An evaluation of story grammars
Open accessAbstract
We evaluate the “story grammar” approach to story understanding from three perspectives. We first examine the formal properties of the grammars and find only one to be formally adequate. We next evaluate the grammars empirically by asking whether they generate all simple stories and whether they generate only stories. We find many stories that they do not generate and one major class of nonstory that they do generate. We also evaluate the grammars' potential as comprehension models and find that they would add nothing to semantic models that focus on the story content. Hence we advocate a story content oriented approach to studying story understanding instead of the structural story grammar approach.
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- Authors
- BLACK, J., & WILENSKY, R.
- Affiliations
- Yale University (US)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Corresponding author
- BLACK, J
- Venue
- Cognitive Science
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1979-07
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 213-229
- ISSN
- 0364-0213 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4240629281
- Cited by
- 222
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2024: 3 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 7
- FWCI
- 484.54
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Cognitive Science (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health
- National Institute of Mental Health
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Narrative Theory and Analysis
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
- Keywords
- story grammar, narrative comprehension, generative grammar, story content, semantic models, narrative structure
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