William Labov:	Well, thanks a lot Donna Jo. Obviously, if you hang around long enough, there's only two things can happen: people forget about you entirely, or they terribly exaggerate what you've done. So maybe that's what's happened here. 
	One aspect of the work that I introduced is that I wanted to base linguistic analysis and linguistic thinking on the way people actually speak in everyday life. In so doing, I got involved in the topic of today, which is the language of life and death. Because in trying to get the flow of language that approaches the speech of everyday life, one technique is to get people to talk about things that are terribly important and meaningful to them. Not their general opinions, but what actually happened. So, in our field work, the key golden ... message is, "What happened, particularly?"
	Then I wrote a paper back in '67 with a guy who was a high school student at the time, Joshua [Waleske 00:01:07], called "Narrative Analysis". It has become a very solid part of the growing field of narratology, which crosses many, many departments. This talk today is an advertisement for a book, which is just about to appear from Cambridge University Press, called "The Language of Life and Death: The Transformation of Experience in Oral Narrative". 
	I'm gonna do something today, which I can't do in the book, which is I'm going to try to evoke the fundamental data that the book is based on, which is, simply, interest. What's interesting?
	Back in 1963, I was interviewing a retired Jewish postman named Jacob [Schiestl 00:01:56], in a brownstone house in New York City. I asked him that question, "Did you ever in a spot where you thought to yourself that you might be killed? That you said to yourself, 'This is it'?'" 
	He said, "Yeah. My brother stuck a knife in my head."
	I said, "How'd that happen?"
	He said, "Like kids, you know? I get into a fight. I twisted his arm up behind him. This was just a few days after my father died. We were sittin' Shiva, and the reason the fight started ... He saw a rat out in the yard. This was out in Coney Island ... And he started to talk about it. My mother just sat down to have a cup of coffee. I told him to cut it out. 'Course, kids, you know ... He don't have to listen to me. That's when I grabbed his arm. I twisted it up behind him. I let go of his arm. There was a knife on the table. He just grabbed it and let me have it. Started bleeding like a pig. Actually ... First thing, went to the doctor. The doctor says, "Just that much more and you'd a been dead."
	So, a few years latter, I was in Columbus, Ohio. I was talkin' to a guy named Harold [Shambal 00:03:12], who had been in the Merchant Marine, and asked him a similar question. He said, "Well, this was in Buenos Aires in South America."
	I said, "What happened in South America?"
	He said, "I was sittin' at a table drinkin' and this Norwegian sailor come over and started givin' me a bunch of junk how I was sittin' with his woman. Everybody at the table were my shipmates. I didn't wanna bother with 'em. I just turned around and shoved him and said, 'I don't wanna fool with you.' Next thing I know ... Lyin' on the ground ... Blood all over me. Fella said, 'Don't move your head. Your throat's cut.'"
	Now, these techniques of interviewing were used by Tony [Krock 00:04:05] when he expanded our study of Philadelphia to include the upper class. One of the questions that we frequently ask people ... Tony asked to 'em is, "Was there someone in your family who's famous for having a feeling that something was gonna happen and it did happen?"
	This upper class person said, "Yes, there is an instance. Dad was being driven out from town by a chauffeur. This was a good many years ago. And he had the New York Times. And he read in the New York Times a notice that the death of a person, whom he knew, but he knew was a very close friend of George [Jensen 00:04:45] ..."
	"Now, George Jensen lived in Chestnut Hill, so Dad said to the chauffeur, 'Stop at Mr. Jensen's house on the way home, because I want to commiserate with him.' And so they did stop, and dad went in and dad said, 'George, I'm sorry to hear about the death of ...' I don't remember his name."
	"And George Jensen said, 'I don't know what you're talking about. If he had died, I would have been one of the first people to know.'"
	"And dad said, 'Well, it's in the newspaper. I'll go out to the car and get the newspaper.', went out, got the newspaper, come back, and he and George went through the newspaper ... No sign of this death notice. And, just as they were finished perusing it, the telephone rang from someone in New York, telling George Jensen that, I guess, he died. But there was nothing in the newspaper. Dad brought the newspaper home. My sister ... I guess George was home at the time ... And I all went through the newspaper meticulously. Couldn't find anything."
	Now, we taught a ... Gillian and I taught a class in 1973 in Michigan Linguistic Institute and a number of our students went out to small towns in Michigan interviewing people. One was Claire [Gallade 00:06:18]. She talked to an old man named Ross Hawkins.
	He said, "Shall I tell you about the first man got killed by a car here? I can tell you that. 'Fore they really had cars in town ... I think it was a ... It was a judge, Sawyer. It was a judge. I understand he was a judge in Ann Arbor. He had a son that was a lawyer and [inaudible 00:06:43] so the son, I guess, must a got drunk. 'Cause he drove through town with a chauffer, with one of those old touring cars without ... You know, open tops and everything? Big cars, first ones. And then they come through the town and late in the night. They went pretty fast, I guess. They come out here to the end of the where the Pontiac Trail turns right or left in the road, and they couldn't make the turn. They turned left. They tipped over in a ditch. Steering wheel hit this fella in the heart, the chauffer. Killed him. And the other fella just broke his thumb, the lawyer who was drunk. They say a drunk man never gets it. I shouldn't say that. Might get in trouble."
	"Anyway, they called up my dad. And I lived across from the city hall there and he was justice of most of his life. Justice of the Peace, you know? And they says, 'Mr. Hawkins, want you to get to [inaudible 00:07:37] and get Mr. Drury to get the ... Go out there and bring that man back to the funeral home or whatever you have to do.'"
	"So my dad said ... He let me go with him. 'Course I was over 12. I don't know how. Probably 15, maybe. So we went out there, picked up that man in a buck board. Well, there was two men on the front seat, so I had to lay back there with that man. And his feet was floppin' over the edge where the gate goes down ... If there was any gate ... And they flopped, turned black ... 'Cause they stopped the circulation, you know? And I thought it was a negro man. And boy, that was an eerie night for me comin' home in the dark with that man."
	Those four stories are what the book is about. They occupy the first ... There's a chapter on escalation of violence, on confrontation with the dead, on premonitions and information from passed on ... the dead. And then there's a series of longer narratives, almost epic narratives, from people telling about equally important things. Then it goes into epic narrative and the application of the study of the techniques of oral storytelling in epic. Then it asks the questions about historians. Do historians draw upon the same techniques that we use in the narratives of everyday speech?
	But the main datum of the book is what we have just been exposed to here. Frequently I ... Say it was a large audience. I'll say, "I'm gonna start telling a story. Right now you're sitting a rustling and turning over a few pages and coughing and stuff like that, but as soon as I start the story you will not do that. You'll just be sitting quietly. After I stop, the silence will continue." And then I say, "Now, I know you're thinking. You're gonna have some fun and drop a book in the middle of this and screw up this business, but it never happens. Never."
	It's an eerie situation for me, because I'm really telling you these stories as they've been told to me. This information is flowing through me. Those of you that ... How many of you've done acting? Yeah, a whole bunch of you. Well, you know there's this strange situation where you're communicating with the audience. You don't know how it's going, but it's flowing through you to them. 
	What I want to understand is ... The fundamental datum is why are these stories so interesting? What is interest all about? But there's a deeper approach to it, which I've put up here, from Jerome Bruner: the narrative construction of reality. Burner says we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative stories: excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on. Unlike the constructions generated by logical and scientific procedures that can be weeded out by falsification, narrative constructions can only achieve verisimilitude. Narratives that are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and narrative necessity, rather than by empirical verification and logical requiredness. In other words, it's a distinct form of truth.
	Now, since I'm gathering this data primarily interest of quantitative analysis of linguistic change and variation, this means that the study of narrative is going off in a different track. I'm not gonna be presenting any quantitative data to you about it. Instead, I'm going to try to understand two things. One, what makes the story so interesting? Secondly, how does the narrator manage to transform reality in his interest to present it in the best possible way?
	Bruner contrasts this with another point of view, which I've just exposed you to. The illusion, created by a skillful narrative, that a story is as it is. It needs no interpretation. Now, when I was telling those stories, none of you had the feeling of, "Gee, I don't understand why this is happening." It just happens. You accept it. But when you look at it closely, and I've been looking at some of these stories for 40, 50 years, you keep getting deeper and deeper into it to understand the question of, "Why did this happen?" and "How is the story told in such a way that it grabs our interest?".
	There's a term that Bruner uses called hermeneutic composability. For a long time I've been very skeptical about the term hermeneutic. It implies that there's a text or a text analog thorough which somebody's been trying to express a meaning and from which someone is trying to extract a meaning. But the hermeneutic analysis is done with a great deal of effort. [inaudible 00:12:52], what you got from the story is a transfer of experience which presupposes or precedes that. But such hermeneutic interpretation is required when there's a neither a rational method of assuring the truth of a meaning assigned the text as a whole, nor an empirical method for determining the verifiability of the constituent elements that make up the text. In effect, the best hope of hermeneutic analysis is to provide an intuitively convincing account of the meaning of the text as a whole in the light of the constituent parts that make it up. That's what I'm gonna try to do today. 
	Here is a map of the fields of narrative that the field of narratology deals with. Everything within a circle is linguistic. Everything outside the circle is non-linguistic. People who study narratology talk about how paintings tell stories, photography ... Photographic stories as you're familiar with, and film, we realize, is crosses the line between linguistic and non-linguistic presentation. But we'll be concerned here with oral narratives of personal experience. I've got some subtypes of oral narratives which are excluded: ballads, jokes, tall tales. Dreams will be something we can consider. But, outside of this, there is non-oral ... But written personal ... written materials that deal with autobiography, and, of course, fiction and history. The examination of the techniques used for telling oral narratives of personal experience will be expanded to these other areas with the assumption that people do draw upon these fundamental notions.
	One of the exorcizes we do in my class on narrative analysis is listening. You might try that sometime. Just start eavesdropping as your profession. Maybe some of you already do. Ask yourself, "What narratives occur in this conversation? What's the role of narratives?" There are two questions. One is, "How many narratives occur in the middle of everyday conversation". Secondly, "How do you get the right to tell a story?". 
	People who've studied conversational analysis are aware of the fact that most turns of talk are one sentence ... One or two. When you're telling a story, a narrative, you need a lot more than that. So you have to let people know. Some of the observations that my students have made is like this. A person who wants to break into a story says, "No, no, no, no! Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!" They do it with considerable effort. 
	Now, how do you recognize, in that case, what is a narrative and what isn't? There are lots of ways of doing it and I have to confess to you that the particular position I have taken has not had much influence. If you go through the journal "Narrative Inquiry", 50% of the articles make reference to Labov and Waletzky '67, but they don't start with the definition of narrative we have, which is a linguistic definition that deals with temporal organization.
	This is a minimal narrative: he hit me and I hit him. When you're in a narrative mode, that's asserting that first he hit me, and then I hit him. There lies between the two what we call a temporal juncture. As opposed to the many, many other ways of telling that same story: "after he hit me I hit him", or "I hit him, he hit me". Lots of ways in which these can be ordered, but the normal way in which to tell a story is to use finite tense verbs, which assert why the fact that the ... Following the narrative rule that the first occurred before the second. This is the structural components that we've identified and this has had a big influence. Most of the references to our work uses these terminology. 
	First, you begin with an abstract. What's it about? "My brother stuck a knife in my head", that's what it's about. Then we have an orientation section where we ask, "Who? Where? What? Who were the participants? Where are they? When? What were they doing?", normally with a progressive. Then we have the complicating action, which says, "And then what happened? And then what happened?" So these are the questions that are being answered. And then an evaluation, which says, "Why", but, most importantly, it precludes, "So what?"
	Now the question "So what?" is always in the background. It isn't used that often, but the threat of "So what?" Is overpowering. It's ... When you've finished telling somebody about something that happened, the guy says, "So what?", you've lost the game. 
	And then a resolution, "How did it end?" And then a coda, which precludes "What happened?" The coda says, "And that was that." or "[inaudible 00:18:09] The guy who picked me up is a detective in union city and I see him every now and again." There are lots of ways in which you bring the story back to the present, the timeline back to the present. So, we'll be talking about, besides these structural components, reportability and credibility, the polarization and integration of participants, the assignment of praise and blame, and the reconstruction of the causal chain of events. These are all elements in my approach to ...
	Let's talk about reportability. A reportable event justifies the occupation of social time for an extended turn of talk. It controls the automatic reassignment of speaker role to the narrator. That is, it's not that you're gonna be the only person to talk for the next five minutes. It's that, if a person says, "Wow! Gee! Is that so?", that the turn of talk automatically gets reassigned to you. It's a narrative ... The reportable event precludes the question, "So what?" or [foreign 00:19:09], Spanish [inaudible 00:19:12]. It's less common than any other events in both the world and the story world, has a greater effect upon the needs and desires of the participants of the narrative than non-reportable events.
	So we come with the central thing in narrative analysis: the most reportable event. It's the event that's less common than any other and has the greatest effect upon the needs and desires of the participants. So we have ... That's what the story is about, but the most reportable event is not the story. 
	Now we introduce another concept of credibility. In oral narratives, a person will experience credibility as essential to maintain the moral stance you're ... If what you're telling is a lie, your moral stance is injured. To maintain interest, this audience ... Audiences quickly turn aside from bullshit. The transfer of experience to the audience is lost. If you don't believe it happened, you don't ... 
	Now the expectation of credibility doesn't apply to every story or narrative you hear. Jokes. "This mouse goes into a bar ..." Nobody is expecting a credibility ... In fact, if you think it's credible, the joke is ruined, because ... 
	Dreams. This is a subtle matter. I think I could appeal to the audience here, that there are probably many of you who have someone in your family who likes to tell their dreams. Right? Now how many of you find those dreams interesting? They're terribly interesting to the person telling them, but they're certainly not interesting to most of us. There will be some exceptions to that when we talk about dreams of premonitions. But, generally speaking, you don't challenge a person's dream by saying, "I don't believe you dreamed that". No. 
	Tall tales, by definition, are not supposed to be credible. And ballads, song ballads, which are often narrative in form. 
	So, in fiction, credibility is replaced, as we saw before, by verisimilitude, the things that happened. As I was talking to Donna Joel before, I was reading Henry Fielding, one of his many wonderful books addressed to the reader. He says that the most important thing in writing is that your characters behave in a way that is normal for them, given the character they have. It's no excuse to argue, "But this actually did happen". Rather, a fiction writer has to write about things that you expect to happen, but ... I think as Donna Joel said, makes you believe in the believability of it.
	But there is an inverse relationship of reportability and credibility. The more reportable, the less credible. That's the fundamental dynamic that drives narratives. As reportability increases, credibility goes down. Yet, to get to people's attention, you want to assert that this is an unusual, reportable event.
	Probably the major theme that I'm gonna put in front of you today is the fact that there is another dimension called objectivity. And credibility increases with objectivity. Now I illustrate this with ... I could illustrate this in many ways, but the opposite of objectivity is subjectivity. There are many storytellers, people tell stories, who respond to the therapeutic impulse to expose your emotions, to analyze your emotions, to discuss your emotions, to speak how you feel. What we find is that a person in the midst of a story says, "Oh and I was so terrified I even wake up thinking about it. Every time I speak to my analyst about it, he says, 'You haven't recovered from this yet'." That will be opposed to techniques that are more objective, which are illustrated by some of the stories that I've told you before.
	So what is the scale of objectivity? On the least objective, "I still remember how scared I was". Next is, you actually said to yourself "This is it." [inaudible 00:24:01], the doctor had said, "Just that much more, and you'd a been dead". The third person witness is frequently a policeman, a doctor, a person who is in good position to judge whether this is true or not, but he's not involved in your emotions.
	This last [inaudible 00:24:19] was from a story about a plane that was going over Mexico City. It left Mexico City, was tryin' to climb the mountain. How many of you have been over Mexico City? You know those big mountains all around it? It's surrounded by mountains, and this plane wasn't makin' it. It was losing altitude and heading towards the mountains. The person telling the story said, "You could hear the prayer beads going in the back of the plane". The sound of those prayer beads is extremely convincing. Or, in another story, a man whose wife had a crush on the narrator, "And she left a note saying she was gonna commit suicide on account of me. He came to my hotel, nice big blue 44 too." So the object speaks more clearly than emotion.
	In trying to analyze narrative, we start with the fact that there is a logical analysis here that I have no empirical basis for what's gonna follow here. Instead, it's logical. Even though hermeneutics says that we don't have logical proof, every narrator must answer the question, "Where shall I begin?" Every time you start to tell a story you have answered that question. And then that is a key point for ... A jumping off point for what we call the reconstruction. A decision to tell a narrative begins with a selection of the most reportable event. You have to decide what you're gonna tell the story about, and you're gonna select the most reportable event. 
	Now, the narrative is not a telling of this MRE. That could be like an abstract, as I've said before. Brother stuck a knife in my head. But, before beginning, the narrator must locate an event prior to the most reportable event, which bears a causal relationship to it and answers the question, "Why did this happen?" So, "My brother stuck a knife in my head." Why? This process proceeds recursively until an event is located, which precludes the question, "Why did that happen?", because it's an ordinary event. "I was sittin' with my shipmates drinkin'". Why? See. When the question ... You've arrived at the point where the question, "Why did that happen?" Is stupid ... Then you have a good starting point. That forms the orientation of the narrative. It's the least reportable event. I'm telling a story. It's not about how we were sitting drinking. 
	This is what the schema for reconstruction looks like. You start with E sub zero, most reportable event. Ask "Why is that?" ... Prior event, E minus one, E minus two, and you continue back until you come to this orientation section, where to start. Now, it turns out that the orientation is the least interesting, but the most important in the decision is how to tell this story, as we'll see. 
	Now the credibility of the most reportable event depends upon the credibility of the hierarchical chain of causal connections leading the maximally credible, and least reportable, event. This is a logical necessity. Now there's two ... There's a basic assumption for my approach to reconstruction ... Reconstruction in attempt to figure out how the person told the story and what lies behind it. 
	First of all, I'm assuming the speaker's not lying. Now you may say, "That's absurd. People Lie." But the assumption is based upon the cause: lying is difficult. It often requires a readjustment of the entire series of events to be sure they're consistently motivated. Lying is dangerous. You never know ... Many of you have practiced lying ... You know it is ever dangerous because you don't know what else has to be adjusted to make that lie go. You never know what other witnesses or other accidents will bring the inconsistency to light with consequent loss of credibility and damage to your moral position. But lying is unnecessary. That's the main point. All analysis of narrative shows that there's no reason to lie, because there's so many other, more effective ways to transform events to achieve the desired results. 
	Now let's look at the Norwegian sailor story, and we'll raise the question, "Why did this guy cut Shambal's throat?" We're gonna look at the polarization of participants. One thing we noticed in the evaluation is the role of negatives. "I don't wanna fool with you." That contrasts this ... The negative contrasts the real world with a possible world. The study of possible worlds is the study of the evaluation of the real world. Guy told me ... He says don't move your head, 'cause if you move your head then you're dead. So that's an approach to evaluation I want to call your attention to, but that's not the main topic. 
	The Norwegian sailor cut Shambal's throat with a knife ... Then reconstruct it. Why? Because Shambal refused to listen to him. Why? Because his complaint that Shambal was sitting with his woman was nonsense. "A bunch of junk", he said. Why? Because Shambal was sitting at a table drinking with his shipmates. So that's my reconstruction of the chain of causality which lies behind the story which you heard. 
	We're interested in the linguistic devices that people use to transform that chain of events into one that is more reasonable from the point of view of the narrator. Another way to look at it is: Shambal was sitting at a table drinking with his shipmates, so the Norwegian sailor's complaint he was sitting with his woman was nonsense, so Shambal refused to listen to him, so the Norwegian sailor cut Shambal's throat with a knife. Still doesn't ... Even though you heard it and you understand that chain of causality, the movement from E minus one to E zero is just too big a jump. 
	There's a key word, which'll be one of the linguistic peculiarities we'll be looking at in this analysis, "kept". "He kept givin' me a bunch of junk." Narratives are about particular events, but "kept" is a quasi-modal, which implies that there's more than one event continued here. So we rewrite this event, saying the Norwegian complained that Shambal was sitting with his woman. Shambal refused to listen to the first time he complained. He refused to listen to the second time he complained ... The third time he complained. So "kept" is a way of condensing or eliminating the fact that this was a repeated complaint.
	In a study of how ... The question that we're raising here is that general study ... I have a paper called, "Speech Actions and Reactions", which raises the question of, "When do words turn into violence?" Crucial question. When do people stop talking and begin killing? And this is part of the answer. Shambal is behaving as if this person is a non-human, and is not listening to him no matter how many times he repeats it. I've got a lot of ethnographic data about bar scenes, but it ... What it shows is that ... "He kept givin' me a bunch of junk" implies that there were at least two, and possibly more, events in which each time he refused to listen to the person. 
	Let's look at another question. The brother who almost killed Schiestl by stabbing him with a knife, what kind of person was he? I've asked people that question. He must be a pretty evil guy if he tried to kill his brother, but nobody says that. They'll say, "Well, kinda uncontrolled." One of the things that Schiestl's story does is to integrate the participants by removing certain actions. Let's look and see how that's done. [inaudible 00:33:22] he says, "I told him to cut it out. 'Course, kids, you know ... He don't have to listen to me." That's a key interjection, because if we reconstruct the story ... My brother picked the knife up and stabbed me with it, because I grabbed his arm and twisted it up behind him, because he said what? There's no record of what his brother said. Instead, we have an excuse. He said, "He don't have to listen to me", because I told him to stop talking, because he started to talk about the rat. 
	So, what happens in this story is that excuse is substituted ... We don't hear the brother speak. This is the most reportable event ... So that excuse, "He don't have to listen to me", prevents us from hearing what the brother said that was so provoking that it led the first act of violence, which is to grab his arm and twist it up behind him. So it's reasonable hermeneutic assumption to say that what his brother said was, "I don't have to listen to you". What frequently happens when you [inaudible 00:34:32] an utterance, an action ... You leave behind evidence as to what was said. 
	My view of this matter was, originally, there was a struggle between Cain and Able. That's what it's about. Then, in matters of great emotional stress, people behave violently. So my explanation for the story was to say, "Around his father's death, there was a great deal of emotional trauma, and anything could just trigger off violence." But I came to the conclusion that was wrong.
	This is perhaps [inaudible 00:35:13]. But really, this is a picture not of Cain and Able, but of Jacob and Esau ... No. Sorry ... Isaac and Jacob, who is bringing an offering to his blind father, Isaac. And Issac is feeling his arms and saying, "The hands are the hands of Esau, but the voice is the voice of Jacob". What Jacob is doing is trying to steal his brother's birthright. He did succeed. He received his father's blessing by assuming that he was Esau. What justification is for that? Well, this is a purely hermeneutic approach. In addition, we expand "because he said I don't have to listen to you" to "You're not my father. I don't have to listen to you". Just a persuasive interpretation, but it goes along with a deeper look at what it means to be sitting Shiva.
	Those who are familiar with the custom know that it's a custom involving many, many features of Jewish life. Turn the ... For seven days you sit at home, you don't do any cooking, people bring in food, turn the mirrors to the wall, don't wear leather shoes, no laundry, no work. And what do you talk about? Turns out, that's a big issue. If you go on the internet, you'll see rabbis writing columns giving people advice as to what to talk about when you're sitting Shiva. There's inappropriate things to say. Talk about a rat is not one of the things you can do.
	But I think it's similar to the analysis of the Norwegian sailor, because it implies that the ... There were a series of events which ... And that the orientation starts only with the last event. That throughout this period, we can assume that Jacob ... Happens to be the same name as Biblical Jacob. That Jacob was continually telling his brother what to do and, in the course of grief, it's not the first time he said, "You can't take my father's place. I don't have to listen to you.". That gives us some sense of what the power of the emotional conflict is that lead to this event. 
	Let's turn to the first man killed by a car here. In this case, we don't have an integrating approach, but we have the assignment of blame. Now reflect. If you remember that story about this drunken Lawyer who drove through town with a chauffer about 60 miles an hour ... Middle of the night with a big old touring car. So, you remember that? So this is the part we're concerned with, and the key word is ... One key word is, "he must a got drunk". This story is being told by Ross Hawkins, who is 71 years old and is remembering. "Must of got drunk" is a modal of well down in the irrealis category. Doesn't mean that he did get drunk.
	But most importantly enough, "he drove through town with a chauffer". It's one of the linguistic devices that people use to assign agency and responsibility. Who was responsible for this terrible event? Well, there's another linguistic device, "they". "They came through town late at night." "They went pretty fast." "They come out ..." "They couldn't make the turn." "They turned left." "They tipped over in the ditch." All this is assigning agency to both of them. So the picture you get is this lawyer saying, "Faster, faster, you son of a bitch! I'll fire you if you don't drive faster!" When, in fact, he was probably asleep in the back of the car.
	But the semantics of "drive" are interesting and show that people can, consciously or unconsciously, make use of peculiarities of the language. What does push mean? It means cause something to move transversely. Right? And drive, in the most usual sense, is to cause a machine to move transversely. Like driving a car or driving a lawnmower. But there's a second meaning of drive, which is to cause a person to drive. Like he marched the men around the room. To cause a person to cause a machine to move. It's that second meaning of drive which is being called up to assign agency to the lawyer. "The lawyer drove through town with a chauffer."
	So this little bit of empirical data that's fun to look at ... We've asked a number of people in our current class, in response to reading that story, "Who was to blame? Who was driving? Who was killed?" Who was to blame? Eighteen, almost 50% of the people, said the lawyer was to blame. Nineteen said the chauffer and four assigned it to both. Who was driving? Only five people got it backwards. It was driving ... How could he be driving? So even though ... And who was killed? Even so, there were seven people who got mixed up about who was killed.
	But it was clear that the effect of this assignment of agency means that at least half the people are blaming the lawyer, as the narrator was doing, because this is a morality play. It's a small town, South Lyon. It's about 3,000 people there. And the picture you get is this big city lawyer from Ann Arbor, who is foolishly throwing his life away, putting other people in danger, getting the chauffer killed, getting dunk, can't handle his own affairs and has this this rich, old, [inaudible 00:41:44] touring car. On the other hand, what have we got ... Is a justice of the peace with a buck board ... Hasn't got a car ... Who has to go out and save this other person. If not save him, clean up the damage. It's clear that that's what we're dealing with here, but ... I'm gonna skip ...
	I'd like to move to another ... The story of the New York Times. We talked about the credibility of the most reportable event. This is the story as I read it. The key thing I want to talk to is that the narrative syntax is quite simple, quite straightforward, until we come to E sub zero, the big event. "And just as they were perusing it, the telephone rang from someone in New York, telling George Jensen that, I guess, he died". Now the problem with all such premonition stories is of credibility.
	The credibility here is challenging, and yet the devices that make it difficult to deal with. I'm a skeptic, but I don't have the answer as to how you'd explain these events. But some of the credibility that comes about to it is assigned to the fact that ... This is the structure of the very complex sentence that's arranged ... Very informal structure ... "Just as they were finished perusing it ..." There's a time ... Establish the time of the event ... And that gets foregrounded, as often happens in the beginning of the sentence. "The telephone rang from someone in New York telling George Jensen, I guess, he died." And the structure of that sentence is what carries much of the impact of the story. When I read that or tell that sentence, it carries a lot of weight. The telephone is doing the speaking. The telephone is the active agent. The telephone rang, telling him ... Right? Someone in New York telling him ... The particular power of this sentence is the fact that the inanimate object is like ... Is giving credibility. 
	Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about historical texts. Because I want to illustrate that some of the same techniques are used by historians, particularly historians who indulge themselves in the 19th century passion for narrative. Many of you are familiar with Queen Elizabeth's death and her last years, particularly because Lord Essex, her favorite, proved to be a traitor and had to be executed. This is by S.T. Bindoff, the great historian of Tudor England. A Penguin book, and it fits in with our theme of the language of life and death. "She brooded on the past, and above all on that cruel tragedy which had robbed her Essex of his life and her life of him. In June 1602, she told the French ambassador that there was nothing which could give her any enjoyment, and when, six months later, her godson, Harrington, came to court, he was moved to grief by her show of human infirmity."
	"By then, indeed, the end was near. It came in Richmond, in Surrey, on the bleak and windy March of 1603. The death of yet another close friend, the Countess of Nottingham, induced a fit of melancholy, which in turn brought on serious illness. Unable to eat or sleep, the Queen refused either to take [inaudible 00:45:45] or to go to bed. For a fortnight, she lay huddled on her cushions in silent misery. Within her chamber, all was deathly silence, and without, all was bustle and activity. Sir Robert Cecil was putting the finishing touches to his plans for bringing in her successor."
	"Sir Robert Carey, posting horses all along the route to Holy Rude..." That's the Scottish seat of government. "... to speed himself North with the tidings. At Richmond there still stands the gate, spared by the German bomb, which damaged the courtyard within, where, in the early hours of that 24th of March, Carey waited for the signal, which would send him galloping away. Between two and three o'clock a light appeared. A door was opened. Whispered words were spoken. Then Carey mounted and was gone. And the hoof beats, which told his departure, were the knell of Tudor England."
	Now I've chosen Bindoff because he's not only a narrator, but he's a master of English language. The last sentence carries a great deal of weight. But there's an interesting question about this, which is similar to question raised by Erich Auerbach in "Mimesis", why Homer frequently interrupts the story with long, almost irrelevant, detail. How the Hell do we justify, "At Richmond there still stands the gate ...", going back to the 20th century, "... spared by the German bomb, which damaged the courtyard within"? Why does the author bring in the gate in the midst of telling what happened when Elizabeth died?
	Now, one of the problems we have with historical narrative is summed up in the famous sentence, "Where you there, Charlie?" How does he know that between two and three o'clock a light appeared, the door was opened, whispered words were spoken? He didn't hear them. No one reported them. It's a reconstruction, but it's reinforced by a number of particular objects. A light, a concrete object ... A door ... Whispered words ... And, most importantly, hoof beats. Hoof beats are this inanimate sound, which adds to credibility. But, more importantly, the gate. You can see that. You can go there and see that gate. I'm not kidding you. Go right to London and there it stands still, just where he was waiting to get the word, carry the information about Elizabeth's death and who was to be next King of England. 
	This technique of using inanimate objects is not uncommon. In another chapter of the book dealing with the death of Absalom, in the ... David son, Absalom ... After the ... Absalom is killed, the author says, "And there is a tower..." He says Absalom had no children. There was a tower made in his memory and it still exists today. You can see this. So, even though I don't have evidence for how Joab killed Absalom, you can go and see Absalom's tower to this day. 
	Sum up ... I've been talking about a number of ways that we can understand how narratives of personal experience are constructed to produce the effect which I started out with, which is to be able to hold your attention. Now, to a certain extent, there's a real problem, both for the book, and for me, because I'm upstaged by the stories I'm talking about. Nothing I can say can be as interesting as they are. So, there's a continuous struggle against the inherent interest, but to understand them gives a certain degree of satisfaction. 
	We start by saying narratives are initiated by a remembered chain of causal relations that link the most reportable event to the least reportable. That chain has to exist in memory. Narratives are constructed as a temporal sequence of events in the order that they were experienced. Narrative construction responds to an inverse relation of reportability to credibility in three ways. 
	Reportability is maximized through irrealis predicates, negatives ... That was the main contribution of the Labov and Waletzky '67. Negatives, modals, irrealis predicates, which don't talk about what happened, but compare what might have happened, what could have happened, what didn't happen, with what actually did happen. 
	Credibility is maximized through realis predicates that give voice to animate and inanimate third person witnesses. So, giving voice to these stones, these guns, these gates, allows them to speak. 
	Then narratives assign reportability for the events narrated by linguistic devices that expand and contract the degrees of activity, including repetition and [inaudible 00:51:17]. Those are some of the examples that I've given. 
	As we go through the chain of events that are illustrating a particular narrative, I can't tell you, "Expect to find a zero cause and a verb drive." I can't tell you, "Expect to find a permissive let." "Expect to find a keep." There're all kinds of peculiarities, idiosyncratic characteristics of the language you're dealing with, which narrators instinctively, unconsciously, make use of to determine their point. And it's fun. It's interesting to discover what they are. Empirically, we can always do experiments to change them, as I've done in a few cases, where you alter that particular device to see what the effect upon the listener will be. 
	But the fundamental operations require ... Well, let me explain the term hermeneutic composability. I spoke to someone who knows more about this than I do. Composability doesn't mean composability, it means compatibility. Hermeneutic explanations imply that there is an explanation which is competing with other explanations in a way that makes it impossible to say which one is right. 
	Maybe one will be more persuasive than the other. The truth of a meaning assigned to the text as a whole. So when I talked about interpretation of Jacob Schiestl's story, I was looking to see how many people said, "Yeah". A significant number of people in the room nod their head yeah. So persuasiveness is the heart of the matter.
	In effect, the best hope of hermeneutic analysis is to provide an intuitively convincing account of the meaning of the text as a whole in the light of the constituent parts that make it up. So I'm footnoting Bruner here to indicate that the major message of his approach to narrative is that narrative is a way in which we conceive reality. It's a screen through which we perceive the world. We're storytellers all, and we make a story. 
	Now, you've noticed that in the word narrative, now being used in hundreds of ways that have nothing to do with what I'm talking about, there was one story about the Phillies. All the major league teams have a narrative, which is just a little paragraph telling you how good or bad they're doing. Narrative is used in hundreds of different ways, but this original way, which is based upon what people do in telling everyday conversation is fundamental. But beyond that, I'm faced with this quotation, "The illusion created by skillful narrative that a story is as it is, and needs no interpretation." 'Cause even though you may understand the story of Jacob Schiestl or the story of the Norwegian sailor better because I've talked about it awhile ... Doesn't increase the impact of the story. It's fundamental interest lies in the fact that it stretches our notion of what human beings can do. Large is our concept of what humanity is like. Every time you hear a story, you say, "My God, did this happen?", you're learning more about human race and what it's capacities are. 
	Okay. That's it.