narrative

The paper regards the process of the development of several features of the narrative speech genre in the discourse field of Russian culture while learning Russian as a second language. Referentiality in general linguistic sense is an area concerning naming of objects and characters by language means. In this paper we analyse the problems of the referential choice (what factors influence the speaker’s choice of a referential expression) and anaphora resolution (how the listener/reader binds an anaphoric pronoun to a coreferential noun phrase).

Drawing on interviews I conducted with women about their sisters, I identify three narrative types: small-n narratives, big-N Narratives and Master Narratives. Small-n narratives are accounts of specific events or interactions that speakers said had occurred with their sisters. Big-N Narratives are the themes speakers developed in telling me about their sisters, and in support of which they told the small-n narratives. Master Narratives are culture-wide ideologies shaping the big-N Narratives.

The research is based on personal observations made while staying in municipal hospital and notes taken at the surgery of the mentioned hospital from November, 21 till December, 4 of 2015. The focus is on the following pairs of communicators: the doctor – the patient, the nurse - the patient, the nurse – the nurse, the patient – the family member, the patient – the patient. The article deals with a problem of interception, following A.V. Nagornaya, who based her research on English literary texts.

The paper covers part of the results obtained by a group of scholars from Volgograd State Socio-Pedagogical University during the work on the project: «Narrative as a medium of conceptualisation of reality in the context of Russian-Chinese intercultural communication» supported by the Russian Foundation for Humanities. The authors explain the theoretical approaches, methods and key dimensions of narrative analysis. They further analyse the culturally specific Chinese narrative genres «chuanqi», «huaben», «huagu», «errenzhuan», «shulaibao», etc.