Narrative Structures in Burmese Folk Tales By Soe Marlar Lwin

based on the oral versions of personal experience, which should be socially situated, the focus is on the relationship of the parts of the narrative to each other, rather than on that of the producer to the recipient of the story.

Another study, which can be characterised as being concerned with structural principles in narrative, was conducted by Harvey Sacks. Based on his analysis of stories in conversations, Sacks (1992) claimed that storytelling is ubiquitous in naturally occurring interaction and that the default organisation in narratives is more than a matter of narrative technique or of discourse organisation. Sacks’ analysis of stories in conversations pointed out the orderly sequences of storytelling, as governed by embedded rules of production and turn-taking in the situated context of the telling. The studies of narrative structures in a context by Labov and Sacks provide the basis for the investigation of storytelling as an extensive social phenomenon.

Such an analysis of sequential compositional structure is just one type of structural analysis (Dundes, 1971; Jason & Segal, 1977). The structure of the texture of a narrative can also be appropriately examined. For example, unlike the studies that investigate a distinct story structure, Hasan (1996) and Hoey (2001) focused on the other layer of narrative—discourse, or the concrete level of textual realisation. Taking a generic approach, Hasan (1996) studied the nursery tale as a genre. Hasan's (1996) Generic Structure Potential (GSP) illustrates the typical sequence of the major narrative elements in nursery tale as follows:

The elements in round brackets are considered as optional while those not in round brackets are regarded as obligatory. The angle brackets enclose elements that have lexicogrammatical