Structuring the Unforgettable: An SFL Genre Analysis of Personal Stories across Age and Gender
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17509/bs_jpbsp.v26i1.547Keywords:
Genre, Personal Stories, Storytelling, Story Variation, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)Abstract
Storytelling turns experience into meaning, and meaning into something we can share. Personal stories about unforgettable moments are one of the clearest examples of this meaning-making process at work. This study examines how individuals construct such stories by drawing on Martin and Rose's (2008) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) genre theory to analyze five story variations: Recount, Anecdote, Exemplum, Narrative, and Observation. Data were collected from spontaneous audio-recorded stories told by 20 participants across different age groups and genders. Findings reveal that Recount was the most commonly used genre (35%), followed by Anecdote (30%), Exemplum (20%), Narrative (15%), and Observation (5%). Across age groups, a developmental pattern emerged: children favored Anecdote to express raw emotional reactions, adolescents favored Narrative to navigate complications, young adults favored Recount to document structured sequences of events, and adults favored Exemplum to offer moral evaluations of others. Story construction also differed by gender, with Exemplum dominant among female participants and Anecdote dominant among male participants.
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