MEMORY NARRATIVE: A COGNITIVE-COMMUNICATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Narrative as a form of organizing and structuring past experience is conventionally associated with memory. Researchers differentiate a number of memory-related narrative types, some being discrepant or ambiguous when placed in a broader context of alternative conceptions. One complicating factor contributing to the typological polyphony is the complex nature of the narrative phenomenon studied within the theoretical and methodological standards of different disciplines and thus entailing controversial interpretations. This paper seeks to clarify some aspects of the memory-narrative relationship by examining memory narrative as a language structure in the cognitive-communicative perspective. The author aims to provide a conceptual framework for the research by setting out distinctive features of memory narrative and determining its status among other narrative formats rendering mnemonic content. The findings suggest that memory narrative is a universal narrative type objectifying both personal and collective past experience and displaying specific semantic and structural properties. To support theoretical claims, relevant language data were collected and analyzed. Empirical analysis was based on four parameters that are of high significance to the cognitive-communicative paradigm: 1) the narrator parameter stating the role of the reminiscing subject in the narration, 2) the content parameter highlighting thematic dominants of the narration, 3) the communicative intention parameter indicating the narrator’s communicative goals, and 4) the axiological perception parameter demonstrating how the narrator evaluates the experience being rendered. The first parameter allowed differentiating between narrator-oriented and event-oriented narrative types, the former being registered for over two thirds of the collected language samples. In accordance with the content parameter, five communicative types of memory narrative were set out: 1) event narrative, 2) confession narrative, 3) analytical narrative, 4) didactic narrative, and 5) entertaining narrative. Empirical data suggest that the communicative types of memory narrative yielded by the research stand in correlation with its thematic dominants. Further analysis revealed that the manifested mnemonic content allows critical evaluation on the part of the narrator who can assign it the following values: 1) positive memory experience, 2) negative memory experience, 3) neutral memory experience, and 4) ambivalent memory experience. The study has shown that memory narrative functions as a specific narrative type objectifying past experience. It is characterized by thematic variation, communicative flexibility and axiological interpretability.