Sessions of the "Russian Pear Chats and Stories" corpus are based on retellings and discussions of "The Pear Film", see "Corpus". "The Pear Film" was created by a research group under Wallace Chafe at Berkeley in the 1970s. The film does not contain any speech acts of the characters, but it depicts a story of the interactions of several characters, among them a gardener who is picking pears, a boy who steals a basket full of pears, a group of other boys who help the first one after he falls off his bicycle, and others along the way. This film offers a well-structured chain of physical and social events and has long established itself as an excellent way to obtain compact and comparable narratives [Chafe ed. 1980; Erbaugh 1990; Chafe 1994; Orero 2008; Stoll, Bickel 2009; Mazur, Kruger 2012; http://www.pearstories.org/].
This digitized version of "The Pear Film" was provided to us by John Du Bois. It is published on this web site with the permission of Professor Marianne Mithun, the heir of Wallace Chafe, and with the permission of Professor John Du Bois (both from the University of California at Santa Barbara). We are grateful to the colleagues for their generous consent to have the film published on this web site.
On September 25, 2015 a workshop "Pear Stories, 40 years later" took place in Turin, Italy. It was a part of the EuroAsianPacific Joint Conference on Cognitive Science. The workshop was organized by Andrej A. Kibrik and included six presentations by scholars from various parts of the world. Wallace Chafe, the originator of "The Pear Film", gave a remarkable video presentation "Origins of the Pear Film". This video must be informative to anyone interested in research build on "The Pear Film".
With the permission of Professor John Du Bois, we also post here the slides of his talk "Pear Film Word Corpus",
which was presented during the same workshop.
Click here
to download the PowerPoint presentation.
Chafe, Wallace. (Ed.) (1980). The Pear Stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Chafe, Wallace. (1994). Discourse, consciousness, and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Erbaugh, Mary. (1990). Mandarin oral narratives compared with English: The Pear/Guava Stories. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, 25(2), 21-42.
Mazur, Iwona, and Kruger, Jan-Louis. (2012). Pear stories and audio description: Language, perception and cognition across cultures. Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 20(1), 1-3.
Orero, Pilar. (2008). Three different receptions of the same film: 'The Pear Stories Project' applied to audio description. European Journal of English Studies, 12(2), 179-193.
Stoll, Sabine, and Bickel, Baltazar. (2009). How deep are differences in referential density? In: J. Guo, E. Lieven, N. Budwig, S. Ervin-Tripp, K. Nakamura, S. Ozcaliskan. (Eds.) Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: research in the traditions of Dan Slobin (pp. 543-555). London: Psychology Press.