Key Features of Narrative and Dialogue Texts
Understanding Text Types
A text is a sentence or a coherent set of statements, oral or written, which have a communicative intention.
Texts can be classified into several types, including: narrative, description, dialogue, exposition, and argumentation.
Narrative Text Features
Narration involves recounting events (sucesos) that happened to characters (personajes) in a specific time and space. Its intention can be to explain, tell, inform, or entertain. When it has an aesthetic purpose, it’s considered a literary narrative.
Narrative Elements
- Narrator: A fictional entity recounting the facts. Can be:
- First-person: A character within the story (protagonist or witness).
- Third-person: May have limited knowledge or be omniscient (knowing all things).
- Narrative Structure (Plot): Corresponds to the argument – the events involving characters and the text’s theme or subject. Typically organized linearly (presentation, middle, end), but other structures exist:
- Circular: Begins and ends similarly.
- In medias res: Starts abruptly in the middle of the action.
- Parallel: Multiple storylines occur simultaneously.
- Characters (Personajes): Individuals who experience the story and are characterized by physical, mental, and social traits.
- Spacetime: The setting in time and space, which may not always be explicit.
- Historical Time: The era or period when the story unfolds.
- Internal Time: The duration of the narrative action.
Linguistic Features of Narrative
Lexical Features
A key characteristic is the predominance of verbs, particularly those indicating movement, speech, or thought.
Morphological Features
Past tense verbs (perfect and imperfect) are dominant. The historical present tense is also sometimes used to bring past actions to life.
Syntactic Features
- Use of narrative styles: Character actions presented directly or indirectly.
- Prevalence of declarative sentences and adverbials of time, place, and manner.
- Abundance of adverbial subordinate clauses (time, place, cause, purpose).
Textual Features
The use of discourse markers is a characteristic textual feature.
Dialogue Text Features
General Characteristics
- Turn-taking: Dialogue requires a sender and receiver(s) who alternate roles. Unidirectional communication, where the receiver only understands without responding, is not dialogue.
- Dialogic Tension: The motivation driving participants to communicate.
- Initiating Tension: A starting point allowing contact.
- Informative Tension: Keeps the conversation going and progressing.
- Silence: Can mark the end of the dialogue.
- Consistency: Interventions should be coherent and connected to previous statements.
- Style: Can be presented in direct or indirect style.
Language in Dialogue
Lexical Features
Prominent use of verbs of saying and thinking (e.g., said, thought, asked) to introduce character interventions.
Syntactic Features
- Prevalence of interrogative and exclamatory sentences, interjections, and vocatives.
- Spontaneous speech patterns: Sentences may be unfinished or have altered word order due to the spontaneous, less formal nature of dialogue.
Textual Features
Key features relate to text cohesion, including: lexical repetitions, use of pronouns and deictics, anaphora/cataphora, and discourse connectors.