The article defines the relationship between the concepts of narrative and recital, as well as related concepts such as narrative discourse, narrative passage; functional and semantic types of speech. The author comes to the conclusion that in the discursive approach the terms narrative and recital are not synonymous. Narrative is a broader concept, which includes the description of events (introduction and background passages) and an explanation of the events (the speaker's reasoning about the events). The recital (or sequential passage) with this approach is one of the types of narrative. The distinction between the concepts of narrative and recital allows to more accurately to determine the place of the recital in the narrative text and to focus on the description of the discursive rules of the use of grammatical categories in this unit.