While not every narrative includes all of these elements, the purpose of this subdivision is to show that narratives have inherent structural order. Labov argues that narrative units must retell events in the order that they were experienced because narrative is temporally sequenced. In other words, events do not occur at random, but are connected to one another; thus “the original semantic interpretation” depends on their original order.[14] To demonstrate this sequence, he breaks a story down into its basic parts. He defines narrative clause as the "basic unit of narrative"[15] around which everything else is built. Clauses can be distinguished from one another by temporal junctures,[16] which indicate a shift in time and which separate narrative clauses. Temporal junctures mark temporal sequencing because clauses cannot be rearranged without disrupting their meaning.
Labov and Waletzky’s findings are important because they derived them from actual data rather than abstract theorization (a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach). Labov, Waletzky, &c., set up interview situations and documented speech patterns in storytelling, keeping with the ethnographic tradition of tape recording oral text so it can be referenced exactly. This inductive method creates a new system through which to understand story text.