Narrative discourse in interviews to linguistically mixed couples

Las tecnologías de la información y las comunicaciones: Presente y futuro en el análisis de córpora. Actas del III Congreso Internacional de Lingüística de Corpus. pp. 467-484.

Recent studies have pointed at the crucial importance of narrative in the evolution of human language (Simone 2009; Lazard 2006; Victorri 2002). Narrating, i.e. telling past stories or imagining still to come or never existed ones, is a primordial and irrepressible need in human experience, which has presumably shaped grammar at a very deep level and which appears to be an exclusive and ubiquitous property of verbal languages. As a consequence of this primeval relation, languages display a wide array of tools aimed at implementing the narrative function. The study of narrative applies to many social science fields, ranging from literary theory, history, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, art, drama, film, theology, philosophy, education and even evolutionary biological science. Linguists’ attention on narrative has often focused mainly on the analysis of the complex products of long-standing literary or oral tradition. In particular, research on oral narrative has been carried out mainly on bodies of elicited personal/autobiographical narratives (cf. Labov & Waletzky 1967; Labov 1982, 1997; Gee 1991). In this study we argue, instead, for the interest of the simplest and most fundamental context where narration surfaces, namely spontaneous informal conversation. We further characterize our object of analysis by combining two different perspectives: a sociolinguistic one, which concentrates on youth language; and a contrastive one, which compares the use of narrative in English and Spanish youthtalk. The overall approach envisaged is ultimately corpus-based, in that the analysis is carried out on and through two comparable corpora of youth language, that have been both constructed at the University of Bergen: the Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT), and the Madrid subcorpus of the Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente (COLAm). Studies carried out over the last decade (cf. Bucholtz 2011, Stenström & Jørgensen 2009, Androutsopoulos & Georgakopoulou 2003) have demonstrated the interest of youth language as a site of innovation and paved the way for further research from a wide range of perspectives. Contrastive corpus-based studies have been carried out on the Bergen corpora, which have investigated different aspects of youth language, with special reference to discourse markers (Stenström and Jørgensen 2009). And yet a model for the investigation of the forms and functions of narrative in youthspeak is still to be developed. In this contribution we intend to make a first step in this direction, presenting a corpus-based investigation on how speakers from the same age-group in two of the most spoken and influential languages in the world use and construct narrative in conversation. After outlining the basic functional and structural properties of narrative in this language modality, we will move to illustrate the contrastive analysis conducted on specific aspects of the body of data considered. We will examine, for instance, the dynamics between narration and non-narration, “narrated world” and “commented world” (Weinrich 1964), from both a pragmatic and a grammatical point of view; the quotation strategies and the other devices used by young speakers to mark the frontier between their and the others’ voices; aspects of modalization, etc. References Androutsopoulos & Georgakopoulou (eds) (2003). Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam, John Benjamins. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) “The Epic and the Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study in the Novel”, in M. Holquist (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination, Austin, University of Texas Press. Bucholtz (2011). White Kids: Language, Race and Styles of Youth Identity, Cambridge University Press. COLA: Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente www.cola.tk COLAm: Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid www.colam.org COLT:www.uib.hf.aksis/colt UNO: www.uib.hf.aksis/uno Helm J. (ed.) (1967). Essays on the verbal and visual arts, 7. Special Issue: Oral Versions of Personal Experience. Three Decades of Narrative Analysis, University of Washington Press. Gee, J.P. (1991). “A linguistic approach to narrative”, Journal of Narrative and Life History, 1: 15-39. Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse: An essay in Method. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press. Jørgensen A. M. (2010). “Vocatives and phatic communion in teenage talk”, in: Jørgensen, J. N. (ed.) (2010). Jørgensen A. M. (2009). “En plan used as a hedge in Spanish Teenage Language”, in Stenström, A. B. & A. M. Jørgensen (eds) Youngspeak in a multilingual perspective, Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 95-11. Jørgensen , A. M. (2008). “COLA: Un Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente”, Anejos a Oralia. Jørgensen, A. M., Stenström, A. B (2008). “¿Una cuestión de cortesia? Estudio contrastivo del lenguaje fático en la conversación juvenil”, Special Issue of Pragmatics 18:4. Jørgensen, A. M. (2008). “La funcion fática de los vocativos en la conversación juvenil de Madrid y Londres”, in: Actas del III Congreso EDICE. Jørgensen, J. N. (ed.) (2010). Love Ya Hate Ya: The Sociolinguistic Study of Youth Language and Youth Identities, Cambridge UP. Labov, W.– Waletsky, J. (1967). “Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience”, in Helms (1967). Labov, W. (1972). “The Transformation of experience in narrative syntax”, in Language in the Inner City. Studies in the Black English Vernacular, University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, W. (1997). “Some Further Steps in Narrative Analysis”, Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7. 1-4: 395-415. Lazard, G. (2006). La quête des invariants interlangues: la linguistique est-elle une science?, Paris, Champion. Simone, R. (2009). “Ex narratione grammatica”, Allegoria, 21.59. Stenström, A.-B. & Jørgensen, A. M. (eds) (2009). Youngspeak in a Multilingual Perspective, Amsterdam, Benjamins. Stenström, A-B., Andersen, G. and Hasund, I. K. (2002). Trends in Teenage Talk. Amsterdam, Benjamins. Toolan, M. J. (2001). Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction, London and New York, Routledge. Victorri, B. (2002). “Homo narrans: le rôle de la narration dans l'émergence du langage”, Langages, 36.146: 112-125. Weinrich, H. (1964). Tempus: Besprochene und Erzählte Welt, Stuttgart, Kohlhammer. """

Journal of Pragmatics, 1982

Remarkably consiste it patterns of linguistic structuriag are a ,~urface feature of everyday oral stories. In this paper, I concentrate on thc types of information found in all st3ry texts (Event, Durative-Descriptive, and Evaluative) and the linguistic encoding and necessary izuer-rela:ionships which obtain among these information types. The social constraints imposed by the demands for appropriate behas4or placed on speaker and hearer by the socially cor~struct~d sieuation of a conversational sto~rytelling are also explored. The ~emporal semantic distinction between State and Event is sho~at to. be basic to narrative vs. non-narra@e discourse. Various narrative genres are described and distinctions are made between past/p,res~:nt/future and hypoth~,~ical m~rratives: specific and genetic narratives; and '~'stofies" and "report¢' both in respect to tl~e encoding each r~eives in Englisk language discourse and the semantic interpretation accorded the various clause~ which make up the text. Finally, the constraints on "stoeavorthine~,~s" of aarratable incidents are shown to depend on the de~ee of relovance to the "bu~finess at hand" in the interaction which the speaker can demonstrate through his telling•

Journal of Pragmatics, 2009

The present volume comprises several contributions to the study of 'self' and 'identity', two notions that in the last decade have become central in many research areas. In Selves and Identities in Narrative and Discourse three different orientations are represented: the first is rooted in sociolinguistics, the second is ethnomethodologically informed, and the third one draws explicitly on narratives. Despite working in different traditions, the contributions to the volume share the view that self and identity are not essential properties of the individual person but are constituted in talk and social practice. The volume contains an introduction, in which the editors explicate the three different orientations, 13 chapters, and a subject index. According to the editors, in the sociolinguistic tradition, with the exception of Hymes and maybe Labov, narratives were not, until recently, acknowledged as a special genre for identity analysis. Rather, identity was considered to be the result of repeated choices in language use-as the work of Tabouret-Keller and Gumperz demonstrates. In the ethnomethodological tradition, the issue of identity is variously treated. More specifically, Sacks' approach to ''category bound activities'' uses membership categorization analysis (MCA) to explore identities; on the other hand, Critical Discourse Analysis views identities as aspects of larger political and ideological contexts, while conversation analysis (CA) examines identities as locally and situationally occasioned. Finally, narrative approaches take narratives to be the privileged genre for the study of selves and identities and the ordering principle that gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless life. What unifies the chapters of the volume is, according to the editors, the view of narratives as territories where ''identity ontologies'' can be questioned and the conviction that the discursive and narrative processes generating identities are parts of interactive and ''communal'' practices. Amanda Minks' chapter ('Goblins like to hear stories: Miskitu children's narratives of spirit encounters') examines interactive stories told by Miskitu children on Corn Island. Minks focuses on the poetic features, the rhetorical organization, and the social effects of the narratives, suggesting that the children's co-constructed narratives articulate a sense of emplacement in the natural/social/cosmological world. By telling stories and interweaving spirits, landscapes, and known social networks Miskitu children position themselves in a social world that is their own. The second contribution ('Storying as becoming: identity through the telling of conversion') by Cecilia Castillo Ayometzi investigates how Mexicans of an immigrant community come to appropriate and sustain an alternative identity-a ''Christian identity''-brought about through their active participation in a Baptist mission. The tool available for the maintenance of this new identity is a story of conversion, through which tellers reorganize their conception of self and are led into the construction of a collective identity that offers a desirable standing in the community. Catherine Evans Davies ('Language and identity in discourse in the American South: sociolinguistic repertoire as expressive resource in the presentation of self') uses an interactional sociolinguistic methodology to study the style shifting of self-defined ''bidialectal'' speakers of Southern American English. Davies explores the ''reflectivity'' (a cover term for consciousness and awareness) of speakers, demonstrating that there are differing degrees of awareness and differing degrees of ability to shift styles out of context. She also examines the agency of speakers, indicating that differences can be found not only in shifting styles for the presentation of self, but also in crafting a style on the basis of ideological beliefs about Southern English. Isabella Paoletti and Greer Cavallaro Johnson, in their chapter 'Doing being ordinary in an interview narrative with a second generation Italian-Australian woman', combine narrative analysis with a CA approach. The researchers www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica, 2013

How to cite Complete issue More information about this article Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Scientific Information System Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative disponível em www.scielo.br/prc

2011

Livre: Analyzing narrative: discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives FINA Anna De, GEORGAKOPOULOU Alexandra.

2006

Against the background of the turn towards constructivism and its impact on the current discussion of methodology, the author of the article reconstructs the specific, interactive plausibilization that autobiographical narrative achieves. The analysis focuses on those sequences where the narrator describes her language acquisition processes. Behavioural data (her elaborate knowledge of German, which is obvious throughout the interview) are contrasted with the account of her crucial experiences where she states having acquired German mainly through the medium of television. The specific role of suffering is highlighted and connected to results from the field of language acquisition research and related to the narrator, demonstrating how closely successful acquisition and emotions are related to each other.

The paper is devoted he main approaches to the understanding of the essence of the narrative in the area of linguistic and psychological researches. We note the specifics of the transformation of knowledge about the nature of narrative, and highlight its main characteristics: the presence of event sequence (temporality), the interaction narrator and narratator, the configuration of their positions; the allocation of narrativity as a special communicative strategy in the process narration and levels of narrativity in the text. The article notes two-way the necessity of bringing notions, concepts and methods of linguistics and psychology. In the study of narrative within psychology formed two main directions: the study of life stories (events) and analysis narration as a special discursive practices. Key worlds: narrative, narrativity, narration as a discursive practice, temporality, important life event.

2006