Narrativity¶
The degree to which a communication is organized and experienced as a story through event structure and discourse, supporting transportation and potentially persuasion.
Core Idea¶
Narrativity is the degree to which a communication is organized and experienced as a story. Narrative content supplies agents, events, and a transition from an initial to a later state; narrative discourse shapes how those events are ordered, voiced, paced, and framed. Narrative content concerns what is represented: who did what, where, when, why, and with what change. Narrative content concerns what is represented: who did what, where, when, why, and with what change.
Scope of Application¶
Narrativity can be assessed in media that represent events and invite audiences to construct a story world. The construct applies to media that represent state-changing events and give receivers enough structure to build a story world.
- Fiction. Plot and discourse techniques organize character change.
- Journalism. Event selection and sequencing can increase or suppress story form.
- Advertising. Brand messages use character and transition to invite transportation.
- Games and interactive media. Player action helps instantiate event sequences and outcomes.
- Personal and organizational accounts. Speakers organize experience into identity-bearing stories.
Clarity¶
Specify whether the claim concerns content structure, discourse technique, perceived narrativity, transportation, or persuasion. Operationalize events, agents, transition, and presentation rather than using ‘story-like’ as a synonym for engaging. Control for topic, evidence, and audience differences when inferring effects. The closest near miss sets the boundary: Narrative transportation is the closest near miss: it is an audience experience often enabled by narrativity, whereas narrativity is a property or degree of the communication and its organization.
Manages Complexity¶
The construct decomposes story-likeness into represented events, presentation, receiver construction, and outcomes. This prevents causal chains from collapsing into one score and enables comparisons across media even when the same events are told with different discourse. The central content–discourse tradeoff is this: Story events and their telling can contribute independently and interact. A second textual structure–receiver experience tension matters because Narrative cues do not guarantee transportation for every audience.
Abstract Reasoning¶
Use three linked moves: identify agents, initial state, events, and resulting state or outcome; analyze causal and temporal connections rather than sequence alone; describe discourse choices such as order, voice, pacing, and emotional framing. As a collapse test, the case exits when events do not form a transition or when discourse supplies no basis for construing them as a story. A fourth check is to measure receiver construction or transportation separately from textual features. A final check is to attribute persuasion only after considering alternative message and audience mechanisms.
Knowledge Transfer¶
Narrativity transfers across verbal, visual, interactive, and multimodal media when event change and discourse support story construction. It becomes metaphor when any progression is called a narrative without agents or state transition. No canonical parent prime is currently asserted; broader structural comparisons remain related-prime analogies until separately adjudicated in the DAG. Events receive temporal or causal ordering. Discourse selects how events appear.
Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶
Narrativity sits in a crowded region of the domain-specific corpus (24th percentile for distinctiveness): several abstractions share nearly its structure, so a description that fits it tends to fit its neighbors too.
Family — Narrative Structure & Storytelling Devices (24 abstractions)
Nearest neighbors
- Nonlinear narrative — 0.91
- Dialogical analysis — 0.90
- Film Grammar — 0.89
- Flashbulb memory — 0.89
- Obligatory scene — 0.89
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-10-08