Journal of Pragmatics 6 (1982) 455-462 45~

North-Holland Publishing Company

S T O R I ~ AND COGNITION: COMMENTS ON ROBERT DE

BEAUGRANDE'S "THE STORY OF GRAMMARS AND TIlE GRAMMAI;t
OF STORIES"

JAMES R. MEEHAN *

In this paper, I strongly support the view that the study of stories is properly the study of what
humans do when they read and write stories. The act of reading a story is seen as a special case vf
worl,:l-perception~and only by looking at the variety of types of stories, I claim, will we be able bto
say ~rlt.~
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...... kgill b~ A l a l l . . . . l ~ k ~ A .¢
u~uuEut~ttvu t .t v .m . a n. y vuit;t
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communication, sto.ry writers pursue their own 8oals and use devices, and an accurate theory o!
stori,.'s must explain how reader~ and writers are aware of each other and how their goals interzet.
Given these concerns, I argue that grammars are quite inadequate for representing what we know
about stories, and I claim that "story grammar" is at best ar~ overworked and mis!eadJr,,~
metaphor.

1. Pers!mctives

Robert de Beaugrande has provided an interesting analysis of tb~:ebrief history

of so-called "story grammars". While 1[ agree with many of iris points, I
di,;agree with others and would more strongly emphasize the rest.
Beaugrande draws a line between two groups: grammar, syntax, k~rm, and
structure in one group; semantics.; and content in the other. Grammars seem to
be the representation of choice for language structures. Are they up to the task
of representing what we know about the structure of stories? Beaugrande gives
six negative answers, one for each interpretation of what is means to be a rule
of a story grammar. I'm not so equivocal, if think that the notion of a story
grammar is one of the most overworked metaphors of our time, and I think it's
disheartening to :see articles in which ~he metaphor is taken seriously. It is
certainly worthwl~Lileo investigate the various aspects, especially the recurrent
aspects, of those te,':ts we call stories, ~ut a grammar hardly suffices to cover
them. Each of the fo~owing three sections explains why I think this.

* Audtor's address: Jame~ R. Meehan, Dept. of Information and Computer Science, University of
California, lt'vine, CA 92~ t7, USA.

0378-2166/82/'0000-0000/$02.75 © 1982 North-Holland

456 J.R. Meehan / Stories ar,d cognition

2. The myth oi[ the wall.formed story

At the outset, ,it seems pointless to me to study :tories with a logician's taste
for pmJtions, deciding whether something is ~rue (a story) or false (not a
story). It is likewise inappropriate to play statistician and reason about the
degree to which something might be a story, just as it is inappropriate to play
the game of judging whether, or to what degree, a sentence, might be grammati-
cal,
~er~: are ac, absolute bounds cor~stories, although we may have personal
limits on what we would consider tc be a g ~ d story. I'm tempted to say that
anything ,:,an be a story, bu~Iit is more accurate to say that anything can be
perceiced as a story. To use one of B~augrande's examples, the Mock Tu~a!e in
Ahce m Wonder/and says, "Once ! was a real turtle". He thinks that that's an
entire sto~,, Alice disagrees, and w~ ,are supposed to s~mpathize with Alic~ and
find hu~or in a!! this. _Thequestion is not whether it is a sto~¢ (the Mock
Turtle tl~:nks it is, Alice thinks it isn't), but rather, what it is about the story
that's o&l. Alic~ herself gives the answer: she expected more. That is the entire
p~int. Carroll is playing with us by riding on the very edge; of our e.xpectations,
as writers often do to provoke amusement or some other affective response.
In my ~'.hesisoa writing stories by computer (Meehan 1979), I said that "Joe
Bear was hungry. There was a jar of honey next to him. He ate it, The End."
was not a story. That was false, of course. What was '~rue is :l~at I didn't
perceive it as a story, and moreover, that I thought that it exceeded the limits
of what most people would perceive as a story, for reasor~s havin~i to do with
plans, goa!s, difficulties, and the highest level, in a hierarchy of idie;~ts,in which
decisions are made that influence tihe story. But all of that pc.ints to the
judgments w.e.'re making about storie.% and while it is certainly interesting to
look at the mental processes that influence that judgment, it is not the case: that
the judgment was predetermined by tlae text alone.
The sarae argument applies to seatence~ and meaning: for zdl the 'work
that's done on the meaning of sentences, what we're really talkin; about (at
least, what the cognitive scientists are talking about) is how w~:,go about
arnving at a given meaning from a given sentence, and context has as much to
do with judgments about stories as it does with the meaning of se~tences. For
example, here is a story by Enrique Anderson Imbert (,96o:6):l ,"

H~ guarri~an ;mgel whispered to Fabian, behind his shoulder:

~CarefuL Fab~.an! It ts decreed that you will die ihe rainate you pronounce the wo~,t doyen."
, ~ FabiarL intrigued.
,~nd he dies.

You may have made your own judgment about the quality or type of that
story, but note thai I said, "Here is a story...". If I had said, "Here: :is a funny
story..." or "Here is a weird story..." you might have processed it differently.
 JJ. Meehan / Stories and cognition 457

Neitherof those!chxiptiom wouldprobablyhavecausedyou difficulties,but

if I had said,“‘Hereis an adventurestory*. . ” you wouldprobablyhavepuzzled
about my introduction,since it didn’tfit your conceptionof an adventure
story. (At least, it doesn’tfit mine.)In other word/s,the processesyou would
have applied to reading that as an adventurestory somehowwould have
alerted you to a fai3tiiqat whichpoint you wouldhave done somethingelse,
such as re-read tlhe story and process it “bottom-up” to make your own
evaluationas to its type. Perhapsyou wouldhavewonderedwhy I misledyou,
or perhapsyou wouldhave suspendedjudgment,knowingthat I was going to
makesomepoint out of this example.
RichardC&angerand I are workingon this problemat a somewhat!ower
level, trying to map out what we cali judgmentalinferences(&anger and
Meehan 1981),the evaluationsyou make on your own inferencesduring
text-understanding,, allowingyou to judgehowwellyour inferencescontinueto
fit. ~RP
1 .,*v Aatn in “6
Yb8.U 1‘s Ii+ IC nf
“1 &sequent input, ?_‘i~i~,~tely, YOU may &&de tE,gi

you’vemade:somekind of error,a situationto whichthere are severalpossible

responses.Aging textsto be certainkindsof storieswas rrotone of our initial
interests?but I expectthat our resultswillbe helpfulat this higher1eve:l.
In any
case, some of the most important things that we should be looking for in
stories are those Izxpectations,evaluations,devices,etc., that describe the
processof readinga story.
“Story”is a state of mind.

3. Lifeversusart

To judge people’sperceptionsof stories with reaction-timee:rcperimenr:s, as

Mandler does, sounds quite reasonable.The difficulty is that. it is hard to
decidewhich observedphenomenashouldbe:attributed to the fact.that the
subject is reading a story, aljd which to the fact that the text describes
somethingthat would give :.hereader pause (‘orproduce &atever effect is
being ob:served)in any case, whetherit is a newspaperarticle, a cookbook
re.cipe,or a mathematicalproof.
The problemis t:his:muchof what is writtenabout storiesis true of tife in
general,and we are Q?longwayfromisolatingthe differencesbctwe?n‘accounts
of real life and s’.oripII
It seems well l:si;iblishedby now that problem-solvingis an important
aspectof lmanya.c~rie:~. For example,Wilensky(1980)and G:snger(1980)have
writrencolmputen pri>grams that undrrstandstoriesby makiciguse of informa-
tion about plans and goals,and 1 wrote one that produces:storiesusing such
information(Mceha~ 1979).Beaugrandecites works by Rumelhartand his
own workwith C,olbythat also supportthis view.But it is also clearthat n~lany
formsof text requireproblen;.-salving information.
458 .LR Meehan / Stories and c,ognition

Suppose we define a report to mean any account, however bland, of some

events that took pla,:e. As long as we can detci:t chrondogical order and the
simplest caus~l~ty, ge will attribute plan:; and g',oals to the acv:ors involved, at
least to the ones we would call rational. Ally re.'port will have to establish the
context, directly or indirectly. There will Ix,. some number of state; and
state-changes, the la~.~tof which we may label the "outcome".
One can tashion r,:ports for even the most mundane activities: today's stock
market, a shopping trip, or an afternoon jog ~xound the park. We need not
even commit oursei,,res to a particular form of communicatio~L; the report
might b~ written, six,ken, or purely mental. That is, simple perception fits this
definition: what you thought when you went to the park and watched joggers
and picr~cs atnd ~t~:. A story is only one I~ind of report, but we can see that
almost all of our grand machinery for understanding stories works for reports
in general, so we have failed to distinguish .art from life, let alone language
from life.
Suppose in your visit to the park, you c~mmacross a golf course on which
you noticed that the only players were young girls and alder women. You
might be puzzk~d; the :'reaction time"' in your comprehension raight rise
dramatically. Then you discovered that there was a Mother-Daughter tourna-
ment taking place. Contrast this with a w'i~ten report in which t]he author
d~ribes the scene in the same order as which you perceived it, del'aying the
explanation about the tournament until weil past the description otf th,: golf
course and the players. Yes, the reader':g re~c~tionLtime may rise, ~nd yes, you
may "explain" this by saying thal *.he"setti~.g" was "displaced", but thai: has
nothing to do with whether the report is in ,the form of a story or s,3mething
else. Again, ~t racy be a story in which the author has deliberately aw~ided
putting the events in an order that would..,make it easiest for you to understand,
perhaps as a devi~:eof the genre, as in a mystery story. If so, then we car,: tai!,:
about the inf~luenc,:of me form of the report on perception, but not other~vise.
The other side of this coin ~s that many reports can be expressed as stories.
Some people, such as good conversationalists and professional comedians, are
~apable of presenting report~ of mundaue activities as if they were stories, fer
p~rposes of entertainment; e.g., "A funny thing happened to me on the w~ty tO
v,ork today...", it seem~ reasonable to conjecture that af',er long practice at
performing this traasforrnation, constantly on the looko,~t for humor or irony
or other things, they may sometimes even perceive what happens to them as a
sto~y.
 J,R. Meehan / Storiesand ,:ogn,ftion 459

4t. Stories are written on purpose

4.1. 7 ] he author
• 's goals

Eventually, we're going to have to look at a story as the deliberate, planned

output of an author, examining his goals, the reasons why he displaced the
setting or killed off the hero in chapter 2 or whatever. It is not sufficient to
examine the affective response in the reader, as Lichtenstein and Brewer do
(I 981). We must also view that as something the author intended. As Dehn
(1981) points out, TALE-SPIN lacked any real perspective of an author and
suffered accordingly. In artificial intelligence terms, what we have here is a
domain problem. We are trying to reanon about a form of writing, without
having much expertise in the art cf writing, and I expect no more suc,:'ess than
I would from someone w~th no medical knowledge who tried to bm~d a
diagnosis system. The story ~rammar literature reveals little or no contact with
the practitioners, namely writer.%_ who certainly do t,,l~..............,r,,,,"t~,,.i,..~........~,'t.,.,.,,~'"la
conferences, etc. In his respense in this issue, Robert Calfee makes a plea for
talking to teachers who train: children to understand stories, a move I whole-
heartedly support. In that same spirit, I suggest that we pay more attention to
wl~at the writers have to say about their work, not so much literary criticism
and the structuralism literat~e as the simpler, "how-to" advice that writers
have passed on.

4.2, Planning = behavior simulation

One of the consequ,~nces of viewing stories as the planned behavior of an

auti~or is the notion that the author must anticipate what the reader is going to
think. Th~.t is, an author simulates a reader in order to judge his "plan", the
linear text. By the same token, a reader may anticipate what the author is going
to do next by simulating the author's plan (as he imagines it). I have started
looking at this idea at the level of problem-solving (Meehan 1981), ,and I
be.lieve that the traditional distinction between "comprehending" systems and
"behaving" systems should be abandoned, that goal-bas,M comprehe,nsion
requires the ability to simulate goal-based behavior (e.g., hypothetical
problem-solving) and vice versa.
For example, Wi]ensky's (1980) PAM program and Granger'!; (1980)
ARTHUR program :~fe text-understanding systems that ds,~ knowledge about
plans and goals to ft~rm (and in ARTHUR's case, re,rise! a representation for
the meaning of text. Once they have detected a goai for one of the characters in
the text, they make :~imple predictions about what is likely to happen next,
enout# so that they can understand subsequent texl in light of these predict-
ions. That is what I call passi,,e understanding, waiting for each new input and
linking that to the logic of what has preceded. They don't use available
a60 J.R. Meehan / Stories and cogniltion

information and problem-solving strategies to look ahead and make detailed

predictions.
The approach that I'm advocating integrates problem-solving with compre-
hension, producing aggressive understanding. For example, if I'm giving you
lengthy directions on how to drive to a certain location, you can aggressively
understand my diret::tions by simulating the trip in your head. If I say to turn
right at a corner wh,~,re3ou know there is no right turn, you can stop me and
complain. If you wt,~reunderstandkqg only passively, you'd miss that, and as
long as the directions sounded plausible, you would accept them.
The other half of the argument is that having the ability to comprehend
goai.ba.w.zl behavior helps in planning and problem-solving. Befor,: I ask you
to do me a favor. I might well consider how you would respend to my request,
thus sir~ulating you~' goal-based comprehension of my goal-based behaviolr.

4.3. Writers'devices
I think l~auoranrle~ m i ~ x the nnint with re~arcl to reeur.~inn in ~tnriel
Memory does indeed place limits on the degree to which the embedding of
stori~ cart be understood, but:

(a) The limits on embedding don't have to be part of the grammar. We can
assume that some other part of the cognitive process of reading wi!ll sound
the alarm. For ,example. I've never see,a a programming langu~Lge lhat
defined a limit on the number of recursive function calls, yet every
programmer knows that such limits exist in actual systems.
(b) 7here are other ways of handling embedding than ke,eping track of all the
~mters to the outermost level. Depending on what you call a level, any
garden-variety spy novel contains deeply nested plots, partiall[y as a
side-effect of nes;ted belief spaces (e.g., double agents). It is the writ¢'r's
responsibility to guide the reader through the various contexts.
{c) Writers can use embedding self-consciously, as a device, which is surely ,~he
most pi!ausible explanation c.f The OldFarmer, The House That Jack Built,
and ~he like. John Barth used this, for example, in Giles Goat.Boy, in a
scene where Giles is using a library computer to foilow ~he glosses irL a
recorded welcoming speech, footnote upon footnote:
.. arm from a sloe in the console issue.d, in the forrl of a printed diagran.t, this gloss upon ~the
gl~s v,xm the gloss ,.Jpop Bray's quotation front Enos Enoch's allusion to Xanthippides's
remaA upon MiJo's r~sdemeanor. (1967:452)

Barth's (!972) r~ovellla Dunyazadiad has five distinct level~i of er~r~beddilag,

stones within stories, and one of the level-3 stories is the same as the top-level
sto~. Nabokov':~ (t%2) Pale Fire has a story told entirely ~in the ~footnotes.
Obviously, thes~ are all devices, not "natural" phenomena, i.e.., a clue that it's a
story, not a report.
 J.R. Meehan / Stories and cognibt 461

5. What we should be doing

Beaugrandelists six perspectiveson the status of grammaticalrules:

(1) The rules are stipulatedsolelyby the formalconstructionof the grammar.

(2) The rules are analytictechniquesto be appliedby the investigator.
(3) The rules represent human operations carried out when producing or
comprehending6 story.
(4) Therulesstipulatenot all humanprocesses,but only thosedealingwith the
order of story constituents.
(5) The rules do not account for the processingof stories, nor for the
sequencingof stories,but only for abstractexpectatiLnsabou stories.
(6) The rules stipulate the ideal toward which stories evolve in repeated
retellings.

I am mostinterestedin (3),sinceI think that readingstoriesis a specialcase of

reading reports, and I would like to isolate the differencesbetween those
processes.Eventually,we must choose a way to represent the information.
Grammarsdon’t seem up to the task, unless you take them very looseI;/,
becauseof all the thingsBeaugrandesa;fsabout them,and becausethey can.t
haridlethose aspects?f storiesthat I hale mentioned.I’m not certainwflethsr
Beaugrandewould agree,but I feel very stronglythat a grammaris not the
only wa.yatorepresent structure, nor is it adequate for stories. Consider
airplanes.They havestructure:in fact, aerodynamicsis a reasonablesystl:min
the structuralist sens,eof that term. But talking about the “grammar of
airplanes” is another matter entirely. It reminds me of a computer-music
article in the Communicationsof the ACM several years ago in which a
well-meaningbut misguidedauthor talked ahjut “th.e BNF gram;llar for
Mozart”(as opposedto the one for Bach).Patterns?Devices?Habi:s? Cer-
tainly.A grammar?Never,

5.1. What should a rheory of stories say?

Beaugrandejoins the crowdwhen,in section3 of his paper, he beginsto state

his own ideas about stories.Stories should have a change of state, interest,
creativity,a turningpoint, etc. Whilethose are undoubtedlyfeaturesof some
stories,and whilesuch taxonomiesare helpful,the list spans many level!;and
is, ultimately,just a:rotherlist. The real task in story theory, for us at least,
shouldbe to be more preciseand to give operationaldefinitionsof what we
mean. Instead of sa$ng that a story shouldhave a turning point (what if it
doesn’t?),we shouldsay,in as muchdetail as we can, not cnly what a turning
point is (its functionin the story),but also how readersccmt.to expectt+em,
detect them,and changetheir subsequentreadingprocessbecauseof them.
462 J.R Meehan / Stories and co~n~tis,~

ildemnces

girth, John. I967. Giles goat.boy. New York: Fawcett World Library,
B~th, John. I~2. Chimera,Includesthreenovella~,:Dunyazadiad,Perse[d,and Ikllerophoniad.
New York: Random House,
13din, Natalie. I98:[. 'Story generation after TALE-StPIN', In: Proceedings ofthe Seventh Interna-
tiontlJointCor,~'eren~on bstificialInteUigetlce.Vancouver.pp. 1,5-18.
Granger., Richard i,q. 19~, Adnplive understandino: coffering erro~'ous inferences. Doctoral
ds~;~rtafion.Yale U~iversity. Y~deComputer Science Res,,arch Report 171.
Granger, Richard Iq. and James l~l. Meehan. 1~I. Judgmental inference in understandinlt. A
~e~cb propos~ subntitted to the National Science Fou~r~dation.
ienb~t, EmZlUeA~ad~:,on. 1966. "taboo'. From: The other side of the mirror (El grimorio).
Trmslatet by I~abei Reade. Carbondale, IL: Southern liliJnoisPress.
L,chtens~ein, Edward and William Brewer. 1981. An evaluatiot~of fou~'classes of story thee,ties.
Ut~pubi'~,d~edpal~. PsychologyDepartment University o~'Illinois, Urbana.
~,teeh~,noJame.~R. :[97@.Th~ melanovel: writ;n~ ~tories by computer. Doctoral dissertation. Yale
Umvemty !1976). New York: G~wlandPublislnng.
M~h~, Jame~ R. 1981..Boy meets goal, boy Io:~ goal, boy gets goal; the nature of feedback
belv:.-~,g,,"a~ba~,~,~.~
~i~lati~ ard understandingsystems.TechnicalReport 170,Inform~tioa
~ ! Comp,a~ S,-'iencesDepartment, University of California, Irvine.
Naboi,ov, Vladifflir,1962. Pale file. blew York: G E Putnam.
Wi~ky. Robert. 1,}80. Ur,dersl~nding goal-base~ stories. Doctoral dis.,.~ertation.Yale Univ~.rsity
{19"~8).New York: Garland l~blishing.

Jan~J R. Meehan was born in 1949. He received hi,,'. B.Sc. degree in ldathematics and Music
Theor: from Yale in 1971 He late~"sr.udiednatural language processing under Roger Schank ehnd
~celvg~J his Ph.D. in Computer Science,from Yale ia 1976. He is currently an Assistant Profi.:ssor
of Inform~n and Computer Scienceat the University of California, Irvine, and is co-direct~)rof
the Artificial Intellig~ztc¢Project there. Meehan is the author of two books, The metanovei: m,'.rting
~t~tes by computer ~nd The new UCI LISP manual, and his article 'An artificial inteUi[!::nce
approach to tonal mt~sictheory' appeared in the Compi'~terMusic Joui,n~l. He has been an oll'ficer
of the AC,V Special Interest Gr~.-:, on Artificial Intelligence since 1977. The emphas~isof his
~'~earch ~s"." "generation" rr:,~lelsof sentences, stories, goal-directed behavior, and music.