Estructuras elementales del relato oralAnálisis lógico de un corpus de narraciones espontáneas sobre sucesos de vida cotidiana acaecidos en La Laguna y La Orotava

Abstract

This doctoral thesis develops a new analytical way for the study of oral tales from the communicational point of view. This analytical model focuses on discovering the existence of common internal patterns and their articulation, as well as on finding the elementary structures that make up the oral tales. The work hypothesis is grounded on the following statement: The oral tales present elementary narrative structures that are independent from the context in which they are produced. According to this hypothesis, the general objective is to find the elementary narrative structures underlying the oral tales included in the corpus. With the results achieved through this research, we will try to set the grounds of a methodological proposal for the study of oral tales regardless their contexts, to offer a tool which helps to analyse the oral stories, daily life stories and historical tales, among others, and to contribute to the structural knowledge of the oral tales according to the logic of the human thought. This research design is articulated in several stages by applying a thorough analytical method using the methodology of Vladimir Propp (2001), which allows us to extract the functions of the oral tales with which the work is made. These functions will become the operational components of the logical and structural analysis. The logical and structural methodology developed by Professor Manuel Martín Serrano helps us to identify the logical relationships among the functions of the oral tales, comparing every single component to the rest of them. Then, an analytic reduction process of the different empirically observed combinatorials will allow us to perform a typological study on the elementary structural composition of the oral tale. This thesis shows that the oral tales can be represented by a limited and reduced set of functions (invariant components) submitted to constrictions which are recurrent in the units analysed in our corpus. Every single oral tale of the corpus is made from five primary elementary structures (which are essential for the existence of an oral tale) that operate as narrative stem functions and can be simple (simples) or complex (compuestas) (terms which have been generated from and defined in the work). Both the analytical proposal and the knowledge generated on the basis of this thesis form the new starting point for future researches addressed to go deeper into the structures of the oral tales, which are reflections of the deepest logic and cognitive structures, and into their hypothetic universality expressed through the recursiveness of the narrative organisation forms.