An inquiry into the narrative structure of television news

In the past two decades, research on the narrative structure of newspaper stories has shown tremendous achievement, while that of television news is still scarce in Taiwan. This article proposes a model of studying the narrative structure of television news by combining perspectives from M. Bal, A. Bell, S. Chatman, W. Labov, M. Montgomery, and T. A. van Dijk. The model demonstrates that the structuralistic duality components of story and discourse are integrated into one whole while actualizing the events into news stories. The paper then goes on further with the discussion of several underlying structures beyond the narrative structures, such as the implied author and his or her viewpoints as emphasized by Chatman and Eco.This study also shows that the proposed narrative structure of television news is quite appropriate for representing the social interactional essence of sociolinguistics and scoionarratology, such as Labov and Herman contend.