Linguistic Models and the Study of Narration: A Critique of Todorov's Grammaire du Decameron

Todorov's aim is to represent the structure of narrative discourse in the form of a grammar, applying his theoretical apparatus to the individual stories comprising Boccaccio’s Decameron. More specifically, he deals with narration, which he characterizes as that aspect of discourse capable of invoking a universe of representations. Todorov is concerned with this universe, not the discourse itself. It is proposed that this approach can be clarified by invoking a version of what Barthes has called connotative semiotics. One part of the ‘grammar’ concerns the basic unit, the narrative proposition, consisting of narrative parts of speech—proper noun, verb and adjective. His approach here can be characterized as a melding of Propp’s functional analysis with the Modistae philosophical theory of the parts of speech. The second major part of his grammar deals with the integration of narrative propositions into a few generalized sequences. While Todorov gives a semantic content to syntagmatic units, he fails to recognize a paradigmatic aspect—the type of thematic analysis developed by Levi-Strauss. However, he does give a brief thematic analysis of one particular story, which is more interesting than his extensive discussion of narrative constituents. Todorov offers no solution to the problem of going from an abstract schema to the individual stories.