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Bruno Roßbach: Skizze einer semiotisch-linguistischen Theorie narrativer Texte

In the present paper, the derivation of the three literary genres, lyric poetry, narrative, and drama, is examined in terms of communications theory within the framework of Karl Bühler’s Organon-Modell. The characteristics of narrative texts are then investigated. From an analytical point of view, a fundamental dichotomy is inherent in narrative texts. On the one hand, we have the world of the narrator and on the other the subject matter, a string of events. The narrative itself is the result of the tension between these two components. The narrator is the focal point of interest in the study of narrative text. The narrator can be described as a person-place-time system, which is implicitly or explicitly and partially or completely linked to the system of characters in the story. Finally, with the help of a series of literary examples, the concept of the "virtual narrator" is introduced. The narrator can be designated "virtual" when, in a similar fashion to a camera, he is at the centre of the events as they unfold. As such, he acts as a sort of observer of the unfolding events. The narrator observes the events, and the linguist observes the observer, defines his mental equipment and follows his syntagmatic and paradigmatic decisions. Through projection of these decisions onto the much broader substratum of the range of possibilities inherent in each sequence of events, the processes by which the meaning of the text is communicated to the audience are made apparent.