Do all stories have the same skeleton? Whether it’s Jane Eyre or Jurassic Park, we instinctively expect a story to “build up to something.” But how do we actually measure that shape? A recent study by Boyd, Blackburn & Pennebaker (2020) uses massive-scale text analysis to reveal the linguistic fingerprint of narrative structure—one that shows up across 40,000+ novels, movie scripts & short stories.
The research confirms what theorists from Aristotle to Freytag have proposed for centuries: stories reliably follow a three-phase arc—staging, plot progression & cognitive tension. In Poetics (circa 335 BCE), Aristotle argued that good stories have a clear beginning, middle & end, & must feature a central conflict to engage the audience emotionally. Centuries later, Gustav Freytag, a 19th-century German novelist, formalised this idea into a five-part “dramatic arc”: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action & denouement. Their models focused on what stories do—but this study explores how those patterns can be detected linguistically, using the tiniest building blocks of language. In other words, they can be identified not through content words (like “castle” or “betrayal”) but through humble function words like prepositions, articles & pronouns.
The study
The team analysed the linguistic features of over 60,000 texts spanning fiction, film, TED talks, news articles & even Supreme Court rulings. They focused on words that signal three processes:
- Staging – scene-setting via prepositions & articles (“on the hill”, “in a house”)
- Plot progression – movement & interaction via pronouns, auxiliary verbs & negations (“he was going”, “they didn’t know”)
- Cognitive tension – internal struggle via words like think, understand, decide
To make comparisons across stories of wildly different lengths, they divided each story into five equal segments & tracked changes in these word types. Consistently, traditional narratives showed:
- High staging at the start, declining later
- Rising plot progression as the story unfolds
- A “peak” of cognitive tension around the middle
Surprisingly, the shape of this narrative arc didn’t vary much between well-rated & poorly rated texts. A 5-star romance novel on Smashwords had the same structural fingerprint as a 2-star one. Plot shape, it turns out, doesn’t explain popularity.
In contrast, nonfictional narratives like TED Talks or science journalism had a different shape: they front-loaded background information & often delayed cognitive tension until the end—reflecting a more “problem–solution” format, rather than a dramatic arc.
Why does this matter for ELT? While it’s not classroom research, this study provides an empirical bridge between discourse structure & language function—especially useful for teachers working with writing, storytelling or presentation skills. It also reveals something delightfully counterintuitive: the hidden structure of stories lives not in the dramatic events or vivid vocabulary, but in the “grammar glue” of everyday language. Function words—like the, in, &, she, because—aren’t usually the focus of literary analysis, yet they quietly shape how we process narrative. They signal who is doing what to whom, when & where it’s happening, & how ideas connect or shift.
In other words, while content words paint the picture, function words hold the frame—and it turns out the frame tells us just as much about how stories work.
Teacher Takeaways?
- Teach function words as narrative tools. Don’t relegate prepositions & articles to dry grammar practice—they help students build worlds. Use story-based writing to show how these words create setting & coherence.
- Use “tension maps” in writing tasks. Encourage students to highlight moments of doubt, conflict or realisation in their stories using cognitive verbs (e.g., realised, wondered, decided)—mirroring the natural arc found in fiction.
- Genre analysis. Get students to compare the structure of a news article, a TED talk & a fictional short story. What linguistic patterns do they notice? Which feel more “story-like”? Why?
Do you ever explore narrative structure with your students? How do you help them build a sense of “shape” in their stories?
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