (1978) defined contingency in a stricter philosophical sense of ‘depending for its existence, occurrence, character etc. on something not yet certain’ (p. 47). Chatman's proposal on the relationship of events and their sequences to story logic has been further investigated by Herman (2002) with his exploration on verb types and event structures in storyworld (re)construction. Herman distinguished event types (activities, achievement, accomplishment, and states) based on the semantic implications of verbs. He regarded different event types realised by the semantic implications of verbs as semantic resources the narrator can resort to in cuing recipients to model certain kinds of storyworlds. From this perspective, Herman argued that different narrative modes set distinct preference-rule systems of event types into play.
A preference-based typology of event types in different narrative genres is also examined in Herman's study. The study proposed, for example, that the preference ranking of event types for an epic will be ‘Accomplishments > achievements > activities > states’ while that of a ghost story will be ‘Activities > states > accomplishments > achievements’ (Herman, 2002, p. 37). He also noted that the parameter for classifying event types is not their goal directedness, but rather the temporal extension and definiteness in the (re)construction of the storyworld. Such classification, Herman claimed, is able to capture not only the punctual events (i.e., events creating ‘clear-cut transitions between