GENERATING NARRATIVES FROM SIMPLE ACTION STRUCTURES

Narrative analysis is applied to episodes of interaction generated by coupled production system controlling the activity of different proces sing units. Formal analysis of such coupled systems, conceived of as m odels of institutionalized social action, has shown that they generate context-free languages of interaction. This note suggests that narrat ive analysis of interaction strings in such languages has limited anal ytical utility. it offers neither a method to discriminate between wel l-formed and malformed strings of interaction nor a procedure to induc e the underlying generative rule structure from a corpus of well-forme d interaction strings. Therefore, the narrative method holds little pr omise as a technique to examine the routinized activity composing a so cial institution.