Narrative Structures in Burmese Folk Tales By Soe Marlar Lwin

a written narrative the opening, middle, and end have already been established, leading to an overwhelming proclivity ‘to construct an overarching storyline that ties events together in a seamless explanatory framework’ (Ochs & Capps, 2001, p. 4).

Instead of finding out narrative theories that are usually self-contained, they took what they called a dimensional approach to narrative. They believed that narrative as genre and activity can be fruitfully examined in terms of a set of dimensions that a narrative displays to differing degrees and in different ways. The five narrative dimensions proposed in their study are outlined in table 1. The dimension of tellership refers to the extent and kind of involvement of partners. This dimension assesses how the relatively high involvement of partners or co-telling of a story can affirm or challenge the prevailing storyline. Tellability is the extent to which a narrative conveys a sequence of reportable events and makes a point in a rhetorically effective manner. It is also related to the significance of events for particular interlocutors. Embeddedness is the degree and kind of integration with surrounding discourse, such as narrative embeddedness in prayers, explanation, and other speech activities. Linearity is the extent to which narratives depict events as transpiring in a single, closed, temporal, and causal path or, alternatively, in diverse, open, uncertain paths. Moral stance is the narrative perspective assumed by tellers and protagonists (Ochs & Capps, 2001, pp. 33–54).

Each narrative dimension establishes a range of possibilities, which can be used to analyse how the telling of a narrative is shaped, and how events are structured through narrative form. In other words, their study brought different aspects of narrative—such as storyline, textual realisation, and context—to light. Recognising the prosaic as well as artistic realisations of narrative, they proposed the framework that can be applied to