It is interesting to see how speakers of different languages often use the same, or similar, linguistic patterns when telling a story, no matter how different the languages they speak are. In this paper the speech of different English, Chinese and Italian speakers telling the same story have been compared, in order to highlight the common features and the main differences in the conventions and linguistic devices used to tell a story in the 3 languages. What has emerged is that, even though there are some distinctions between the three languages, the main features and means used by the speakers narrating the story are basically the same, and that different linguistic structures are often used in different languages to convey the same meaning or effect (Fleischman & Yaguello, 2004).
The major objects of analysis in this paper will be: 1) the presence/absence and the differences in the narratives of all 3 languages of a film perspective, i.e. whether the narrator talks about the movie as a movie or as a story, and what are the choices that determine this difference at the level of language; 2) how and at what extent the characters are described and introduced in the narrative will also be taken into consideration; for example, the way and words used to describe the characters, or how the characters are introduced into the narrative.
The narratives considered here are taken from the work of Professor Wallace Chafe who, in the 1970s, produced with his collaborators a short movie, with colour and sound but no spoken word, to be shown to people all around the world, in order to compare narrative discourse in different languages. The film was designed to be as much universal as possible, i.e. any references to American culture were avoided, and the story shown in the movie has to do with actions and situations that every man and woman could have experienced in his/her life (Erbaugh 2001). The movie has been shown to speakers of different languages, and they have then been asked to tell what they have seen in the film. In 1975 Professor Chafe recorded the story told by 50 English speakers in California, then the same experiment has been conduct with 20 speakers of Mandarin Chinese in Taipei by Erbaugh, and with speakers of other languages such as Japanese, Malay, Greek, German, etc (Freedle 1980).
The samples chosen for closer analysis in this paper are the narratives of two English speakers and two Chinese speakers, which best exemplify the key features here discussed. Yet some data and references will be given considering the whole corpus of Chinese and English spoken narratives, when needed. The whole samples consist in the narratives of 20 American undergraduate students and 20 Chinese university students aged between 19 and 28, whose first language is Mandarin Chinese or who have spoken Mandarin since childhood (original transcripts from www.pearstories.org).
In addition to this material, I have recorded and transcribed 6 Italian speakers of Northern Italy. The pear stories film was shown to them, and they were then asked to tell what they have seen in the film. The 6 Italian speakers chosen are university students aged between 19 and 23, with a similar level of education of their Chinese and English counterparts. They were recorded on December 2006, and then their narratives were transcribed (without a formal marking of intonation, pauses, etc. but dividing the speech according to the notions of “idea units” and “focuses”) in order to compare them with those of the Chinese and English speakers. Two samples of the Italian narratives, which well represent the typical narrative amongst the six recorded, are included in Appendix 2, and will be more often used for the comparison, even though references and examples will be taken from the remaining 4 narratives as well. I also translated into English the Chinese and Italian examples, trying to be as faithful as possible to the original, eve though this sometimes can result in a odd or non-natural English.
Firstly, with regard to the film-viewer perspective, it is useful to take into consideration Tannen’s (1980) comparative study of English and Greek narratives based on the pear film. Contrasting the speech of the two groups, Tannen argues that Greek and English speakers differentiate in their account of the story mainly in one aspect: the American students interviewed, trying to be objective, tended to describe the story as a film, using specific cinematographic jargon, describing the zoom close-ups or noticing the costumes used. On the other hand, Greek speakers tended to effectively tell a story, and often gave moral and personal judgements, seldom mentioning words such as “film” or “camera”. According to Tanmen, this difference is mainly due to the fact that American students are more used to memory tests, and are thus concerned in scoring well, trying to remember as much details as possible and to be objective. On the contrary, Greek speakers are more interested in telling a story successfully, and are then more concentrated in the narrative effect they produce, focusing on the main points of the story and trying to extrapolate a moral or philosophic meaning from it.
The case of Chinese narratives is more complex. As Erbaugh (1990) pointed out, when Chinese and English narratives of the pear film are compared, the difference is narrower, since 12 out of the 20 Chinese students interviewed mentioned the word 电影 dianying or 片 pian (film) and some of them also referred indirectly to the movie, commenting on the change of scene or other film-specific features. Erbaugh suggests that
stressing the fact that the difference between the two groups of speakers can not be misunderstood, or used to support the lack of critical point of view of Chinese speakers. Erbaugh’s argument is confirmed by statistic evidence, but to clarify this point it is useful to examine more in details some examples from the narratives, in order to understand the qualitative difference in the use of film perspective between the two groups of speakers. The speech of E14 for English and M05 for Chinese (see Appendix 1) are taken here as examples of narrations with a film-viewer perspective in both languages.
The first, immediate sign that the narrator is talking about a film is, of course, the direct use of the word “film”, or its equivalents in other languages (Tannen 1980). In the samples considered, the American speaker mentions the word “movie” five times all along her narration:
1 1.1 The movie opened up on this[.3] nice scene,
was that all the noises in the movie,
9.2 like the movie[.2]the ..sound track had been slowed down,
14.7 and ..nobody ever smiles in the movie,
19 19.1 And that’s the end of the movie. (ibid)
In contrast, the Chinese speaker M05 only uses the word 影片yingpian (film) once, in her conclusive sentence:
71.1 uh.....這個影片就結束了。
a…zhège yĭngpiàn jiù jiéshùle
(uh… then this film has finished)
and so does the Italian speaker IT6, who is, in fact, the only one of the six Italians interviewed to mention the word “cinema” (film). Exactly as the previous example from the Chinese narrative, he uses the word at the very end, as a conclusion:
9 Qui finisce il cinema.
(the movie ends here)
The fact that the American speaker makes use of the word “movie” all along her narration (and not only at the beginning or at the end, as do the majority of Chinese and Italian speakers who use the word) is the first signal that her narration is maintain a film-viewer perspective (ibid.). Besides these direct references to the word “movie”, E14 also uses a lot of cinematographic jargon to refer directly to the film, such as “open up”, “nice scene”, “zoomed on”, so as to make clear to her audience that what she is talking about is a movie (ibid.). Some of the Chinese speakers used cinematographic jargon too, even though not as much as the Americans did. Of the six Italian speakers, only two (IT01 and IT05) used film-specific terminology such as “la scena” (the scene) or “zoom”.
However, the mere reference to the word “film” or to other film-specific words (if sporadic in the narration) does not necessarily imply the maintenance of the film-viewer perspective along the whole narration. There must be something more to indicate to the listener that the narrator is talking about a film, and not simply narrating a story. In order to better analyze how and at what extent the students used or not the film perspective indirectly, it is useful here to briefly introduce the concepts of idea unit and focus proposed by Chafe. In his work ‘The Deployment of Consciousness in the Production of a Narrative’ (1980), Chafe defines idea units as the short segments into which a natural flow of speech is divided. He underlines the fact that, even though when we listen to someone talking we get the impression of a fluent talk, this is an elaboration of the listener’s mind, but that in fact natural speech is fragmented and jerky. According to Chafe, the different parts in which our speech is divided represent the different, temporary focus of our conscience on the small part of information needed. Idea units are practically identified in various ways, such as intonation, pausing, rising or falling pitch etc. (ibid.). For example, according to this classification, the following abstract from the speech of E09 represents one focus of consciousness, composed by 3 idea units, here separated in different lines:
9 9.1 [2.95[.9]A..nd um[.25]{throat clearing}[.35]]he goes up the ladder,
9.2 and picks some more pears…And he's up there picking,
9.3 [.4]and a little boy comes on his bicycle.
This subdivision of the narratives is here useful to understand how much importance (which means how many focuses or idea units) is given, for example, to the film-viewer perspective, and consequently how relevant this perspective is in the economy of the entire narrative.
It is then possible to maintain indirectly (i.e. without mentioning directly the word “film” or using cinematographic jargon) the viewer approach. In the narratives analyzed here, this indirect use of the film-viewer perspective is often maintained by using a sensorial point of view; that is to say that the speaker who summarizes a movie is likely to emphasize what s/he have seen or heard (Tannen 1980). This is semantically expressed by the use of lexical items from the visual and auditory semantic fields, but other devices are also a sign of the viewer perspective adopted, as for example describing the scene first, and in full details, or introducing the characters by recounting their look or clothes (ibid.). These techniques are largely used by the American students, but also by the Chinese and the Italians: four out of the six Italian speakers used an auditory or visual perspective, even though none of those four talked directly about a “movie”.
The narrative of M05 gives an example of this indirect approach. As previously said, she mentions the word yingpian (film) only once, at the end of her account, but she maintains the visual or auditory perspective all along her narration, devoting many idea units in her speech to express a sensorial perspective, as in the following examples:
4 4.1 uh.....附近還可以聽到羊叫的聲音。
am… fùjìn hái kĕyĭ tīngdào yáng jiào de shēngyīn
(am…near you can also hear the sound of a goat)
7 7.1 uh.....陽光照在..... ，
am… yángguāng zhàozài…
(the sunlight shines on…)
Besides these isolated idea units, that occur frequently and all along her narration, at some points she also uses whole focuses to express a sensorial point of view:
51 51.1 這個這個時候那三個小孩兒也走了，
zhègè zhègè shíhòu nà sān gè xiăoháir yĕ zŏule,
(in that that moment those 3 boys went away too)
51.2 看起來很輕鬆愉快，
kàn qĭlái hĕn qīngsōng yúkuài,
(they look very relaxed and happy)
51.3 uh身體很健康的樣子。
a shēntĭ hĕn jiànkāng de yàngzi
(their appearence is healthy)
Two out of three idea units in this focus are employed to expresses her opinion about the appearance of the three boys; notice the use of visual expressions such as 看起来 kan qilai (it looks like) or 样子 yangzi (appearance), which remind the speaker of the fact that she is talking about something she has seen. The same use of visual and auditory words can be noticed in the speech of IT03. Differently from the Chinese narrative of M05, IT03 never mentions the word film or any cinematographic jargon, yet she also refers to what she have seen or heard. Here are some examples of idea units, taken from her speech, which express this viewpoint. IT03 never devotes a whole focus on a visual or auditory description, but rather refers to those sensory perception in various idea units along her narration:
2.1 Poi si vede, un uomo… in lontananza e il rumore di una capra
(and then you see a man…on the distance and (you hear) the sound of a goat)
non si vedeva bene dall’immagine
(I couldn’t see clearly from the picture)
6.8 perché dopo si vede l’immagine in cui
(because later you see the picture where)
On the contrary, American speakers often devote whole focuses to a description of the sounds or images in the film; in fact, four American narrative revolve around the sound heard in the movie (ibid.), as in the following focus from the speech of E14:
6 6.1 [1.4]Like you could hear the[.15]the creaking [.35]of the[.4]ladder,
6.2 [.8]and the picking of the pears,
6.3 and then from a long way off[.35]they zoomed in on a[.35]/on
a/[.2]a[.2]child on a bicycle,
6.4 and you could hear the [.4]the gears on the bicycle going round,
The same American and Chinese speakers mentioned above, emphasize the film-viewer perspective also by assigning a whole focus to the description of the setting. E14 does it at the very beginning (lines 1.1-2.2), devoting two focuses in describing the land and trying to find a geographical collocation for the setting (mentioning in the same focus words like “movie or “scene”), while M05 opens her account more “traditionally”, i.e. introducing the character and the first scene (a man picking pears). She leaves the description of the setting to the second focus; but then she assigns 9 focuses to it (lines 2.1-10.2), and adds frequently personal comments such as 非常漂亮 feichang piaoliang (very beautiful) or 这个风景非常平静 zhe ge fengjing feichang pingjing (this scenery is very relaxing). None of the Italian speakers interviewed mentioned the landscape or the setting at any point; only the pear tree has been mentioned by all the 6 speakers.
Thus when narrating the film from a film-viewer perspective, the speakers of the three different languages all use the same or similar devices to keep the film frame. But there is a main difference in how the speakers use this perspective. As Tannen (1980) argues, the American students tend to use this viewpoint in order to give an objective account of the film, thus they try as much as possible to avoid adding personal or moral judgement to the story. On the contrary, Chinese speakers who describe the film in a viewer perspective frequently add their own point of view, their personal comments or moral judgements. Again, speaker M05 and E14 are good examples of this difference. Though E14 gives her personal point of view sometimes in her narrative, as in “but there was pear trees in it…and that was odd” (lines 3.1-3.2), she still tries to give an objective reason for it: in fact, the previous example is preceded by the description of the setting, from which it can be inferred that a pear tree in such an environment is to be considered “odd” (see lines 1.4-2.2). In other cases, she points out clearly that what she has just said was her own impression, and not part of the film. On the other hand, speaker M05 often adds to her descriptions personal judgments, especially by means of pejorative or positive adjectives referred to what she wants to comment on. As an example, when she describes the setting, she specifies that the landscape is “beautiful” or “relaxing”, employing 4 idea units and a whole focus for it (see 10.1-10-2). From these examples it is clear that, even though the film-viewer perspective is present in both narratives, the way in which the speakers decline this viewpoint is very different: it is a way to be objective for the English speaker, but a way to express her personal comments for the Chinese speaker. As regards Italian speakers, they generally did not add personal comments during the narration; only one of them (IT04) used a whole focus at the end of her account to express her point of view regarding the end of the story:
9.1 però…
(but)
9.2 strana la cosa perché comunque
(this thing is weird because anyway)
9.3 glien’è sparita una cesta
(a whole basked disappeared)
9.4 e loro ne avevano tre.
(but they (the boys) just have three (pears))
Another sign of the use of a viewer perspective can be observed in the description of the characters. Generally speaking, in all the three languages the speakers who do not mention directly or indirectly a film-viewer perspective, simply introduce the protagonist or protagonists of the story, without spending more than one or two idea units in describing them. On the other hand, the visual-oriented accounts generally have full descriptions of the people involved, with specification (or guessing) of their age, their appearance, their nationality or even their social status (Dowing 1980). The following examples are taken from visual-oriented narratives:
3.1 [.35]There’s [.65]a farmer,
[.l5]he looks like ay uh..Chicano American, (E09)
34.1 這個女孩子.....給給我的印象比較深，
zhègè nǚháizi… gĕi gĕi wŏ de yìngxiàng bĭjiào shēn,
(this girl gave me a quite deep impression)
34.2 因為她的頭髮是黑顏色的，(M05)
yīnwèi tā de tóufà shì hēiyánsè de,
(bacause her hair is black)
2.1 C’era ‘sto signore qua che era su una scala sull’albero
(there was this man here who was on a ladder on the tree)
aveva un vestito che era blu. (IT05)
(he was wearing blue clothes)
On the other hand, the introduction and description of the same characters in narratives without (or only with a partial) film-viewer perspective are as follow:
uh…..就是有一個男的，(M17)
am, jiùshì yŏu yí gè nánde,
(am…it’s that there was a male)
[.3+u—h[.3]]there’s a--..man,
[.45]picking pears (E08)
C’era un contadino che raccoglieva delle pere (IT06)
(there was a farmer who was picking some pears)
It is clear from the above examples how the speaker who decides to adopt a visual perspective to narrate the film, is influenced by this choice to use a more specific, “visual” vocabulary in describing characters, but also actions and settings.
These considerations lead to a consistent difference from one speaker to another (but also between languages): the choice about which nouns and adjectives to use in describing the people in the film. Since some speakers tend to be more generic, giving only information strictly useful for the progression of the narrative while others are far more specific, (see above examples), this implies and is reflected also in a different word choice between the speakers (ibid.). As an example, some nouns used in the different languages to refer to the man picking pears, are the following (equivalent words are in the same line):
ENGLISH: man, guy, farm laborer, farmer; CHINESE : 人 ren (man), 农人 nongren (farmer), 男的 nande (male), 外国先生 waiguo xiansheng (foreign gentleman); ITALIAN: uomo (man), contadino (farmer), signore (mister).
What is interesting to notice here is that, in this case, Americans used more generic, non-interpretative nouns to refer to the protagonists, and only 4 of them mentioned the pear-picker’s social status or ethnicity; Chinese speakers, on the other hand, were far more explicit, using frequently nouns such as 外国先生 waiguo xiansheng (foreign gentleman), 种树的人 zhongshu de ren (tree grower) or 摘芭乐的人 zhai bale de ren (guava picker) (Erbaugh 1990). As regards Italian speakers, they typically used words such as “uomo” (man) or “signore” (mister), both very common and generic words in Italian to refer to a male adult. Only two of them referred to the man as a “contadino” (farmer), and none of them mentioned his social status or ethnic origin.
It is interesting at this point to notice how the speakers introduce the characters in their narratives. The speakers of the three languages, no matter weather they were using a film-viewer perspective or not, generally begin their narration or indicate the change of scene with the introduction of the main character involved in that section of the story, sometimes using a full focus to describe in details his age, nationality or social condition. A remarkable similarity between the three languages is the use of an identical structure to topicalize the noun that refers to the character, in order to introduce him in the narration (Erbaugh 1990). The topic is usually defined as “what the sentence is about” (Li & Thompson 1989: 82) and in these cases it is introduced by the locution “there is/was” in English, and its Chinese and Italian equivalents “有” and “c’è/c’era” (see speaker E09 line 3.1, speaker E08 line 1.2 and speaker IT06 line 1.1). While topicalization is a device commonly used in both spoken and written Chinese, which has been defined a topic-prominent language (ibid.), it is not so common in standard English or Italian. In English, topicalization is not usually explicitly marked, with a few exception in spoken English or in structures where expressions like “regarding”, “speaking of” etc. clearly mark the topic of the sentence (Huddleston & Pullum 2002). The same can be said about Italian: in many varieties of spoken Italian the structure is quite commonly used (Frascarelli 2000), yet it is not as common in formal or written Italian. So, marking the topic in the sentence can be considered a feature common to all the three languages considered here. However, in Chinese the use of this structure is overwhelming: in the narrative here considered, Chinese speakers use frequently topicalization to focus the attention of the listener on the main object of the rest of the sentence (comment), and, differently from the Italians and the Americans, who marked the topic only by means of the structure mentioned before, they did it also by using other grammatical structures. The marked topic can be almost every component of the sentence, for example the subject, but also the location or time of the action (Li & Thompson 1989). Some examples of topicalization can be seen on the speech of M05 and M17:
32.1 在那個路上，(M05)
zài nàgè lùshàng,
(in that street)
23.2 那個農人呢，（M17)
nàgè nóngrén ne,
(that farmer NE)
Here the topic is marked in two different ways, both very typical of spoken language. In the first case, a pause in the speech is the only marker of the topic; in the second example, the topic is more distinctly separated from the comment by the pause particle 呢 ne (ibid.).
Analyzing the characters in the narratives, another cross-language feature can be noticed: when talking about a character in a certain situation, some speakers decide to adopt a first-person point of view to describe his thoughts. This is present in both Chinese and English narratives, but in none of the Italian narratives. Good examples of the use of this “character perspective” are the narrative of E09 (lines 12.2-13.1) and the following part in the speech of M04:
43 43.1 我想，
wŏ xiăng,
(I think)
43.2 這個農人可能心裡覺得，
zhège nóngrén kĕnéng xīnlĭ juédé,
(this farmer maybe inside his heart thinks)
43.3 ie., 少了一簍果子.
ei, shăole yì lóu guŏzi .
(hey, It’s missing a basket of fruit)
In both cases, to make the distinction between the thoughts of the speaker and those of the characters clearer, the direct speech is separated from the rest of the narration by an interjection, such as “ie” in Chinese or “well” in English (even though the English speaker also uses the verb “says” to introduce the direct speech). In these examples, the Chinese speaker specifies clearly that the thoughts of the character are her guessing, while the American speaker narrates them as if they were part of the movie itself.
In conclusion, even though some differences can be noticed in the narrative discourse between Chinese, English and Italian speakers, the example of the pear film shows clearly how some general patterns are similar, if not identical, across languages. An example of such patterns is the use in the narration of a film-viewer perspective, which is a viewpoint adopted more consistently by American speakers, but which is also present in Chinese and Italian narratives. Furthermore, similar patterns in the three languages can be found in the introduction and description of the characters, especially in the topicalization of the introductory sentence, in the use of equivalent or similar nouns to refer to them or in the degree of specificity in descriptions. In general, the pear film linguistic experiment and the comparative studies carried on until now on the basis of it are of great interest, and not only to linguists. In fact, they can also be useful for cross-language communication or in order to translate between languages, since they help to compare and understand the deep differences but also the similarities between speakers of different languages.
REFERENCES:
Chafe, W. L. (1980) ‘The Deployment of Consciousness in the Production of a Narrative’ in Chafe, W. L. (Ed.) The Pear Stories, Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Downing, P. (1980) ‘Factors Influencing Lexical Choice in Narrative’ in Chafe, W. L. (Ed.) The Pear Stories, Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Erbaugh, M. S. (1990) ‘Mandarin oral narratives compared with English: the pear/guava stories’ in Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association, Vol. 25, No.2, pp. 21-42.
Erbaugh, M. S. (2001), The Chinese Pear Stories: Narratives Across Seven Chinese Dialects, available at: http://www.pearstories.org/default.htm (Accessed: 10/11/2006).
Fleischman, S. and Yaguello, M. (2004) ‘Discourse markers across languages’ in Moder, C. L. and Martinovic-Zic A. (Ed.) Discourse Across Languages and Cultures, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Frascarelli, M. (2000) The Syntax-Phonology Interface in Focus and Topic Constructions in Italian, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Freedle, R. (1980) ‘Preface to the series’ in Chafe, W. L. (Ed.) The Pear Stories, Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. K. (2002) The Cambridge grammar of the English language, Cambridge University Press.
Li, C. N. and Thompson, S. A. (1989), Mandarin Chinese: a functional reference grammar, Berkeley: University of California Press.
McEnery, A. M. and Xiao, R. Z. (2006) ‘Collocation, Semantic Prosody, and Near Synonymy: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective’ in Applied Linguistics [Online], Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 103-129, available at: http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/45/ (Accessed: 21/11/2006).
Tannen, D. (1980) ‘A Comparative Analysis of Oral Narrative Strategies: Athenian Greek and American English’ in Chafe, W. L. (Ed.) The Pear Stories, Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation
The major objects of analysis in this paper will be: 1) the presence/absence and the differences in the narratives of all 3 languages of a film perspective, i.e. whether the narrator talks about the movie as a movie or as a story, and what are the choices that determine this difference at the level of language; 2) how and at what extent the characters are described and introduced in the narrative will also be taken into consideration; for example, the way and words used to describe the characters, or how the characters are introduced into the narrative.
The narratives considered here are taken from the work of Professor Wallace Chafe who, in the 1970s, produced with his collaborators a short movie, with colour and sound but no spoken word, to be shown to people all around the world, in order to compare narrative discourse in different languages. The film was designed to be as much universal as possible, i.e. any references to American culture were avoided, and the story shown in the movie has to do with actions and situations that every man and woman could have experienced in his/her life (Erbaugh 2001). The movie has been shown to speakers of different languages, and they have then been asked to tell what they have seen in the film. In 1975 Professor Chafe recorded the story told by 50 English speakers in California, then the same experiment has been conduct with 20 speakers of Mandarin Chinese in Taipei by Erbaugh, and with speakers of other languages such as Japanese, Malay, Greek, German, etc (Freedle 1980).
The samples chosen for closer analysis in this paper are the narratives of two English speakers and two Chinese speakers, which best exemplify the key features here discussed. Yet some data and references will be given considering the whole corpus of Chinese and English spoken narratives, when needed. The whole samples consist in the narratives of 20 American undergraduate students and 20 Chinese university students aged between 19 and 28, whose first language is Mandarin Chinese or who have spoken Mandarin since childhood (original transcripts from www.pearstories.org).
In addition to this material, I have recorded and transcribed 6 Italian speakers of Northern Italy. The pear stories film was shown to them, and they were then asked to tell what they have seen in the film. The 6 Italian speakers chosen are university students aged between 19 and 23, with a similar level of education of their Chinese and English counterparts. They were recorded on December 2006, and then their narratives were transcribed (without a formal marking of intonation, pauses, etc. but dividing the speech according to the notions of “idea units” and “focuses”) in order to compare them with those of the Chinese and English speakers. Two samples of the Italian narratives, which well represent the typical narrative amongst the six recorded, are included in Appendix 2, and will be more often used for the comparison, even though references and examples will be taken from the remaining 4 narratives as well. I also translated into English the Chinese and Italian examples, trying to be as faithful as possible to the original, eve though this sometimes can result in a odd or non-natural English.
Firstly, with regard to the film-viewer perspective, it is useful to take into consideration Tannen’s (1980) comparative study of English and Greek narratives based on the pear film. Contrasting the speech of the two groups, Tannen argues that Greek and English speakers differentiate in their account of the story mainly in one aspect: the American students interviewed, trying to be objective, tended to describe the story as a film, using specific cinematographic jargon, describing the zoom close-ups or noticing the costumes used. On the other hand, Greek speakers tended to effectively tell a story, and often gave moral and personal judgements, seldom mentioning words such as “film” or “camera”. According to Tanmen, this difference is mainly due to the fact that American students are more used to memory tests, and are thus concerned in scoring well, trying to remember as much details as possible and to be objective. On the contrary, Greek speakers are more interested in telling a story successfully, and are then more concentrated in the narrative effect they produce, focusing on the main points of the story and trying to extrapolate a moral or philosophic meaning from it.
The case of Chinese narratives is more complex. As Erbaugh (1990) pointed out, when Chinese and English narratives of the pear film are compared, the difference is narrower, since 12 out of the 20 Chinese students interviewed mentioned the word 电影 dianying or 片 pian (film) and some of them also referred indirectly to the movie, commenting on the change of scene or other film-specific features. Erbaugh suggests that
“the national splits in film-viewer perspective are far from absolute” (1990: 27),
stressing the fact that the difference between the two groups of speakers can not be misunderstood, or used to support the lack of critical point of view of Chinese speakers. Erbaugh’s argument is confirmed by statistic evidence, but to clarify this point it is useful to examine more in details some examples from the narratives, in order to understand the qualitative difference in the use of film perspective between the two groups of speakers. The speech of E14 for English and M05 for Chinese (see Appendix 1) are taken here as examples of narrations with a film-viewer perspective in both languages.
The first, immediate sign that the narrator is talking about a film is, of course, the direct use of the word “film”, or its equivalents in other languages (Tannen 1980). In the samples considered, the American speaker mentions the word “movie” five times all along her narration:
1 1.1 The movie opened up on this[.3] nice scene,
was that all the noises in the movie,
9.2 like the movie[.2]the ..sound track had been slowed down,
14.7 and ..nobody ever smiles in the movie,
19 19.1 And that’s the end of the movie. (ibid)
In contrast, the Chinese speaker M05 only uses the word 影片yingpian (film) once, in her conclusive sentence:
71.1 uh.....這個影片就結束了。
a…zhège yĭngpiàn jiù jiéshùle
(uh… then this film has finished)
and so does the Italian speaker IT6, who is, in fact, the only one of the six Italians interviewed to mention the word “cinema” (film). Exactly as the previous example from the Chinese narrative, he uses the word at the very end, as a conclusion:
9 Qui finisce il cinema.
(the movie ends here)
The fact that the American speaker makes use of the word “movie” all along her narration (and not only at the beginning or at the end, as do the majority of Chinese and Italian speakers who use the word) is the first signal that her narration is maintain a film-viewer perspective (ibid.). Besides these direct references to the word “movie”, E14 also uses a lot of cinematographic jargon to refer directly to the film, such as “open up”, “nice scene”, “zoomed on”, so as to make clear to her audience that what she is talking about is a movie (ibid.). Some of the Chinese speakers used cinematographic jargon too, even though not as much as the Americans did. Of the six Italian speakers, only two (IT01 and IT05) used film-specific terminology such as “la scena” (the scene) or “zoom”.
However, the mere reference to the word “film” or to other film-specific words (if sporadic in the narration) does not necessarily imply the maintenance of the film-viewer perspective along the whole narration. There must be something more to indicate to the listener that the narrator is talking about a film, and not simply narrating a story. In order to better analyze how and at what extent the students used or not the film perspective indirectly, it is useful here to briefly introduce the concepts of idea unit and focus proposed by Chafe. In his work ‘The Deployment of Consciousness in the Production of a Narrative’ (1980), Chafe defines idea units as the short segments into which a natural flow of speech is divided. He underlines the fact that, even though when we listen to someone talking we get the impression of a fluent talk, this is an elaboration of the listener’s mind, but that in fact natural speech is fragmented and jerky. According to Chafe, the different parts in which our speech is divided represent the different, temporary focus of our conscience on the small part of information needed. Idea units are practically identified in various ways, such as intonation, pausing, rising or falling pitch etc. (ibid.). For example, according to this classification, the following abstract from the speech of E09 represents one focus of consciousness, composed by 3 idea units, here separated in different lines:
9 9.1 [2.95[.9]A..nd um[.25]{throat clearing}[.35]]he goes up the ladder,
9.2 and picks some more pears…And he's up there picking,
9.3 [.4]and a little boy comes on his bicycle.
This subdivision of the narratives is here useful to understand how much importance (which means how many focuses or idea units) is given, for example, to the film-viewer perspective, and consequently how relevant this perspective is in the economy of the entire narrative.
It is then possible to maintain indirectly (i.e. without mentioning directly the word “film” or using cinematographic jargon) the viewer approach. In the narratives analyzed here, this indirect use of the film-viewer perspective is often maintained by using a sensorial point of view; that is to say that the speaker who summarizes a movie is likely to emphasize what s/he have seen or heard (Tannen 1980). This is semantically expressed by the use of lexical items from the visual and auditory semantic fields, but other devices are also a sign of the viewer perspective adopted, as for example describing the scene first, and in full details, or introducing the characters by recounting their look or clothes (ibid.). These techniques are largely used by the American students, but also by the Chinese and the Italians: four out of the six Italian speakers used an auditory or visual perspective, even though none of those four talked directly about a “movie”.
The narrative of M05 gives an example of this indirect approach. As previously said, she mentions the word yingpian (film) only once, at the end of her account, but she maintains the visual or auditory perspective all along her narration, devoting many idea units in her speech to express a sensorial perspective, as in the following examples:
4 4.1 uh.....附近還可以聽到羊叫的聲音。
am… fùjìn hái kĕyĭ tīngdào yáng jiào de shēngyīn
(am…near you can also hear the sound of a goat)
7 7.1 uh.....陽光照在..... ，
am… yángguāng zhàozài…
(the sunlight shines on…)
Besides these isolated idea units, that occur frequently and all along her narration, at some points she also uses whole focuses to express a sensorial point of view:
51 51.1 這個這個時候那三個小孩兒也走了，
zhègè zhègè shíhòu nà sān gè xiăoháir yĕ zŏule,
(in that that moment those 3 boys went away too)
51.2 看起來很輕鬆愉快，
kàn qĭlái hĕn qīngsōng yúkuài,
(they look very relaxed and happy)
51.3 uh身體很健康的樣子。
a shēntĭ hĕn jiànkāng de yàngzi
(their appearence is healthy)
Two out of three idea units in this focus are employed to expresses her opinion about the appearance of the three boys; notice the use of visual expressions such as 看起来 kan qilai (it looks like) or 样子 yangzi (appearance), which remind the speaker of the fact that she is talking about something she has seen. The same use of visual and auditory words can be noticed in the speech of IT03. Differently from the Chinese narrative of M05, IT03 never mentions the word film or any cinematographic jargon, yet she also refers to what she have seen or heard. Here are some examples of idea units, taken from her speech, which express this viewpoint. IT03 never devotes a whole focus on a visual or auditory description, but rather refers to those sensory perception in various idea units along her narration:
2.1 Poi si vede, un uomo… in lontananza e il rumore di una capra
(and then you see a man…on the distance and (you hear) the sound of a goat)
non si vedeva bene dall’immagine
(I couldn’t see clearly from the picture)
6.8 perché dopo si vede l’immagine in cui
(because later you see the picture where)
On the contrary, American speakers often devote whole focuses to a description of the sounds or images in the film; in fact, four American narrative revolve around the sound heard in the movie (ibid.), as in the following focus from the speech of E14:
6 6.1 [1.4]Like you could hear the[.15]the creaking [.35]of the[.4]ladder,
6.2 [.8]and the picking of the pears,
6.3 and then from a long way off[.35]they zoomed in on a[.35]/on
a/[.2]a[.2]child on a bicycle,
6.4 and you could hear the [.4]the gears on the bicycle going round,
The same American and Chinese speakers mentioned above, emphasize the film-viewer perspective also by assigning a whole focus to the description of the setting. E14 does it at the very beginning (lines 1.1-2.2), devoting two focuses in describing the land and trying to find a geographical collocation for the setting (mentioning in the same focus words like “movie or “scene”), while M05 opens her account more “traditionally”, i.e. introducing the character and the first scene (a man picking pears). She leaves the description of the setting to the second focus; but then she assigns 9 focuses to it (lines 2.1-10.2), and adds frequently personal comments such as 非常漂亮 feichang piaoliang (very beautiful) or 这个风景非常平静 zhe ge fengjing feichang pingjing (this scenery is very relaxing). None of the Italian speakers interviewed mentioned the landscape or the setting at any point; only the pear tree has been mentioned by all the 6 speakers.
Thus when narrating the film from a film-viewer perspective, the speakers of the three different languages all use the same or similar devices to keep the film frame. But there is a main difference in how the speakers use this perspective. As Tannen (1980) argues, the American students tend to use this viewpoint in order to give an objective account of the film, thus they try as much as possible to avoid adding personal or moral judgement to the story. On the contrary, Chinese speakers who describe the film in a viewer perspective frequently add their own point of view, their personal comments or moral judgements. Again, speaker M05 and E14 are good examples of this difference. Though E14 gives her personal point of view sometimes in her narrative, as in “but there was pear trees in it…and that was odd” (lines 3.1-3.2), she still tries to give an objective reason for it: in fact, the previous example is preceded by the description of the setting, from which it can be inferred that a pear tree in such an environment is to be considered “odd” (see lines 1.4-2.2). In other cases, she points out clearly that what she has just said was her own impression, and not part of the film. On the other hand, speaker M05 often adds to her descriptions personal judgments, especially by means of pejorative or positive adjectives referred to what she wants to comment on. As an example, when she describes the setting, she specifies that the landscape is “beautiful” or “relaxing”, employing 4 idea units and a whole focus for it (see 10.1-10-2). From these examples it is clear that, even though the film-viewer perspective is present in both narratives, the way in which the speakers decline this viewpoint is very different: it is a way to be objective for the English speaker, but a way to express her personal comments for the Chinese speaker. As regards Italian speakers, they generally did not add personal comments during the narration; only one of them (IT04) used a whole focus at the end of her account to express her point of view regarding the end of the story:
9.1 però…
(but)
9.2 strana la cosa perché comunque
(this thing is weird because anyway)
9.3 glien’è sparita una cesta
(a whole basked disappeared)
9.4 e loro ne avevano tre.
(but they (the boys) just have three (pears))
Another sign of the use of a viewer perspective can be observed in the description of the characters. Generally speaking, in all the three languages the speakers who do not mention directly or indirectly a film-viewer perspective, simply introduce the protagonist or protagonists of the story, without spending more than one or two idea units in describing them. On the other hand, the visual-oriented accounts generally have full descriptions of the people involved, with specification (or guessing) of their age, their appearance, their nationality or even their social status (Dowing 1980). The following examples are taken from visual-oriented narratives:
3.1 [.35]There’s [.65]a farmer,
[.l5]he looks like ay uh..Chicano American, (E09)
34.1 這個女孩子.....給給我的印象比較深，
zhègè nǚháizi… gĕi gĕi wŏ de yìngxiàng bĭjiào shēn,
(this girl gave me a quite deep impression)
34.2 因為她的頭髮是黑顏色的，(M05)
yīnwèi tā de tóufà shì hēiyánsè de,
(bacause her hair is black)
2.1 C’era ‘sto signore qua che era su una scala sull’albero
(there was this man here who was on a ladder on the tree)
aveva un vestito che era blu. (IT05)
(he was wearing blue clothes)
On the other hand, the introduction and description of the same characters in narratives without (or only with a partial) film-viewer perspective are as follow:
uh…..就是有一個男的，(M17)
am, jiùshì yŏu yí gè nánde,
(am…it’s that there was a male)
[.3+u—h[.3]]there’s a--..man,
[.45]picking pears (E08)
C’era un contadino che raccoglieva delle pere (IT06)
(there was a farmer who was picking some pears)
It is clear from the above examples how the speaker who decides to adopt a visual perspective to narrate the film, is influenced by this choice to use a more specific, “visual” vocabulary in describing characters, but also actions and settings.
These considerations lead to a consistent difference from one speaker to another (but also between languages): the choice about which nouns and adjectives to use in describing the people in the film. Since some speakers tend to be more generic, giving only information strictly useful for the progression of the narrative while others are far more specific, (see above examples), this implies and is reflected also in a different word choice between the speakers (ibid.). As an example, some nouns used in the different languages to refer to the man picking pears, are the following (equivalent words are in the same line):
ENGLISH: man, guy, farm laborer, farmer; CHINESE : 人 ren (man), 农人 nongren (farmer), 男的 nande (male), 外国先生 waiguo xiansheng (foreign gentleman); ITALIAN: uomo (man), contadino (farmer), signore (mister).
What is interesting to notice here is that, in this case, Americans used more generic, non-interpretative nouns to refer to the protagonists, and only 4 of them mentioned the pear-picker’s social status or ethnicity; Chinese speakers, on the other hand, were far more explicit, using frequently nouns such as 外国先生 waiguo xiansheng (foreign gentleman), 种树的人 zhongshu de ren (tree grower) or 摘芭乐的人 zhai bale de ren (guava picker) (Erbaugh 1990). As regards Italian speakers, they typically used words such as “uomo” (man) or “signore” (mister), both very common and generic words in Italian to refer to a male adult. Only two of them referred to the man as a “contadino” (farmer), and none of them mentioned his social status or ethnic origin.
It is interesting at this point to notice how the speakers introduce the characters in their narratives. The speakers of the three languages, no matter weather they were using a film-viewer perspective or not, generally begin their narration or indicate the change of scene with the introduction of the main character involved in that section of the story, sometimes using a full focus to describe in details his age, nationality or social condition. A remarkable similarity between the three languages is the use of an identical structure to topicalize the noun that refers to the character, in order to introduce him in the narration (Erbaugh 1990). The topic is usually defined as “what the sentence is about” (Li & Thompson 1989: 82) and in these cases it is introduced by the locution “there is/was” in English, and its Chinese and Italian equivalents “有” and “c’è/c’era” (see speaker E09 line 3.1, speaker E08 line 1.2 and speaker IT06 line 1.1). While topicalization is a device commonly used in both spoken and written Chinese, which has been defined a topic-prominent language (ibid.), it is not so common in standard English or Italian. In English, topicalization is not usually explicitly marked, with a few exception in spoken English or in structures where expressions like “regarding”, “speaking of” etc. clearly mark the topic of the sentence (Huddleston & Pullum 2002). The same can be said about Italian: in many varieties of spoken Italian the structure is quite commonly used (Frascarelli 2000), yet it is not as common in formal or written Italian. So, marking the topic in the sentence can be considered a feature common to all the three languages considered here. However, in Chinese the use of this structure is overwhelming: in the narrative here considered, Chinese speakers use frequently topicalization to focus the attention of the listener on the main object of the rest of the sentence (comment), and, differently from the Italians and the Americans, who marked the topic only by means of the structure mentioned before, they did it also by using other grammatical structures. The marked topic can be almost every component of the sentence, for example the subject, but also the location or time of the action (Li & Thompson 1989). Some examples of topicalization can be seen on the speech of M05 and M17:
32.1 在那個路上，(M05)
zài nàgè lùshàng,
(in that street)
23.2 那個農人呢，（M17)
nàgè nóngrén ne,
(that farmer NE)
Here the topic is marked in two different ways, both very typical of spoken language. In the first case, a pause in the speech is the only marker of the topic; in the second example, the topic is more distinctly separated from the comment by the pause particle 呢 ne (ibid.).
Analyzing the characters in the narratives, another cross-language feature can be noticed: when talking about a character in a certain situation, some speakers decide to adopt a first-person point of view to describe his thoughts. This is present in both Chinese and English narratives, but in none of the Italian narratives. Good examples of the use of this “character perspective” are the narrative of E09 (lines 12.2-13.1) and the following part in the speech of M04:
43 43.1 我想，
wŏ xiăng,
(I think)
43.2 這個農人可能心裡覺得，
zhège nóngrén kĕnéng xīnlĭ juédé,
(this farmer maybe inside his heart thinks)
43.3 ie., 少了一簍果子.
ei, shăole yì lóu guŏzi .
(hey, It’s missing a basket of fruit)
In both cases, to make the distinction between the thoughts of the speaker and those of the characters clearer, the direct speech is separated from the rest of the narration by an interjection, such as “ie” in Chinese or “well” in English (even though the English speaker also uses the verb “says” to introduce the direct speech). In these examples, the Chinese speaker specifies clearly that the thoughts of the character are her guessing, while the American speaker narrates them as if they were part of the movie itself.
In conclusion, even though some differences can be noticed in the narrative discourse between Chinese, English and Italian speakers, the example of the pear film shows clearly how some general patterns are similar, if not identical, across languages. An example of such patterns is the use in the narration of a film-viewer perspective, which is a viewpoint adopted more consistently by American speakers, but which is also present in Chinese and Italian narratives. Furthermore, similar patterns in the three languages can be found in the introduction and description of the characters, especially in the topicalization of the introductory sentence, in the use of equivalent or similar nouns to refer to them or in the degree of specificity in descriptions. In general, the pear film linguistic experiment and the comparative studies carried on until now on the basis of it are of great interest, and not only to linguists. In fact, they can also be useful for cross-language communication or in order to translate between languages, since they help to compare and understand the deep differences but also the similarities between speakers of different languages.
REFERENCES:
Chafe, W. L. (1980) ‘The Deployment of Consciousness in the Production of a Narrative’ in Chafe, W. L. (Ed.) The Pear Stories, Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Downing, P. (1980) ‘Factors Influencing Lexical Choice in Narrative’ in Chafe, W. L. (Ed.) The Pear Stories, Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Erbaugh, M. S. (1990) ‘Mandarin oral narratives compared with English: the pear/guava stories’ in Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association, Vol. 25, No.2, pp. 21-42.
Erbaugh, M. S. (2001), The Chinese Pear Stories: Narratives Across Seven Chinese Dialects, available at: http://www.pearstories.org/default.htm (Accessed: 10/11/2006).
Fleischman, S. and Yaguello, M. (2004) ‘Discourse markers across languages’ in Moder, C. L. and Martinovic-Zic A. (Ed.) Discourse Across Languages and Cultures, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Frascarelli, M. (2000) The Syntax-Phonology Interface in Focus and Topic Constructions in Italian, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Freedle, R. (1980) ‘Preface to the series’ in Chafe, W. L. (Ed.) The Pear Stories, Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. K. (2002) The Cambridge grammar of the English language, Cambridge University Press.
Li, C. N. and Thompson, S. A. (1989), Mandarin Chinese: a functional reference grammar, Berkeley: University of California Press.
McEnery, A. M. and Xiao, R. Z. (2006) ‘Collocation, Semantic Prosody, and Near Synonymy: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective’ in Applied Linguistics [Online], Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 103-129, available at: http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/45/ (Accessed: 21/11/2006).
Tannen, D. (1980) ‘A Comparative Analysis of Oral Narrative Strategies: Athenian Greek and American English’ in Chafe, W. L. (Ed.) The Pear Stories, Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production, Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation
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