GENERATING NARRATIVES FROM SIMPLE ACTION STRUCTURES

Narrative analysis is applied to episodes of interaction generated by coupled production system controlling the activity of different processing units. Formal analysis of such coupled systems, conceived of as models of institutionalized social action, has shown that they generate context-free languages of interaction. This note suggests that narrative analysis of interaction strings in such languages has limited analytical utility. it offers neither a method to discriminate between well-formed and malformed strings of interaction nor a procedure to induce the underlying generative rule structure from a corpus of well-formed interaction strings. Therefore, the narrative method holds little promise as a technique to examine the routinized activity composing a social institution.