Personal Experience Narrative Structure in “Al-ikhlas” Hadith

Using personal experience narrative in different forms of teaching and preaching is so common that it is unsurprising that it has been the object of scholarly attention and research. The present study aims to apply Labov’s model of narrative structure to the personal experience narratives (PENs) in the sincerity hadith. Sincerity—“Alikhlas”—is defined as being deeply devoted to Allah by heart and actions. According to Islamic teachings, a sincere person not only has a deep fear of Allah, but his intentions in all actions are mainly to please Him. Drawing on Labov’s work on PEN structures (1972; initially Labov & Waletzky, 1967, 1981, 1997), the study attempts to answer two key questions: a) whether or not the Labovian model applies to the PENs in the hadith and b) how effective the model is in establishing the link between what was said (i.e., the stories told), how the narratives were structured and the Islamic concept the hadith was meant to teach. The analysis shows that though the hadith belongs to a different language with assumedly different socio-linguistic narrative practices, the Labovian model works as an effective tool of analysis as it sheds light on how the overlapping layers of the narratives were structured to define the Islamic concept of “sincerity”.

Emotional engagement in expressive writing

HaCohen et al. (2018) identified three types of narratives that emerge in the context of integrating a difficult event into one’s life story. We use their identification while focusing on the quality of emotional involvement evidenced in texts, and combining it with an abstract-content text analysis. This allows us to quantify emotional engagement in Expressive Writing (EW) texts. We analyze personal-experience narratives produced in EW, and examine whether good EW outcome cases (in terms of well-being improvement) would be characterized with different types of narratives than poor outcome cases. Results show that texts produced by good outcome cases presented more emotional involvement than poor cases. Furthermore, good cases presented with a more complex and well-integrated narrative of their story than poor cases. It is suggested that good outcome participants’ writings are more emotionally involved, integrated and personal. Our findings emphasize the importance of context-sensitive and function-oriented accounts of EW texts.

Narrative Style: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Oral Personal Experience Narratives

Personal narrative, a very important subgenre of narratives, is usually developed in a particular style. To know its specificity, in this study, oral personal narratives have been analyzed. For this purpose, twenty oral narratives, collected from twenty students of BS English, have been analyzed. In order to understand the macrostructure, i.e., narrative categories, Labov’s (1972) model of sociolinguist features of narratives has been used. For the analysis of microstructures, Halliday’s and Hasan’s (1976) five key cohesive ties: references, conjunction, substitution, ellipses, and lexical ties have been used. It was found that with little variations, most of the personal experience oral narratives follow the Labov’s structure of narrative analysis, i.e., abstract, orientation, complicating actions, resolution, evaluation, and coda. Likewise, while doing microanalysis, it was found that the narratives were well-compact with the help of elements of cohesive ties. The study shows that oral personal experience narratives can have the same structure as those of written narratives.

A Female Shankaracharya?

This article examines the practices through which a female religious leader (guru) in India by the name of Trikal Bhavanta Saraswati (in shorthand, “Mataji”) constructs women’s alternative authority in a high powered lineage of male Hindu gurus called Shankaracharyas. Mataji’s appropriation of the Shankaracharya leadership demonstrates an Indic example of “dharmic feminism,” by virtue of which she advocates the female as normative and, through that radical notion, advances a dharmic platform for gender equality in institutions in which women rarely figure among the power elite. Through narrative performance, Mataji reshapes the boundaries of religious leadership to affirm new possibilities for female authority in a lineage that has denied women’s agency. Exploring her personal experience narratives and the themes they illuminate can shed light on why her leadership intervenes in an orthodox lineage of male authority to exercise alternative authority and exact transformation of contemporary Hinduism.

“It’s Like I Said to So-and-So”: Everyday Storying

This chapter explores a story type as more of an activity than an object: the telling of ordinary stories, mainly personal experience narratives (PENs), in order to build relationships and community. While narrative skill may be enjoyed, artistry is secondary to connecting people to people and people to place through sharing conversation and information. Everyday storying practices, such as “How was your day?” conversation, joking, and project sagas are discussed and compared to other know genres such as “craik” and “chit-chat.” The chapter also presents a particular story subtype, the “touchstone story,” by which visitors to the island tell a story of personal connection with the island, fishery, town, or activity to establish relationship. Flipping the expected pattern in which the fishery family or crew is expected to be the authoritative narrative source, family and crew play the community stewardship role of being audience: affirming and incorporating visitors by listening.

Investigating ‘care leaver’ identity: A narrative analysis of personal experience stories

People who spent time in public care as children are often represented as ‘care leavers’. This paper investigates how ‘care leaver’ is discursively constructed as a group identity, by analyzing 18 written personal experience stories from several charity websites by people identified or who self-identify as care leavers. Several approaches to narrative analysis are used: a clause-level analysis based on Labovʼs code scheme; the identification of turning points; an analysis of ‘identity work’; and an analysis of subject positions relative to ‘master narratives’. The findings from each of the methods are then combined to reveal how intertextual, narrative-structural, and contextual factors combine to constitute a common care leaver discourse. This forms the basis for a characterization of ‘care leaver’ group identity as ‘survivors of the system’. The findings also reveal how ‘care leaver’ as type, including stereotype, influences how identity is constructed in the personal experience narratives.

From Pre-Grammaticality to Proficiency in L1: Acquiring and Developing Infinitival Usage in Hebrew

The study traces the developmental route in acquisition and use of infinitives (e.g., lišon ‘to sleep’, le-exol ‘to-eat’, la-asot ’to-do’) in Hebrew as a first language, proceeding from the initial, “pre-grammatical“ emergence of linguistic forms among toddlers to structure-based knowledge and proficient use of the same devices in adolescence. Analysis involves a varied data-base of L1 oral Hebrew usage in: parent-child interactions of children aged 1;6 to 3;0 years; elicited storybook-based narratives of preschoolers; and personal-experience narratives and expository talks of schoolchildren, adolescents, and adults. Findings show that infinitives constitute an interesting test-case for examining the route from initial emergence via acquisition to maturely proficient command of a given subsystem in L1. Infinitival structures in Modern Hebrew, a language with an impoverished system of nonfinite verbs and lacking in auxiliaries of the kind common in Standard Average European, reveal a long developmental path, showing increasing complexity at all levels of language use: morphological form, types of syntactic constructions, semantic content, and discursive function, the latter primarily for the purpose of achieving textual connectivity.