The voices of the tale: the storyteller in early Byzantine collective biographies, miracle collections, and collections of edifying tales

This article is a first attempt to approach the figure of the storyteller in three types of early Byzantine tale collections (fourth–seventh centuries): collective biography, miracle collection, and collection of edifying tales. Our approach draws significantly on Walter Benjamin's discussion of the storyteller and Monica Fludernik's work on conversational storytelling. Our analysis has a twofold purpose: first, to revise the impression that the storyteller is a canonical force that possesses the same characteristics in every single tale; second, to suggest that the storyteller is an inherent feature of short hagiographical narratives.

Credible as Evidence? Multilayered Audience Reception of Narrative Arguments

Building on a view of both narration and argumentation as dynamic concepts, this paper considers ways of assessing the credibility of narrative arguments constructed in empirical examples of conversational discourse. I argue that the key in any such exercise is to pay close attention to both structural and pragmatic details, particularly how conversational storytelling gets embedded in the surrounding discourse and how the way this is discursively accomplished vis-à-vis the narrators’ multilayered audience may be reflective of their argumentative goals.

Storytelling on Oral Grounds: Viewpoint Alignment and Perspective Taking in Narrative Discourse

In this paper, we seek to explain the power of perspective taking in narrative discourse by turning to research on the oral foundations of storytelling in human communication and language. We argue that narratives function through a central process of alignment between the viewpoints of narrator, hearer/reader, and character and develop an analytical framework that is capable of generating general claims about the processes and outcomes of narrative discourse while flexibly accounting for the great linguistic variability both across and within stories. The central propositions of this viewpoint alignment framework are that the distance between the viewpoints of participants in the narrative construal – narrator, character, reader – is dynamic and regulated by linguistic choices as well as contextual factors. Fundamentally, viewpoint alignment is grounded in oral narrative interaction and, from this conversation, transferred to the written narrative situation, varying between demonstration and invasion of the narrative subjects and guiding readers’ route of processing the narrative (experiential versus reflective). Our claim is that variations in viewpoint alignment are functional to the communicative context and intended outcomes of narratives. This is illustrated with the analysis of a corporate journalistic narrative that comprises both interactional and non-interactional aspects of storytelling. The concept of viewpoint alignment further explains the oral fundaments of narrative discourse in conversational storytelling and poses new questions on the relation between the dynamic processing of stories on the one hand and their static outcomes on the other.

What dialog is absent from constructed dialog?

This paper is concerned with constructed dialog in conversational storytelling. Based on Clark & Gerrig’s (1990) demonstration theory, its focus is on what is absent from constructed dialog. To determine what is absent, a comparison is made between constructed dialog tokens and utterances in conversation. The inquiry uses both quantitative and qualitative methods. It is based on the Narrative Corpus (NC; Rühlemann & O’Donnell 2012), a corpus of conversational narratives extracted from the conversational component of the British National Corpus (BNC), and its systematic annotation of constructed dialog (that is, direct speech introduced by a quotative and free direct speech without any introducer). The quantitative comparison of verbalizations used in constructed dialog as opposed to verbalizations used in conversational utterances demonstrates that a particular utterance type is significantly missing from constructed dialog: the continuer utterance, whose basic function is to exhibit an understanding that a form of ‘telling’ by another speaker is going on. The qualitative analysis, based on a subset of storytellings from the NC that were re-analyzed acoustically and re-transcribed using Jeffersonian conventions based on the Audio BNC (Coleman et al. 2012), reveals a stark mismatch between the commonness of tellings in talk-in-interaction and their uncommonness in constructed dialog. The absence of continuers from constructed dialog is discussed against the backdrop of indexicality. I argue that continuers share the key properties of indexicals – semantic vacuity and an existential relationship with the ‘thing’ indicated – and can therefore be seen as indexicals themselves. As indexicals, intrinsically connected to the speech situation of their utterance, continuers cannot be included in constructed dialog, which typically occurs in a different speech situation with different interactional parameters. Finally, I offer initial thoughts on the underrepresentation of telling sequences in constructed dialog.

Erzählen als multimodale Aktivität – zur Einführung in das Themenheft

This special issue of Linguistik online is dedicated to the study of storytelling in face-to-face interaction. More specifically, the individual contributions to this special issue approach conversational storytelling from a multimodal perspective and provide analyses on the fine-grained coordination of verbal, para-verbal, and nonverbal action in face-to-face storytelling. This introduction first frames the individual contributions by providing an overview of the current topics and open research questions in the developing field of multimodal storytelling research. All individual papers are then briefly summarized and discussed in terms of their commonalities and their contribution to the developing field of multimodally-oriented research on conversational storytelling.

Staging mental discursive processes and reactions: The construction of direct reported thought (DRT) in conversational storytelling

ABSTRACT This article approaches the construction of reported thought in everyday conversation by analysing instances of direct reported thought (DRT), taken from storytelling sequences. It is argued that DRT is used by narrators as a device to portray, in a dynamic sense, the ways in which they experience the story world in their mind, as discursive processes and reactions around an external event that clash with their expectations or initial perception of the situation. More specifically, the analysis shows that DRT is employed to stage a ‘first wrong thought’ (Jefferson 2004) that is shaped in a range of ways, as a process of worrying, deliberating, lamenting, and blaming or accusing someone in the situation, as well as shocked and indignant reactions that are constructed as exclamations and a process of reproaching and planning a future revenge action. (Direct reported thought, conversational storytelling, mental discursive processes, mental reactions, first wrong thought, silent shock, inner experience, direct reported speech)

Young children’s multimodal participation in storytelling

In what ways do young children use talk and gesture to participate in conversational storytelling with family members? This paper addresses this question by examining the interactions between Japanese-speaking children (ages one year and ten months to two years and five months) and their parents at the dining table. In focusing on children’s use of talk and gesture in inhabiting the dynamic and shifting roles of ‘recipient’ and ‘speaker’, the analysis shows how children (1) display their understanding of parents’ tellings and (2) animate the activities, social actions, and stances of characters (self and other). It also shows how parents respond to children’s talk and gesture, through practices such as alignment, assessment and repair. The findings shed light on children’s multimodal participation in conversational storytelling, and their abilities to engage in action and make relevant contributions to interaction.

A story more real than reality

This article examines the concept of experientiality in conversational storytelling from an ethnomethodological perspective, introducing a case in which the narrative mediation of experience fails. The recipient misses the experiential point of the story in the flow of interaction, which stems from other reasons than a failure in sense-making or cognitive comprehension. I discuss my findings with Monika Fludernik’s influential theory of Natural Narratology, according to which all narratives concern experiential exchange between the teller and the recipient, which travels from one consciousness to the other through natural cognitive parameters grounded in real life schemata. Applying conversation analysis, I focus on scrutinizing the details of the turn-by-turn unfolding activities of the participants. My analysis demonstrates that Fludernik’s conception of naturality falls short in capturing the relevancies of naturally occurring storytelling. Ignoring the reflexive intentionality of telling and reception makes Natural Narratology ill-equipped to grasp the dynamics of experientiality in everyday narration.