| Taking as its starting point Wittgenstein's dictum "the meaning of a word is its use in the language," this thesis contains an examination of the use of 'storie' and 'tale' in the whole corpus of Chaucer's works, what these words mean in that corpus and what working theory of narrative may arise from his use of these words. Using TACT ( Text Analysis Computing Tools) in a computer-aided text analysis, I look primarily at the context of words within which 'storie' and 'tale' occur, i.e. their. collocations, and what these collocations tell us about their meaning. An extensive appendix contains tables and figures showing the collocations of 'storie' and 'tale.' I adapted these tables and figures from data generated by TACT.;In this thesis I show that Chaucer uses 'storie' and 'tale' quite differently. 'Storie' tends to attract time words and names pointing either to existents within its diegetic world or to the past. 'Tale' tends to attract those pointing both to the external world of the narrator and to the present. 'Storie' is the agent of verbs of discourse as often as it is their patient. 'Tale' is never the agent of such verbs. In the case of 'tellen,' stories tell more often than they are told; tales are always told. When 'storie' occurs in phrases with a possessive pronoun, the pronoun is always in the objective genitive. When 'tale' is in similar circumstances, the pronoun is always in the subjective genitive. In the former case the antecedent of the pronoun is 'storied,' in the latter it 'tales.' 'Storie' tends to rhyme with words recalling the courtly and clerkly; 'tale' tends to rhyme with those recalling the common and quotidian. 'Storie' occurs in contexts foregrounding public memory, authority and the forces of history, 'tale' in those foregrounding private subjectivity and the assertions of the individual. These suggest that while readers of Chaucer should resist the temptation to regard 'storie' and 'tale' as being in all cases strictly analogous to "story" and "discourse" in the narratological sense, they may do well to prefer these senses to traditional, genre-based senses. |
