A Preliminary Analysis and Catalog of Thematic Labels

An account of the labels commonly used to express themes could both help in assessing the coverage of models of narrative processing, and support recognizing themes by the textual appearance of these labels. This paper presents a preliminary analysis and catalog of thematic labels such as “vicious cycle” and “underdog”. In contrast to a top-down approach characterizing themes in terms of components of a model of narrative processing, a bottom-up approach is taken. Thematic labels are gathered independent of any particular model and they are catalogued according to the types of relationships the corresponding themes convey.