Narrative Interaction

Book excerpt: Telling stories in conversations is intricately interwoven with the interactive and local functions of story telling. Telling stories demands a certain kind of context and in itself establishes a particular interactive reality. Thus, narration is a specific kind of verbal interaction, governed by contextualizing devices, genre-specific cooperative regularities and corresponding verbal features. It plays an important role in institutional as well as in private modes of communication. The volume focuses on narration as a contextualized and contextualizing activity, which allocates specific structural tasks to the participants in the narrative process (narrator, co-narrator, listener). Thus, the research questions are oriented towards story telling under a functional and interactive perspective. The contributions analyze recordings of authentic narrations in different functions using different kinds of qualitative reconstructive methods. The data come from everyday as well as institutional settings and the languages covered are English, German, Greek, Hungarian, and Italian.