Narrative and Non-narrative in Interaction

The chapter brings together the discussion of narrative and non-narrative discourse analysis as presented in the preceding chapters and discusses the interaction of narrative and non-narrative in a variety of contexts. The intermingling of the two modes is argued to serve a variety of more or less strategic purposes in a range of genres (e.g. argumentation, new, scientific texts). However, it is also possible to have non-patterned discourse, which falls between the narrative and the non-narrative modes, as in the case of text colonies or lists. The chapter revisits the notions of units, structure, functions, relations and processes, by comparing the two discourse modes and identifying potential areas of overlap or divergence. These notions are mapped onto the matrix of discourse planes as discussed in the first chapter.