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Author
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Comment
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Rob
Unregistered User
(7/25/05 1:41 am)
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passive and nominal forms in fairy tales
hello there,
I have to write a paper about the grammer used in fairy tales which also includes a chapter on passive ('he was eaten by..') and nominal forms (e.g. 'the abandonment of the children' rather than 'the father abandoned the children').
However, these forms don't seem to be very common in fairy tales, do you agree? It this due to the fact that it might render things less specific and harder to understand for children (and adults..)?
thank you for your imput!!
rob
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Veronica Schanoes
Registered User
(7/25/05 2:36 am)
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Re: passive and nominal forms in fairy tales
I think it's going to depend a lot on which versions of the tales you're using. I can't say I've ever noticed one way or another.
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Writerpatrick
Registered User
(7/25/05 8:30 am)
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Re: passive and nominal forms in fairy tales
Fairy tales are often made up of story elements such as characters and events, so it depends upon who is telling the story (and how long ago) as to how the prose will read. Traditionally it was simply a matter of relating the story. When the story did get written down, the recording of story elements often took priority over form.
Many of the earlier English writers were translating from other languages so they were more concerened with how closely the translation fit with the original story rather than the active or passive form. It was treated as an academic exercise, so the stories were written as one would with non-fiction. Modern writers doing story retellings will often use active voice because that is what they are taught.
Also, the grammatical forms permitted by the original languages would have an effect. The Grimms worked in German, but I don't know if they used High German or Low German (if there was a distinction back then). Each has it's limits.
So any passive voice you may find in a story has a lot to depend with who the writer is, when they wrote it and the language they used.
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midori
snyder
Registered User
(7/25/05 9:00 am)
ezSupporter
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Re: passive and nominal forms in fairy tales
Were you asked to base the research for your paper from a specific collection? It seems that the professor could hardly ask you to write such a paper without at least limiting the field to a particular collection of tales (one that they at least have some familiarity with I would imagine.) As the other posters have suggested so much here depends on the grammatical structure of the language of the tale in any one of its various iterations..its transmission from an oral language to a written one and beyond, a movement from 19th century illiterate peasant women, to the Grimm brothers, to the various contemporary translations).
And then of course...since narratives are pretty universal, the field is wide open...well you would have to deal with the specifics of an individual language (Japanese, Tuareg, Xhosa, Finnish, Inuit, Hungarian, Russian) and its forms of discourse.
I do so hope this professor has narrowed the field for you...personally I would find this really frustrating and difficult as a student. (Unless the professor hopes in this impossible question, that you will arrive at the knowledge that fairy tales have indeed travelled through so many versions that such an answer depends on its variables...and hence your paper becomes not an answer to the question, but a discussion of the problems of authority/authencity of the narratives grammar invoked by the question)
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Rob
Unregistered User
(7/25/05 9:23 am)
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Re: passive and nominal forms in fairy tales
thanks for your replies so far..
in fact I am concentrating on snow-white, hansel and gretel, the juniper tree, the red shoes, jack and the beanstalk and the three billy goats gruff. (but also wondered about some general comment on classical fairy tales which is always too vast i know..)
Other discourse types often use the passive or nominal form to render the text vague, often to obscure responsibility. In media or political discourse they often say things like 'the bombing of x' rather than 'WE bombed x'.
I wondered whether in fairy tales these forms are also used in a similar way to underline the author's ideology about what he considers good or bad.
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midori
snyder
Registered User
(7/25/05 10:05 am)
ezSupporter
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Re: passive and nominal forms in fairy tales
OK...so who is the author of the tales you are using? Because it would seem that an interesting argument about author intention could arise if you say compared written retellings--say Victorians versus contemporary versions. In which case I don't know how long the paper needs to be, but rather than looking a clutch of different narratives, you might find it more useful to select one narrative, and employ three or four different versions for analysis. Might be fun--especially if they were radically different.
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kristiw
Unregistered User
(7/25/05 4:52 pm)
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Re: passive and nominal forms in fairy tales
Fascinating... someone did precisely this for one of my linguistic classes, taking various versions of Little Red Riding Hood from different periods and looking at how the language changed to change the audience's perception of the protagonist. For instance, in early American children's stories (around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and one of the texts she looked at was a picture book used as an advertisement) RRH became much more endearing and victimized, and presented less as a victim of her own naivete. I strongly recommend you look at just one story, and pick some key texts from different periods. Linguistic approaches to folklore are my favorite :). . . keep me posted.
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(8/5/05 9:02 am)
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'academic exercise'?
[[ Many of the earlier English writers were translating from other languages so they were more concerened with how closely the translation fit with the original story rather than the active or passive form. It was treated as an academic exercise, so the stories were written as one would with non-fiction. ]]
Which English writers were you referring to here?
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Rosemary Lake
Registered User
(8/5/05 9:57 am)
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versions
Damn. I wrote a long reply and lost it.
At my site, www.rosemarylake.com, there's a link to Laura Gibbs' site for searching all of Lang's fairy books for key words and phrases. Hunt's and Crane's translations of Grimm should be online at Gutenberg in single files, searchable. Crane has "The Almond Tree" not "The Juniper Tree." Calvino should have a version also. Quite a bit of difference in these styles.
Also I have a link to Ashliman's site or you could search for 'Ashliman' and 'tale type' for some different traditional versions of the same tale, if Heidi doesn't have them all here yet.
If you go as far from the Grimm-ish tradition as Andersen's "The Red Shoes", you might look at some Cabinet des Fees stories too -- also at the Lang site.
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