NARRATIVES WITHOUT MEANING

I will proceed from my reading of Abell's paper to discuss one kev iss ue in the new approach to sociological analysis that Abell calls compa rative narratives, that Andrew Abbott (in press) calls narrative posit ivism, and that 1 (1989) call event structure analysis. Lest I give th e impression that I do not like Abell's contribution, I begin by notin g that I appreciate his work practically as a fan. I routinely think o f abstractions in terms of homomorphisms since reading Abell's earlier works. An abstract narrative must preserve some of the orderings pres ent in the parent (more concrete) narratives in order to be sensible, therefore orderings in the parent narratives constrain the abstraction , and homomorphisms provide an elegant way of dealing with such constr aints. Moreover, I think that the relaxed binary operation that Abell has introduced in this article advances the formal description of narr atives in a way that corresponds to common sense, at least in some app lications. Additionally, Abell's new definition seems to deal with abs tract actions of different durations-a befuddling problem of real impo rtance, as Abbott (in press) emphasized. That said, my agenda is to su ggest that Abell inappropriately slights semantic analysis in his appr oach, that so do others who are developing technology in this area-des pite the potential consequence of encouraging ''mindless methodology'' , and that help in dealing with the problem might be attained by turni ng to other disciplines that focus on qualitative materials, especiall y linguistics.