«Narrative» as a cultural phenomenon and an object of discursive activity

This article is devoted to the consideration of narrative and the recognition of the importance of narratives in human life, concentrated not in literary texts, but in everyday language. The authors consider various interpretations of the concept of "narrative" and the origins of its occurrence. The current situation and trends characterizing the development of scientific knowledge and determining the growing interest in narrative research are analyzed. The article shows a brief history of the emergence and development of narratology as a separate area devoted to the study of narrative; linguistic directions that focus their research on narrative as well as leading researchers developing narratological theories are identified. The authors distinguish between the concepts of narrative, story, text and discourse. An attempt was made to identify the main characteristics of a narrative and its linguistic features and determine the structure of a narrative, implying the existence of a sequence of sentences that convey the experience of a person. The article outlines the problem of interpreting the term "narrative" and focuses on the wording of the definition of the term from as an interdisciplinary concept. The authors propose a narrative interpretation that takes into account its psychological nature and sociocultural conditionality. It is emphasized that the narrative should be considered not only as a linguistic text, but also as a cultural phenomenon and an object of discursive activity realized in the conditions of foreign language intercultural communication. To obtain representative data in the academic context of the use of the concept of "narrative", the authors of the article turn to corpus linguistics and identify the frequency of the term "narrative" in English-language corpa, as well as the most frequent phrases. The significance of the interpretation of the concept of "narrative" is revealed in correlation with the sociocultural context of activity and thinking. The authors dwell on the cultural aspect of narrative and emphasize the crucial link between culture, language and communication. Particular attention is paid to the presentation of narrative as a mental product reproduced by man through discursive activity. The peculiarities of narrative are studied in the context of intercultural foreign language communication, when the narrative acquires a special meaning, becoming a carrier of national-cultural specificity and identifying the speaker as a representative of a certain linguistic and cultural community. As a result, the narrative is regarded as a communicative-cognitive unit of a different socioculturality. The prospects for further study of narrative aim at identifying the features of narrative activity in teaching a foreign language.

Keywords

Authors

References