A challenge for automated user access to, or presentation of, event data is the fact that such data rarely explicitly controls for appropriate narrativisation choices. This is problematic because readers nevertheless read narrativisation effects into texts regardless of whether those effects were intended or not. Gaining control of such effects, which we characterise here as the “narrativisation task”, therefore constitutes a general problem whenever knowledge is to be externalised for user access, regardless of whether that externalisation is linguistic or involves other presentation modalities. To achieve narrative control in verbalisation, we present a formal theory of narratives using OWL-DL, specifying the theory’s ontological commitments and accompanying ontological design patterns. Building on this, we demonstrate a specific pipeline that can be applied to produce linguistic narratives from knowledge graphs via an ontological layer and corresponding rules that generate appropriately slanted natural language from semantic specifications. This complements existing event knowledge by pairing any event representation with a selected conceptualisation, i.e. interpretation. By these means, we aim to improve user access to event information by constructing appropriate narrative stances that help render information presentation coherently in multiple languages; we illustrate this capability here using English and Spanish.