The Nature of Meaning of Stories in Conversation

Although everyday stories told in the course of ongoing conversations are as open to multiple readings as many literary texts, the participants in the conversational storytelling situation must assign a meaning to a given telling of a story in order to facilitate the absorption of the story into the state of general talk which normally obtains. In the present paper, work done by the American linguistic school of narrative analysis (as begun by Labov and Waletzky and further developed by the author of this paper) is brought together with insights into conversational storytelling from ethno-methodological conversation analysts (Sacks, Jefferson, etc.) The meaning of a given telling of a story is shown to derive from both the structure of the story as told and the process of interpretation which goes on in the conversation after the telling. Special attention is paid to the «next story» which can follow the telling of a «first story» in a conversation. It is argued that the next story is crucially constrained by the first story, while the first story is assigned its meaning partially from the topic of the following one

False Starts Can be True

Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1978), pp. 628-63

Discourse Structure and Discourse Interpretation

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure (1997

Offender Theme Analyses in a Crime Narrative: An Applied Approach

There is a great deal of research on the structure of narrative and its mode, and on the narrative positioning and counter positioning of the actor in legal and social contexts. In offender narratives, personal experiences are embedded for observation and analysis of particular realities that contextualize a disposition of the perpetrator being ‘an undergoer’ rather than an ‘effector’ of actions. This is evaluated in the shift from a narrated action to a speaker utterance in prospection and also in anticipation of the criminal act. Using ‘grammatical logic’, it is also possible to demonstrate how the crucial event (the crime) is not a cause, but an effect of a personal theme that encapsulates pattern of circumstances when the narrative outcome in criminal narrative becomes the product of its discursive practices. This is the ‘story of intentionality’ (my term) in crime narratives, characteristically embedded within the 1st the story of crime, the 2nd is the story of investigation [14, 20]. Using techniques from functional grammar and critical stylistics for discourse analysis, I intend to show an effective approach for the search of offender theme that underlies an act of crime. These disciplines provide the analyst with the linguistic material to analyse intersentential cohesion in a chain of semantically linked sentences (in written or spoken discourse) that explore the ways in which things are ‘made to look’ in the structure and functions of the English language. As a case study, I am using an offender narrative from Tony Parker’s book Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers (1990) showing an effective approach for the search of personal themes underlying the act of crime. Offender theme analyses are also valuable for evaluating the changing nature or development of offender characteristics pre or post crime

Discourse understanding

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-57)Performed pursuant to contract no. 400-81-0030 of the National Institute of Educatio

The American Story: Cultural Constraints On The Meaning And Structure Of Stories In Conversation.

PhDLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/178413/2/7822985.pd

Discourse Structure and Discourse Interpretation

this paper, we will address the well known problem of the apparent non-linear flow of temporal information in narrative. We will show that many seeming exceptions to the Strong Narrative Hypothesis (snh) (Polanyi, 1987) which states that the order of event clauses in a text is isomorphic with the order of events in the model of the text can be accommodated within the snh when the hierarchical structure of the narrative text itself is understood. In our discussion in the present paper we will use the formal machinery of the Linguistic Discourse Model (ldm), a recursive discourse grammar developed by Polanyi and Scha in a series of papers (Polanyi and Scha 1984; Polanyi 1987, 1988, 1996; Prust, Scha and van den Berg 1994; Scha and Polanyi 1988) to suggest a proper treatment of some classes of putative counterexamples to the snh. In doing so, our aim is to demonstrate the utility of the ldm framework in helping to identify and resolve complex issues in the structure and interpretation of natural discourse. 2 Interpretation of temporal relations in discours