Socio-pragmatic analysis of a narrative essay

Abstract EN

The present paper attempts to combine social interaction and pragmatic analysis with narrative essay objectives.

A narrative essay is usually derived from social experiences and pragmatically relates these social experiences in a story-form manner.

Sociolinguistics is the science that studies the relation between language and society.

Pragmatics, on the other hand, deals with the study of the intended meaning of words.

Based on the previously mentioned concepts, the present paper analyzes -in detail- Sheila Allard's narrative essay entitled “The Loan” according to Labov's model of narration and Searle's classification of speech acts.

The paper concludes that declarative and representative acts gain the highest scores since the writer commits to the truth of what is said and declares a real situation gained from a serious experience in life.