Professor Paul van den Hoven from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, was invited to present his recent work on the narratives in public discourse at the National Key Research Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics on April 1, 2014.

In his talk, Professor Paul van den Hoven first illustrated to the audience the concept of narratives by showing Steve Jobs’ speech “Stay hungry, Stay foolish” at the commencement of Stanford University. After arousing the audience’s interest in the functions of narratives in public discourse, Professor Paul van den Hoven introduced the cognitive narrative scheme, including a syntagmactic dimension with the five standard stages of a focused narrative chain based on Todorov’s work, and a paradigmatic dimension with the five ratio’s to present an act based on based on Kenneth Burke’s Pentad model. He analyzed Steve Jobs’ speech with the scheme to facilitate audience’s understanding about the scheme. Later he moved on to examples of public discourse coming from courtroom, news papers and advertisement, that seemingly employ other devices then the narrative device. He demonstrated how this discourse also invites to be read as ‘a story’, guiding the audience to the construction of prototypical roles of the hero, the villain, the helper, the donor, the dispatcher (Vladimir Propp’s famous roles), to model accountabilities of the agents in specific ways, and most important, to construct an epilogue - a moral lesson.

The two hour lecture showed how and why the narrative is a device that deserves a much wider application as a discourse analytical category then merely in prototypical story-telling discourse.