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PROPP'S MORPHOLOGY: SYNTAGMATIC ANALYSIS

Human beings tend to format most of their communication in narrative form. There are many different kinds of stories: jokes, dramas, novels, epigrams, arguments, poems, parables, mysteriesÉand more. Even scientific, legal, and other formal reports assume the existence of the narrative of human history.

The narrative analysis presented here is based on Vladimir Propp's well known morphology of the Russian folk tale. Published in Russian in 1928, translated into English in 1958 and published in a revised translation in 1968, Propp's study of more than one hundred Russian folk tales is important because it identifies a distinct underlying structure - all of these stories seem to have nearly the same form.

In this exercise you will use Propp's morphology as a tool to perform a sygtagmatic semiotic analysis. This means that you will break a story into it's constituent parts and study the way that the parts are used to construct the story as it develops over time. [23], [29], [40], [41], [42]

Before you begin the exercise, you will need to have a story in mind. Propp's Morphology is best applied to folk tales and similar stories. For example, here are some stories to which it can be applied:

PROPP'S MORPHOLOGY: SYNTAGMATIC ANALYSIS

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