In "Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience",[8] Labov, with Joshua Waletzky, takes a sociolinguistic approach to examining how language works between people. This is significant because it contextualizes the study of structure and form, connecting purpose to method. His stated purpose is to "isolate the elements of narrative".[9] This work focuses exclusively on oral narratives.
Labov describes narrative as having two functions: referential and evaluative, with its referential functions orienting and grounding a story in its contextual world by referencing events in sequential order as they originally occurred,[10] and its evaluative functions describing the storyteller’s purpose in telling the story.[11] Formally analyzing data from orally-generated texts obtained via observed group interaction and interview (600 interviews were taken from several studies whose participants included ethnically diverse groups of children and adults from various backgrounds[12]), Labov divides narrative into five or six sections