Implicit Messages of Narratives and Evaluative Text Structures: A Network-Based Approach

When people want to convince us of normative matters, they often tell a story. Only in rare cases, however, is what they want to convince us of explicitly formulated in the story, like the proverbial ‘moral of the story’ in a fable. Often the assertion remains implicit. But why do some stories have such an implicit message and others do not? This paper argues that evaluative text structures, i.e. complex patterns of evaluations and oppositions which emerge from evaluations within the text, play a central role in the generation of implicit messages in narratives. It introduces a collaborative manual annotation of evaluations, literary encodings and oppositions in thirty-five literary narratives, proposes a network visualization for evaluative structures as well as several narratological and quantitative typologies for them. Finally, it shows that information about evaluative text structures can be used to predict with more than 0.85 accuracy which stories have a clear implicit message and identifies the most important features and their contribution.