Communicative Actions and Narrative Practices
This chapter continues to build the more positive account of our everyday intersubjective abilities by considering the role of communicative and narrative practices. Research in applied linguistics shows that our communicative engagements are complex and detailed practices that draw on a multitude of semiotic resources in the environment and in the other person’s embodied comportment. From childhood we learn to make sense of persons in action-oriented and narrative ways, listening to stories, or (re-)producing them in play-acting. We become familiarized with a range of ordinary or extraordinary situations, and the sorts of actions appropriate to them, all of which help to shape our expectations about people and their behaviors. In order to understand others in circumstances instituted by complex social practices and normative formations, to empathize with them, and to engage in such practices with them, much depends on our capacity to frame the actions of others in narrative.