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CHAPTER 12
Story grammars
Return of a theory
R. Raymond Lang
Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans
Introduction
This chapter describes a declarative model for simple narratives. The model
characterizes event sequences that constitute a story when reported in natural
language. Previous work in story generation has followed one of two tracks:
(1) declarative, or isolating the structure of stories and then creating text con-
forming to that structure, and (2) procedural, or modeling and recreating the
processes used by human authors. Researchers in the first track often were
unable to implement their model; but implementations arising from the sec-
ond track did not directly address what constitutes a story. By implementing
a story grammar, we address both these issues and constructively demonstrate
the viability of utilizing formal grammars to describe stories.
Background
Anthropology and linguistics intersect when attention focuses on the folklore
pertaining to a culture. In the early nineteenth century, Wilhelm and Jakob
Grimm published their collections of traditional domestic tales of the Ger-
man people (Grimm 1987). Subsequently, Aleksandr Afanasev published his
collection of Russian folk tales (Afanasev 1974, 1975), which Vladimir Propp
used in the 1920s in his investigations into the morphology of the folktale
(Propp 1968). Contemporary investigations into story structure reached a wa-
tershed in 1973, when B. N. Colby published a grammar for Eskimo folktales
