THE APPLICATION OF LABOV’S SOCIOLINGUISTIC MODEL OF NARRATIVE ANALYSIS TO A SHORT STORY THE LOTTERY BY SHIRLEY JACKSON

Abstract

The present paper highlights the peculiaritiesof a famous American short story, The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson through a sociolinguistic model of narrative analysis that William Labov developed. Although the model was initially developed for analysing oral narrative analysis based on the everyday discourse practices of "real speakers in real social contexts", linguists and stylisticians have found it equally productive and effective for stylistic analysis of short literary texts short stories such as Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997), which is composed of two interrelated stories; James Joyce's Ulysses (2000); Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (2002). After a rigorous analysis of a large corpus of natural narratives, Labov identified recurrent features or structural elements, which include (i) abstract, (ii) orientation, (iii) complicating action, (iv) evaluation, narrative clauses, (v) result and orientation (vi) coda that underpin a "fully formed natural narrative". The application ofLabov’ssixschema enhances our comprehension of the story by providing an insight into the author’s linguistic
and narrative techniques.