Narratives hold a special place in human language systems and thus in individual speech communities. They are a cross-culturally shared key vehicle through which social identity is constructed as well as reinforced, and are a locus for the transmission of normative social behaviour. Thus, narratives express highly refined and succinct representations of social, linguistic and other cognitive categories. In particular in this project, we consider:

1. What metalinguistic resources do speech communities have for categorising narrative types? And, what functions do such categories or ‘genres’ fulfill?
2. What force have narrative and discourse exerted on the evolution and development of grammatical categories?
3. How are social domains like kinship, and the transmission of cultural knowledge constructed in and by narrative?