Information

General information and characteristics of the Narrative Acts

What is a Narrative Act?

A narrative act is a linguistic form that represents a complex action which has a secondary action. For example : Marc encourages Mary to study hard. «To encourage» is the complex action and «To study hard» is the secondary action.
A narrative act is characterized by :
  • A predicate form : this is very useful because when a narrative act is coded, it's coded with its predicate form (for more information, see predicate form).
    For example : Encourage(X, Y, a)
  • Number of involved characters : this attribute represents the number of characters that are involved when the action is executed. It represents the number of active subjects.
    Example : Marc tells Mary that July is beautiful.
    Here Marc and Mary are the only involved characters
  • A type : the type defines if the narrative act is an action about an action (AA), an action about a state (AS), a state about an action (SA) or a state about a state (SS)
  • A sequence position : the sequence position corresponds to the position of the principal action related to the secondary action. It can be before, during or after.
  • A level of abstraction : this attribute corresponds to the complexity of the sentence.
  • Valence : valence is a linguistic characteristic of a verb. It corresponds to the number of elements that are connected to that verb. The element can be active or passive. A verb can be avalent (for example : to rain) and it can have a different valence according to how it is used (for example : He gives a gift (v=1). He gives a gift to her (v=2))
  • A domain and a Class : a narrative act is classified in domains and classes. (See Domains and classes)

Example - exercise

Read the example above and try to find the narrative acts. If you want to see the solution, click on the button after the text.

Once upon a time, a prince named Charles lived in a far away country. One day, while he was walking in the forest, he heard two peasants talking about an imprisoned princess, in a castle guarded by a very dangerous dragon. That princess was Sarah, his secret love. Charles took his sword and his white horse and ran to the castle. After a long battle against the dragon, he saved the Princess Sarah and took her back home because he was secretly in love with her . All the kingdom congratulated him for having saved their beloved princess . The king Leonard, Sarah's father, rewarded the prince by offering him a crown full of diamonds . As soon as the princess learned that Charles saved her , she decided to marry him as soon as possible . But in Leonard's kingdom, nobody knew Prince Charles, so nobody knew his very dark secret...

The predicate form

The predicate form is the representation of the act as a predicate. A predicate is a linguistic form that once applied to terms forms a statement. It is created according to the rules of the predicate logic, initially created by Aristotle.
Predicates in the catalog follow these conventions:
  • Characters are represented by the letters: X, Y, Z, U
  • Tasks and actions are represented by the letters: a, a1, a2,...
  • Material object is represented by: obj
  • Plan or program are represented by the letter: p
  • State is represented by the letter: s
Example: Encourage(X, Y, a)
If you want more information about the predicate logic, read the predicate logic wikipedia's page

The sources

Narrative acts were found in sources. In this category, we wrote where we found the narrative act and what was the original term we found. Our main sources are the following :
  • TOD1 : Todorov, T. (1969). Grammaire du Decameron. The Hague - Paris: Mouton.
  • TOD2 : Todorov, T. (1970). Les transformations narratives.Poétiques, (3), 322–333.
  • GC : Greimas, A. J. (1983).Du Sens II : essais sémiotiques. Paris: Seuil.
    Courtès, J. (1991).Analyse sémiotique du discours.Paris, Hachette(Hachette). Paris.
  • BRE : Bremond, C. (1973).Logique du récit. Paris: Seuil.
  • SAT : Speech acts theory Searle, J. R. (1976). A Classification of Illocutionary Acts.Language in Society,5(1), 1–23.
    Austin, J. L. (1962). How To Do Things With Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955.The Journal of Symbolic Logic,36, 513.
  • SGO : Sgouros, N. (1999). Dynamic Generation, Management and Resolution of Interactive Plots.Artificial Intelligence,107(1), 29–62.
  • IDT : Szilas, N. (2007). A Computational Model of an Intelligent Narrator for Interactive Narratives.Applied Artificial Intelligence,21(8), 753–801.
  • PWK : Promweek - McCoy, J., Treanor, M., Samuel, B., Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Mateas, M. (2011). Comme il Faut: A System for Authoring Playable Social Models. In Proceedings of the Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-11) (pp. 158–163).
  • VER : Versu - Evans, R., & Short, E. (2014). Versu — A Simulationist Storytelling System. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, 6(2), 113–130.
  • CRA : The Legacy of Siboot (1982), Erasmatron, Storytron, Siboot
  • FAC : Façade - Mateas, M., & Stern, A. (2003). Integrating Plot, Character and Natural Language Processing in the Interactive Drama Façade. In S. Göbel, N. Braun, U. Spierling, J. Dechau, & H. Diener (Eds.), Proceedings of the Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (TIDSE) Conference (pp. 139–151). Darmstadt: Fraunhofer IRB.

The domains and classes

The narrative acts are classified by domains and classes. Domains are the first level of classification. Classes are children of domains.
The Catalog of Narrative Acts. TECFA - University of Geneva, 2018.