On Evaluating Story Grammars

In their recent article entitled “An Evaluation of Story Grammars,” Black and Wilensky (1979) offer a critique of the recent work on this topic. They argue that story grammars (or story schemata as I prefer to call them) are not a productive approach to the study of story understanding, and they offer three main lines of argumentation. First, they argue that story grammars are notformully adequate in as much as most of them are represented as a set of context free rewrite rules which are known to be inadequate even for sentence grammars. Second, they argue that story grammars are not empiricully adequate in as much as there are stories which do not seem to follow story grammars and there are nonstories which do. Finally, they argue that story grammars could not form an adequate basis for a comprehension model since in order to apply the grammar you need to have interpreted the story. These arguments are, in my opinion, indicative of a misunderstanding of the enterprise that I and others working on these issues have been engaged in. I believe that they are all based on a misunderstanding about what grammars might be good for and about how comprehension might occur. In this response, I wish to clarify the nature of story schemata as I understand them, clarify the nature of Black and Wilensky’s misunderstandings and show how each of their arguments fails to address the important issues about story grammars and story schemata. I begin by summarizing the basic notions of story grammars and story schemata. Most story grammars are based around the observation that many stories seem to involve a sort of problem solving motif (c.f., Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975; Rumelhart, 1977b; Stein & Glenn, 1979; Thomdyke, 1977). Such stories have roughly the following structure: First, something happens to a protagonist which sets up a goal that must be satisfied. Then the remainder of the story is a description of the protagonist’s problem solving behavior in seeking the goal coupled with the results of that behavior. The