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What is a narrative event? A narrative event is an event that is reported by means of a narrative. Although this answer is too simple not to be true, it is not the whole story. As is often noted in narratology and elsewhere, by making an event part of the content of a narrative, one "transforms" the event in a specific manner.1 However, talk of "transformation" is imprecise here, and the purpose of this essay is to be more specific about what happens when an event becomes part of a narrative. I'll argue that by producing an intelligible narrative, speakers are subject to a specific norm that delimits the range of descriptions under which the events covered by the narrative may be identified. I'll start by introducing the notions of "event" and "narrative" that I'll be working with. Next, I will introduce and discuss the notion of a narrative event. Finally, I'll discuss some consequences of my proposal and point to the need for further research.
A brief caveat before I start: There is a growing body of research in narratology about events as part of narratives.2 These studies are mostly concerned with shaping conceptual tools for the characterization of events according to, for example, their contribution to the plot, their degree of conformity to a protagonists goals, their ethical significance, or their surprisal value or emotional import for readers or listeners of the narrative. What I will do in this essay differs from this research in at least two respects. First, for narrative events, as I will understand the term, the features just mentioned are not essential: none of them constitutes a narrative event. Thus a narrative event may or may not possess, say, ethical significance; the possession of ethical significance, or the lack of it, does not matter to the question of whether something is a narrative event or not. This is different from the norm I will propose in this essay, for being subject to this norm is indeed a necessary condition for something to count as a narrative event. Second, events that can be fruitfully characterized along the lines of their surprisal value, ethical significance, emotional import, and so forth are typically part and parcel of rather complex literary narratives.3 In...