and action: for tragedy is not a representation of men but of a piece of action [...]. Moreover, you could not have a tragedy without action, but you can have one without character-study (Aristotle, 1932). What Aristotle said in relation to tragedy became the origin of a school of thought which claims that in order to understand a character in a fictional text, one need only to analyze its role in the action. This approach was put on a new foundation by Propp (1928) in a ground-breaking corpus study of the Russian folktale. In analyzing a hundred Russian fairy tales, he constructed a sequence of 31 functions which he attributed to seven areas of action or types of character: opponent; donor; helper; princess and her father; dispatcher; hero; false hero. Greimas (1966) generalized this approach with his actant model in which all narrative characters are regarded as expressions of an underlying narrative grammar composed of six actants ordered into pairs: the hero (also sujet) and his search for an object; the sender and the receiver; the heros helper and the opponent. Each actant is not necessarily realized in one single character, since one character may perform more than one role, and one role may be distributed among several characters. Schanks concept of story skeletons also starts from the idea that stories have an underlying structure, but in his model there are many such structures and therefore many different roles for actors, eg the story of a divorce using the story skeleton betrayal with the two actors: the betrayer and the betrayed (Schank, 1995). (1949) described in an influential work what he called, using a term coined by James Joyce, the monomyth, which is an abstraction of numerous mythological and religious stories marking the stages of the heros way: separation/departure; the trials and victories of initiation; return and reintegration into society (Campbell, 1949). According to Campbell, who bases his argument on Freuds and especially on Jungs form of psychoanalysis, the monomyth is universal and can be found in stories, myths, and legends all over the world. In contrast to these generalized model-oriented approaches, traditional approaches tend to employ a genre- and period-specific vocabulary for action roles such as confidant and intriguer in traditional drama, or villain, sidekick, and henchman in the popular media of the 20th century.of the common labels for character in use refer to the role a character has in action. Protagonist, in use since Greek antiquity, refers to the main character of a narrative or a play, and antagonist to its main opponent. In contrast to these neutral labels, the term hero refers to a positive figure, usually in some kind of representative story. In modern high-culture narratives, there is more often an anti-hero or no single protagonist at all, but a constellation of characters (Tr? Hler, 2007) .to Charactersto characters in texts occurs with the use of proper names, definite descriptions and personal pronouns (Margolin, 1995). In addition to these direct references, indirect evocations can be found: the untagged rendering of direct speech, the description of actions (eg a hand grabbed) or use of the passive voice (the window was opened). The role of names in interpreting characters has been treated repeatedly, resulting in different ways of classifying name usage (eg Lamping, 1983; Birus, 1987) .can be viewed as a succession of scenes or situative frames, only one of which is active at any given moment. An active situative frame may contain numerous characters, but only some of them will be focused on by being explicitly referred to in the corresponding stretch of text. The first active frame in which a character occurs and is explicitly referred to constitutes its introduction. After being introduced, a character may drop out of sight, not be referred to for several succeeding active frames, and then reappear. In general, whenever a character is encountered in an active frame, it is to be determined whether this is its first occurrence or whether it has already been introduced in an earlier active frame and is reappearing at a particular point. Determining that a character in the current active scene has already appeared in an earlier one is termed identification. A distinction is to be made between normal, false, impeded, and deferred identifications. A false identification occurs when a previously mentioned character is identified but it then becomes clear later that some other character was in fact being referred to. An impeded identification does not refer unequivocally to any specific character, and a clear reference to the character or characters is never given in the text, while in the case of deferred identification the reader is ultimately able to establish the identity of an equivocally presented character. Deferred identification can further be broken down into an overt form in which the reader knows th...
