An Investigation of Discourse Units in the Stories of One Thousand One Nights on Todorov’s Narratology

The present study discusses the narrative components including noun, adjective and verb (person, characteristics and action) of stories of One Thousand One Nights based on the narrative theory of Todorov. The characters in the stories of One Thousand One Nights are classified according to the traditional Persian grammar into mass nouns, proper nouns and unknown nouns. In each case, the actions and properties of the characters in the story are explained and the method of meaning making in the text is explained in the form of a basic narrative grammar. In this taxonomy, mass nouns refer to those characters that are typical and despite the different roles that they have in the story are always introduced by a specific trait. Proper nouns refer to famous historical or story characters who are introduced by their proper names and readers know them by their traits and characteristics and their names are associated by a specific trait in the mind of the readers. Unknown nouns refer to those characters that are unknown to the readers and are typical characters embodying a moral or psychological trait. These characters are named in the stories according to their prominent traits which identify them such as the foolish teacher, the pious woman and the generous youth.