Over the past seven posts, we have traced a single thread through the forest of semiotic possibility, guided by our perennial laboratory companion: Liora. Each post examined a distinct axis of narrative ecology:
-
Construal — what counts as event, state, or participant
-
Relationality — how entities are classified, possessed, and connected
-
Perspective — whose experience and knowledge foreground narrative attention
-
Orientation — how phenomena are anchored spatially, socially, and discursively
-
Integration of Axes — how construal, relationality, perspective, and orientation dynamically interact
-
Narrative Ecology in Action — Liora’s scene as a full coordination of axes
-
Cross-Linguistic Ecologies — how different languages license distinct narrative textures
1. Narrative is Ecological
The series has demonstrated that stories are not linear sequences of events or mere mirrors of “reality.” They are ecological systems, in which:
-
Construal selects what phenomena can appear
-
Relationality links participants, objects, and events into intelligible networks
-
Perspective governs attention and epistemic access
-
Orientation stabilises the horizon across space, social relations, and discourse
Together, these axes form coherent semiotic ecologies that allow phenomena to emerge, interact, and be intelligibly experienced.
2. Typology Shapes Narrative Possibility
Cross-linguistic comparisons — English, Salishan, Japanese-style ecologies — reveal that:
-
Same “content” can be realised very differently depending on the language’s semiotic affordances
-
Differences are semiotic, not cognitive determinism
-
Languages do not “determine thought,” but they pattern the space of what stories can naturally unfold
-
Narrative variation arises from systemic potential, not arbitrary choice
Liora’s forest is a controlled laboratory: identical phenomena, multiple narrative ecologies, each internally coherent.
3. Liora as Semiotic Lens
Throughout the series, Liora has illustrated how a single narrative scene can be actualised in multiple ways:
-
Event-focused or participant-rich
-
State-dense or dynamically agentive
-
Single-perspective or distributed-perspective
-
Minimally or richly oriented
Her small gestures — leaning, observing, interacting — reveal the structured potential of language for enacting experience, making visible the otherwise invisible scaffolding of narrative ecology.
4. The Relational-Ontological Payoff
From a relational-ontological perspective:
-
Meaning = reality in narrative terms; phenomena exist in the structured presence created by language
-
Narrative typology = semiotic architecture of possibility; each language encodes a distinct theory of how events, participants, and relations can emerge
-
Stories are experiments in potentiality, not mirrors of some pre-given world
This framework reframes storytelling as comparative metaphysics without metaphysics: typology reveals how experience can be cut, connected, and anchored, not what the world “actually is.”
5. Looking Forward
The ecological lens opens multiple avenues for further exploration:
-
Translation as ecological adaptation: how do semiotic ecologies shift when stories move across languages?
-
Narrative invention and improvisation: how do ecologies shape creativity and emergent storytelling?
-
Extended case studies: other narrative genres, multi-modal texts, and culturally patterned story-worlds
-
Liora’s ongoing adventures: continued illustration of narrative ecology in action
The key insight remains: by attending to construal, relationality, perspective, and orientation, we can read, write, and compare stories as living semiotic ecologies, each internally coherent, each licensed by its system, each opening unique experiential possibilities.
This meta-post closes the core Ecological Narratology series, leaving us with a framework for navigating narrative possibility across languages, ecologies, and storytelling practices — and a small guide, in Liora, for seeing semiotic potential unfold in real time.
No comments:
Post a Comment