12Narrative discourse
Abstract: This chapter investigates cognitive aspects of narrative discourse centered, first, on narrative and memory and, second, on narrative in interaction. It explores the strategies and mental processing participants in conversation employ to get a story straight, highlighting the role of rational contextual construction and evaluation vis-à-vis reliance on memory. Then the consideration of social aspects of narrative discourse focuses on tellability and evaluation, both of which depend on and help constitute such social functions as breaking the ice, exchanging personal information, entertaining, identifying group values, goals, and expectations. A final discussion of methodological issues and applications reviews perspectives on the study of spoken narrative from Labov onwards, touching on developmental narratology, along with newer approaches to storytelling such as cognitive narratology, and recent research on narrative in talk at work.
Keywords: narrative, storytelling, memory, evaluation, tellability
1Introduction
Narrative is a fundamental human resource for the organization of experience, sense making and talk-in-interaction. The stories we tell help reify our experiences and allow us to construct coherent autobiographical identities: this construction of identity through storytelling has both cognitive and social significance, enabling memory, molding our understanding of self and facilitating interaction with others. Our tendency toward the narrative mode of thought renders not just stories but also instructions, recipes, travelogues, reports and proposals with narrative forms and features.
To illuminate the forms and functions of narrative in verbal communication, this chapter will address, first, cognitive aspects of narrative in verbal communication in § 2, focusing in turn on narrative in interaction and narrative in memory, then social aspects of narration in verbal communication in § 3, focusing in turn on the perennial themes of tellability and evaluation, and closing, in § 4, with a discussion of methodological issues and current developments and their significance for applications in the area of verbal communication.
The data used in this investigation derive from two corpora of English conversation: (i) the Saarbrücken Corpus of Spoken English (SCoSE), the American conversation portion of which was recorded by my students at Northern Illinois University in interaction with their friends and families in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the British conversation portion of which was recorded by my students in Saarbrücken, Germany, during their visits to England between 2000 and 2010. (ii) The CallHome Corpus from the Linguistic Data Consortium, consisting of 120 long-distance phone calls lasting up to thirty minutes between native speakers of English recorded in the early 1990s. The participants received free phone calls for volunteering; most participants called family members or close friends. For the sake of consistency, excerpts from the CallHome Corpus have been adapted to the transcription conventions of the SCoSE.
2Cognitive aspects of narrative in verbal communication
Humans are preconditioned or acculturated to cognize experiences and plans in narrative form; the fundamental “a and then b, and then c” structure is so natural as to seem irrefutably logical, apparently hot-wired into our perception of events in the physical world. Of course, there can be diversions and digressions from this basic progression, but they tend to confirm through their marked structure the expectedness of the pattern “a then b then c“. Bruner (1991: 4) writes, ‘We organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative’. As Brockmeier (2000) argues, the process of autobiographical identity construction takes narrative form, synthesizing cultural and individual orders of time: thus, we narrate experience to internalize it as part of life stories (Linde 1993) or autobiographical identity (Brockmeier 2001). According to this view, we narrate a story for ourselves, and once we have this story (autobiographical identity), we bring it to discourses as the basis for particular stories fabricated in the particular context.
An important distinction is drawn between episodic memory and semantic memory by neuro-scientists (Tulving 1972, 1983, 1984): episodic memory consists in autobiographical events, including times, places, associated emotions, and other contextual information that can be explicitly stated. It is this episodic memory which allows us to travel back in time to recall personal experiences (Tulving 2002). Semantic memory is built up from the facts, concepts and schemata related to the items in episodic memory. Bruner and Weisser (1991: 135) describe autobiography using Tulving’s terms as ‘a canny act of putting a sampling of episodic memories into a matrix of organized and culturally schematized semantic memory’. The process of narration organizes and forms experience, but it must be accessible for purposes of both episodic and semantic remembering.
2.1Narrative in Interaction
The whole complex of issues surrounding storytelling in face-to-face interaction constitute cognitive aspects of verbal communication: production, reception, co-production of narrative in conversation. Many diverse linguistic structures highlight and support narrative discourse in natural contexts: they guide tellers in the production (and co-production) of stories and listeners in their reception. They allow (incipient) listeners to introduce and recognize narrative, to become listeners, to respond properly during the storytelling and to recognize and react properly to the conclusion, perhaps responding not just with comments and evaluations but with apposite stories of their own.
One finds plenty of research on how adults acculturate children into storytelling practices (Ochs, Smith and Taylor 1989; Blum-Kulka 1993; Blum-Kulka and Snow 1992), but there is none on how children acquire listening practices. Correct listening requires more than just saying ‘mhm’, ‘uh-huh’ and ‘wow’ at the right times, it presupposes recognition of genres, openings, episodes, closings and production of appropriate responses, including response stories mirroring themes, characters, stance and even lexical-syntactic structures from the foregoing story. Children must learn to produce and comprehend not just the standard mhm and wow, but also characteristic prefaces like this one time, climaxes like and I said to myself ’this is it’, and codas like and the rest is history as well as typical structural features of stories like repetition, details, and dialogue.
During the storytelling performance, both tellers and listeners produce evaluations and expressions of emotion. They share and compare attitudes toward and feelings about the events described. Sometimes a teller emotion x elicits a hearer emotion x, as when teller humor evokes listener humor, or sadness evokes sadness; but other times a teller emotion x elicits an appropriately paired listener emotion y, as when teller grief evokes listener sympathy or when the expression of guilt and contrition evokes understanding and forgiveness. Both tellers and listeners comment on the events in stories, evaluating actions and positioning themselves vis-à-vis goals and decisions described, agreeing and disagreeing, establishing rapport as well as personal and group identities.
The parameters of narrative in interaction emerge most clearly in the production of response stories in conversation. As they attend to stories told by others, listeners automatically recall parallel experiences and themes in their own life stories, then cobble them together into response stories matching those just told when they obtain the floor. Part of one’s identity as a member of a group consists in responding the same way as others, sharing similar associations, and, when appropriate, remembering apposite stories of one’s own. There is a fairly substantial literature on stories told specifically in response to other stories in conversation, especially Sacks comments on second stories at various points in his lectures (1992), and Ryave’s (1978) work on achieving a series of stories as well as my own work on response stories (Norrick 2000, 2010). Foregoing stories or series of stories place constraints on what can appropriately be told as a next story: in responding to a personal story with a story of one’s own, the two must be topically coherent; in responding to a story about some third person, the next story should concern the same person or another, perhaps related person, in a similar situation, reflecting the same basic theme and the same basic stance, if possible.
Recipients of personal stories often respond with ‘me too’ stories of their own, sometimes engaging in story topping to claim superiority for their own story. It is not rare for an erstwhile listener to produce her own story on a topic related to a story just told with a formulaic segue like that reminds me of the time or the same thing happened to me. In the excerpt below, two teenage girls are discussing relationships with boys. As Zoe finishes her story about a boy unacceptable for one reason, Mel tells a story about a boy she had to reject for a different reason, structuring her story so as to highlight its parallelism with the previous one.
| (1) | |||
| 22 | Zoe: | ‘I mean- | |
| 23 | I think you be a well good mate and everything’, | ||
| 24 | and like it only lasted a couple of weeks, | ||
| 25 | but he just go like- | ||
| 26 | he’s really think he was in love. | ||
| 27 | and I was just like ‘no, I don’t want a relationship like that’. | ||
| 28 | Mel: | yeah. | |
| 29 | he’s like the boy I went out with. | ||
| 30. | when we went out in like a kind of group, | ||
| 31 | I don’t- | ||
| 32 | I wouldn’t be allowed to be friendly to other people. | ||
| 33 | and apparently all he was going out with me was, | ||
| 34 | because he wanted to have sex before he was seventeen. | ||
| 35 | and I was like ‘you have the wrong girl’. | ||
| 36 | Zoe: | yeah, exactly. | |
| (SCoSE, London Teenager Talk 5: Mel and Zoe) | |||
In order to produce an appropriate response story, Mel must scan her memory for an experience she can plausibly offer as analogous to what Zoe has just narrated. Then she needs to remember pertinent details for narration, choosing parallel forms for ‘transforming experience into narrative syntax’. Mel also positions herself with respect to her suitor and adopts the same stance toward the relationship as Zoe expressed. Notice particularly the initial formulation ‘he’s like the boy I went out with’ in line 8 to introduce the objectively not so similar story, then again the similarity of the final reported speech in each case: Zoe’s and I was just like ‘no, I don’t want a relationship like that’ in line 27 and Mel’s and I was like ‘you have the wrong girl’ in line 35, both introduced with the quotative phrase ‘and I was like’. Zoe’s final assessment yeah, exactly ratifies Mel’s story as an appropriate response in any case.
2.2Narrative and memory
Labov’s original formulations ‘oral versions of personal experience’ (1967) and ‘transforming experiences into talk’ (1972), and his discussion in those essays foregrounded experience and talk, while they left remembering out of the picture, although his interviewers ask questions like: “What was the most important fight you remember?” (Labov and Waletzky 1967: 14), and his storytellers sometimes offer remarks such as: “Oh, yes. I can remember real well. I w=s just a girl. Fact, stayed with me quite a while” (Labov and Waletzky 1967: 14), showing that they recognize a relation between telling and remembering, even if the theoretical description proposed syncopates it. This raises the scintillating question of how we exploit memory for purposes of constructing narratives.
In his current work in progress on ‘The language of life and death’, Labov (forthcoming) speaks of ‘narrators shaping the remembered reality to conform to their interests’. Here remembering comes to sound like a selective process of choosing salient aspects of remembered past experiences for re-use in constructing currently relevant stories: we construct a (currently relevant) past based on selective remembering. The cognitive processes of collecting relevant stored information for current use resembles Chafe’s (1994) description of the process of remembering, of bringing ‘clusters of ideas’ into focus, of activating information (from semi-active or inactive states in the mind) into intonation units in the consciousness of the teller. According to Chafe, storytellers successively activate ideas through remembering in the construction of a narrative. This suggests a special kind of cognitive processing we can think of as ‘remembering for narration’, parallel to Slobin’s ‘thinking for speaking’.
In his research on differences between languages, Slobin (1987: 435) wrote:
The activity of thinking takes on a particular quality when it is employed in the activity of speaking. In the evanescent time frame of constructing utterances in discourse, one fits one’s thoughts into available linguistic forms. ... ‘Thinking for speaking’ involves picking those characteristics that a) fit some conceptualization of the event, and b) are readily encodable in the language.
Not just the encoding of a perceived event, but also the act of narrating an experience will necessarily impose a particular form on the experience, and this form must influence both the way the experience is presented in the current context and the way the experience is internalized for future narrative encoding (cf. Slobin 1996). This perspective echoes and supports the view that the process of transforming an internalized experience into narrative in a particular language (register) and context affects the form of the story told and the way the experience is interpreted within the autobiographical identity of the teller.
Narration helps organize and makes sense of experiences, especially something like an automobile accident where everything happens so fast. In the excerpt below Mary is telling for her family the course of the accident from the previous evening:
| (2) | |||
| 249 | Mary: | we really didn’t think it was that ba:d. | |
| 250. | we were going all right. | ||
| 251 | and then we rounded that curve and … | ||
| 252 | came out of the curve | ||
| 253 | and he said | ||
| 254 | “I started to accelerate out of the curve | ||
| 255 | and … hit that ice.” (1.5) | ||
| 256 | and he was in the other lane | ||
| 257 | and I thought he was gonna get control of it … | ||
| 258 | and he- | ||
| 259 | I thought he was turning to go back into our lane | ||
| 260. | Ralph: | m-hm | |
| 261 | Mary: | but he said he was still trying to keep control of the FISHtail | |
| 262 | so he obviously … overcorrected it | ||
| 263 | like his father said | ||
| 264 | because of the uh- | ||
| 265 | tho- he’s got a lot of play in his wheel | ||
| 266 | and … he said | ||
| 267 | he probably just overcorrected it | ||
| 268 | and that’s what started our spin | ||
| 269 | cause we spun this way. (2) | ||
| 270. | then all the way around | ||
| 271 | Amy: | you spun this way, okay | |
| 272 | he went to this lane and then you spun that way. | ||
| 273 | Mary: | yeah. | |
| 274 | Amy: | and then hit- | |
| 275 | Mary: | he just continued you know to do | |
| 276 | sideways | ||
| 277 | Ralph: | spun all the way around? three sixty? | |
| 278 | Mary: | yep. | |
| 279 | Pat: | and so? | |
| 280. | Mary: | it’s so weird because you don’t have time to be scared. | |
| (SCoSE. Complete Conversations, Mary at home) | |||
Not just Mary but other family members work to clarify the story. This illustrates the phenomenon of group memory, where periodic rehearsal of a story helps to solidify the experience for participants. Notice how not just Mary but other family members join in, attempting to clarify the story. Consider particularly Amy saying in lines 271–272: ‘you spun this way, okay. he went to this lane and then you spun that way’, followed by Mary’s confirmation ‘yeah’; and then Ralph’s questions ‘spun all the way around? three sixty?’ in line 277, which Mary again answers in the affirmative. Apparently Mary and her boyfriend Bryan have already told at least pieces of the story to Bryan’s father, cited in lines 262–263 as saying Bryan must have overcorrected it. Bryan’s own account of what happens also appears at two points: in lines 253–255 he is quoted, and again in lines 261 and 266–267, so Mary has already received significant input into her story from others before she presents it to her father and sister. Thus, the individual experiences woven into one’s life story (Brockmeier 2001) depend not just on remembering events, but are always a matter of reconstruction and re-evaluation based in part on narration for a particular audience and their contributions.
We can even speak of societal or cultural memory embodied in the stories members tell and retell (Brockmeier 2000; Brockmeier and Carbaugh (eds.) 2001; Wang and Brockmeier 2002). Individuals shape their separate experiences in various ways to fit into their life story and to connect their own life story to the history of their social groups and place (see Johnstone 1990, 1993). The institutional/ scholarly instantiation of this is found in oral history, where individual narrative versions of past experiences are collected and collated. Here we find some research on how trustworthy reports of details and dialogue are, on talk about memory and forgetting during narrative performance, clarity of recall and related issues (Pillemer 2000; Oring 1987; Neisser (ed.) 1982). Norrick (2005a) considers data like the passage below from an oral history interview:
| (3) | The whole band- this was the Abe Lyman Band. We went to Ames Iowa, and the dance band, they played for a dance at Ames Iowa. And then we went- I can’t remember just exactly ... to Lubbock Texas, and someplace else in New Mexico or something. No, that would- I haven’t thought about that for a long time. SCoSE, Indianapolis Interviews, Babe Burton |
We realize our memories are incomplete and fallible, but our individual narratives still necessarily form the basis for our sense of self through time, our autobiography within its cultural matrix (Bruner and Weisser 1991), including its situatedness within prevailing master narratives (Bamberg 2004, 2005).
Sometimes narrators may have to fill in gaps and re-imagine details as they piece together a story of a past experience. Remembering and retelling always require selecting and re-constructing (see Chafe 1998; Norrick 1998). Storytelling involves activating clusters of ideas, thereby re-conceptualizing past experience in current categories and language for current listeners. In personal stories, this may also entail filling in gaps where memory is fuzzy. Comments on remembering and forgetting can sometimes give us a look into how tellers fill in such gaps during the narrative process, e.g., in the passage below, where the teller admits not remembering what he thought, and then states outright that he is trying to ‘conjure up somewhat of an image’ in line 81. This is probably a pretty accurate description of much ‘remembering’ that goes on in constructing a narrative from long-past experiences. The process of telling a story from the distant past involves more than simple acts of remembering: the teller selects ‘clusters of ideas’ in Chafe’s sense, then synthesizes and serializes them in the light of current cognitive and contextual exigencies.
| (4) | |||
| 74 | Barry: | and I was told that I- I- I- um, | |
| 75 | was was going to, | ||
| 76 | I was going with three other boys to a uh, | ||
| 77 | a rabbi’s home, | ||
| 78 | a rabbi who you know who had lived in Europe and lived in America. | ||
| 79 | so I:, | ||
| 80. | I don’t remember exactly what I thought {laugh} thirteen years ago. | ||
| 81 | but I can- can conjure up somewhat of an image. | ||
| 82 | of {laugh} like a little bit of, | ||
| 83 | what I might have thought. | ||
| 84 | and I- I- ha- I was little afraid, | ||
| 85 | that um, | ||
| 86 | Sarah: | {laugh} | |
| 87 | Barry: | {laugh} that you know um | |
| 88 | I’m going to this rabbi’s house, | ||
| 89 | and he’s going to chastise me. | ||
| 90. | he’s going to say you Jewish boy, | ||
| 91 | what are doing with your life. | ||
| 92 | you shouldn’t- you should do something with your life. | ||
| 93 | for a change. | ||
| 94 | you should (()) learn some Torah. | ||
| 95 | what are you, | ||
| 96 | what what is this. | ||
| (CallHome, en 6179) | |||
After candidly admitting that he does not really remember what he thought at the time in line 80, the storyteller Barry nevertheless engages in a fairly lengthy description of what might have gone through his mind in lines 87–96. Significantly, Barry adopts a clear stance in his conjuring, critical of his unengaged younger self from his current adult perspective: he positions himself toward a master narrative (in the sense of Bamberg 2004, 2005), in which being a Jewish boy, doing something with your life, and learning some Torah all hang together in particular, evaluated ways. Even when storytelling fails to access clear, complete memories, it seems to put the teller in a state of mind congenial to imagining appropriate thoughts and details – and expressing particular attitudes toward them. Thus, remembering and narrating a story can affect the form and content of that story as internalized and woven into one’s autobiographical identity. The narrative practices of filling in gaps and conjuring up details based on background knowledge and imagination indicate that we do not have and apparently do not need complete stories in memory.
2.3Conclusions on cognitive aspects of narrative discourse
We have surveyed cognitive aspects of narrative in verbal communication, focusing particularly on narrative in interaction and narrative and memory. Specifically, we have explored the strategies a participant in conversation employs and the kinds of help she receives in getting her story of a recent automobile accident straight. The story as narrated owes a great deal to interaction with others both since the accident and during the telling. We considered the mental processing described by storytellers in filling in gaps in memory and conjuring up details where memory failed. Again the conversational evidence suggests a large role for rational contextual construction and evaluation vis-à-vis reliance on memory. Moreover, in imagining details the teller potentially adopts a new stance toward the former self and past experience. As Bamberg (2006, 4) puts it in a discussion of Bruner’s approach to life stories, ‘biographies are not playbacks of life events but require a point of view from where past events are tied together and are made relevant for a here & now–with an eye on the biographer’s future orientations’. Analysis of a story co-narrated by a young woman and other members of her family reveals her developing a personal narrative on the basis of plentiful input from the others. Autobiographical memory for experiences shared and later co-narrated by multiple participants must certainly bear the stamp of their interaction.
These various analyses provide evidence for the mitigated, contextual nature of initial personal story construction and again for the contextual pressures on remembering and re-telling. The practices of filling in gaps and conjuring details on the basis of general knowledge and imagination argue against complete stories in memory. The availability of story materials for non-narrative purposes suggests that what we commit to memory may not be as sequential and causal in organization as expected of narrative structures. Indeed, it seems almost counter-productive to maintain a complete monolithic narrative in memory, since it must be tailored to contextual conditions in each particular telling in any case. At the same time, multifarious correspondences between separate versions of the same story indicate surprisingly detailed memory for a specific story.
3Social aspects of narration in verbal communication
Obvious social functions of narration in verbal communication are to break the ice in conversation, to exchange personal information, to inject humor and to entertain, modulating rapport and ratifying membership in a Community of Practice (Eckert 1989, 2000; cf. Wenger 1998). Storytelling is always bound up with identity display (Goffman 1981; Schiffrin 1996), not just in the stories ones tells, but how they are fitted into group interaction, and how listeners receive them and respond with stories of their own. Autobiographical memory is organized in narrative form (Bruner 2001; Brockmeier 2001; cf. Bamberg 2006). Storytelling enables identity display in conversation with family, friends and colleagues, through positioning (Bamberg 2004) the teller vis-à-vis characters in the storyworld and listeners in the interaction, expressing support or disapproval through assessing, agreeing and disagreeing (Raymond and Heritage 2006; Pomerantz 1984), for instance, a mother telling stories about her daughter (Gordon 2007; Tannen 2007; cf. Ochs and Taylor 1992), students in various cliques at school (Eckert 1989), young women talking about relationships (Georgakopoulou 2007). Co-narration, team performance (Norrick 2004), twice-told tales (Norrick 1997), collaborative fantasy (Norrick 2000) all accrue to bonding and high rapport (see also this volume, chapter 11). Not just telling but also listening practices serve the needs of identity display, aligning tellers and listeners, demonstrating (im)politeness and coordinating interaction through nodding, smiling, and laughing together.
In the following, I focus on two major areas of research of particular interest for the social aspect of narration in interaction, namely tellability within the group, and evaluation.
3.1Tellability
The tellability of a story is something conversationalists negotiate in the given context, though in earlier approaches it was often viewed as an inherent property of the (detached) content of a story. Tellability is one of the gradient dimensions of narrative, in the sense of Ochs and Capps (2001), something negotiated by the teller and the listeners in particular local contexts. According to this earlier tradition, a story must be “reportable” or “tellable”: A would-be narrator must be able to defend the story as relevant and newsworthy to get and hold the floor and escape censure at its conclusion. Moreover, tellers do not simply relate events step by step; they characteristically stop the action at the climax for an evaluative comment, typically something like “and I said to myself, this is it.” Telling a story without evaluation or without a currently relevant point can lead to a loss of face for the teller, especially when the story is received with a scathing “what’s the point?”
Tellability is often equated with “local news” by tellers and listeners, in so far as their stories generally begin with some reference to a new or unexpected event, e.g., “the most gosh-awful wreck on the Ventura Freeway” (Sacks 1992). They also characteristically end with some final reference to the reportability of the story, as in the closing “It wasn’t in the paper last night. I looked.” The sort of news that makes a story salient today will no longer make it salient tomorrow. If you see a person every day at work, the sorts of news which count as tellable need not exceed the sort of thing one might hear on the evening news, but this same material will not suffice for a story to tell someone you see only every six months. As Sacks observes, stories about potential local news events seen or heard recently tend to be told first, then stories of personal accomplishment and experience since the last meeting occurred. Even when interlocutors run out of news, they can reminisce, telling old stories not for the sake of their content but for other reasons. A primary reason for telling a particular story in reminiscence is the opportunity for co-narration and laughing together (Norrick 1997, 2004).
According to more recent research perspectives, the tellability of a story depends not only on its (detached) content but also on its contextual (embedded) relevance for the participants involved. Thus, family dinner-table talk reveals children routinely telling familiar stories and relating unnewsworthy tales at the request of their parents as a part of the socialization process. Indeed, conversationalists often tell stories familiar to some or even all their listeners, and it is precisely the familiarity of story content which influences participation rights, since it presents the opportunity for significant co-narration. Familiar funny stories are typically prefaced in ways which label them as unoriginal (e.g., “remember the time we …”) and yet these signals animate participants to involvement rather than cuing them to question the relevance and tellability of the stories. The tellability of familiar stories hinges not on their content as such but on the dynamics of the narrative event itself, and humor makes co-narration desirable.
In his consideration of the ‘dark side’ of tellability, Norrick (2005) observes that some stories, though eminently tellable in their extra-ordinary content, are not tellable for many tellers under most circumstances, because they are too personal, too embarrassing, or obscene. Some newsworthy personal experiences are for that very reason untellable, because they would be embarrassing to the teller, the listeners, or both. Even if tellability is often equated with local news, and a story about “the most gosh-awful wreck on the Ventura Freeway” is tellable as news, at some point the gruesome details of the wreck with the dead and injured, the blood and guts may go beyond the tellable into the area of the no longer tellable. Conversationalists may tell transgressive stories “in the pursuit of intimacy,” pushing the envelope of propriety in order to modulate rapport, attending to cues like laughter to avoid rushing beyond acceptable standards (Jefferson, Sacks and Schegloff 1987; cf. Jones 2002; Coupland & Jaworski 2003). In relating a transgressive experience, the teller risks rejection on two levels: the other participants may refuse to listen to the offensive story; and they may negatively judge the teller for the behavior reported. On the positive side, the teller may gain the listener’s admiration for the experience reported, may modulate intimacy through self-disclosure, and may inspire the listener to reply with similar self-disclosure. Tellability is, then, a two-sided notion: Some events bear too little significance to reach the lower-bounding threshold of tellability, while others are so intimate (or frightening) that they lie on the dark side of tellability. The conversational narrator navigates the path between these two boundaries in various ways. Storytellers may worry about the scathing ‘so what?’ (Polyani 1979: 19 ff.), following a story with no clear point or significance, but there is often more shame in transgressing norms than in telling a boring story. The societal sanctions for obscenity are more immediate and obvious than those for telling pointless stories: responses to the former are immediate and unmistakable reprimands like “You can’t talk like that here!” while responses to the latter are ambiguous long-term behaviors such as avoidance. Within the scope of expectations about appropriate experiences to relate and appropriate ways of telling, narrators and their audiences co-construct their individual personalities and relationships through their negotiation of the upper boundary of tellability and their joint evaluation of the characters and events described.
3.2Evaluation
Evaluating persons and events being described are social, highly interactive phenomena (Goodwin and Goodwin 1992; Gordon 2007; cf. Pomerantz 1984). Evaluation was recognized as a typical feature of narratives of personal experience by Labov and Waletzky (1967: 29). Labov and Waletzky define evaluation as “the part of the narrative that reveals the attitude of the narrator towards the narrative” (1967: 32). Evaluation in narrative turns a mere series of events into a story that reflects the teller’s personal and cultural values and point of view. Labov (1972: 366) says that evaluation is “perhaps the most important element in addition to the basis narrative clause …: the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative, its raison d’être: why it was told, and what the narrator is getting at”, and he goes on to describe various types of evaluation in personal narratives. Evaluation can be either external in the form of explicit assessments or internal in the form of dialogue, repetition and formulaicity. There has been considerable research on evaluation in stories from Labov onwards (Tannen 1984; Polanyi 1985; Fleischman 1990; Toolan 1988; Linde 1993; Daiute and Nelson 1997; Wennerstrom 2001, among many others). Norrick (2010) focuses on the evaluation supplied by listeners, and on how storytellers respond to it.
Labov distinguished internal and external evaluation, but we shall see that evaluation can be doubly external, in the sense that it may originate in contributions from listeners to be incorporated into the performance of the principal storyteller. This observation suggests clearly that evaluation emerges as a part of the process of narration rather than inhering in the taleworld, as described by Young (1987). According to Young, any performance of personal narrative constitutes two types of self presentation: of the narrator as a character in the story, and of an identity as a storyteller in the present context. Young developed the distinction between the taleworld and the storyrealm; that is, between the events in the story and the presentation of those events in the form of a story (1987: 21). In first person narrative, the pronouns I and me act as a pivot between these provinces, referring both to a character in the taleworld and to the teller in the storyrealm. For a young teller talking about a recent experience, there may be little difference between the character-me and the teller-me, but for an elderly teller who is describing personal experiences in a taleworld long ago, the teller-me often differs greatly from the character-me. The tension between these two identities provides natural stuff for evaluation, evincing one sense in which evaluation emerges as a product of the storytelling performance.
Moreover, during a story performance the listeners can have a say as well. Storytellers may accept listener evaluations and incorporate them into their stories, but listeners may evaluate a story from different perspectives and at different points in the narrative than principal tellers, and this again highlights the interactive character of evaluation. Not only do tellers design their narrative performance for a particular context, tailoring their evaluation to the current recipients, but these recipients may also contribute actively to the evaluation of the story, and the teller can in turn react to their contributions in nuanced ways. To cite an example, in the passage below the storyteller offers evaluations of her own, but she also picks up evaluations from her listener and works them into her narrative. The two parties involved are good friends catching up with each others’ lives during an extended telephone call. As she tells her story, Bea says how ‘great’ the experience was in line 1 and how ‘nice and arty’ the people were in line 3, then she acknowledges and integrates the assessments her friend proposes not only in the form of single words such as ‘refreshing’ in lines 4–5, but also in the form of phrases like ‘good for the soul’ in lines 14–15, as well as generally positive evaluations like ‘oh that’s wonderful’ in line 11, which transmutes into ‘it was really great’ in line 12.
While Bea is clearly the primary speaker, Ally provides very frequent assessments of the actions Bea describes; Ally even completes an utterance of Bea’s for her in lines 13–14, showing how closely she is following the progress of the story. In turn, Bea responds to these assessments, integrating them into her ongoing story performance in various ways, resulting in a heavily evaluated story overall and in high rapport interaction. Of course, storytellers may sometimes just acknowledge assessments contributed by recipients with a cursory “yeah” or ratify them with “I know” or something similar, just as they sometimes react to recipient assessments with evaluative comments of their own as well.
3.3Conclusions on social aspects of narrative discourse
Exploration of tellability and evaluation in storytelling reveal multifarious social aspects of narration in verbal communication. Tellability and evaluation are aspects of storytelling dependent on and constitutive for such social functions as breaking the ice, exchanging personal information, entertaining, identifying group values, goals, and expectations. Positioning oneself, claiming membership in and delineating boundaries in communities of practice, reciprocally depend upon how listeners offer assessment and how tellers ratify and incorporate them into their storytelling performances. Tellability is Janus-like with both a lower-bounding threshold, ensuring that a story sufficiently transcends quotidian expectations, and an upper-bounding limit, forbidding stories too intimate or frightening on the ‘dark side’ of what is tellable in the current context. Conversational narrators negotiate these boundaries with their listeners from one context to the next. Evaluation in narrative may begin with the primary teller, but listeners will react to their evaluations and perhaps provide evaluations of their own for the teller to accept or reject and perhaps to incorporate into the ongoing narrative.
4Methodological issues and applications
Methodologically, the study of narration in interaction begins with Labov’s research on stories elicited in an interview situation. Labov essentially built a specific version of tellability into his corpus by requesting stories on topics like important fights and near-death experiences, and he defined a minimal narrative as at least two past tense clauses in irreversible order. Later researchers have objected both to Labov’s method of elicitation and his narrow definition of narrative. As Schegloff (1997: 104) puts it in a collection of papers published in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Labov and Waletzky’s path-breaking study, we might “entertain the possibility that the constitutive practices of storytelling incorporate recipients and that storytelling abstracted from its interactional setting, occasioning, and uptake is an academically hybridized form”. Conversation Analysis stresses audience design and the sequential organization of storytelling in talk-in-interaction, viewing each narrative as a situated, emergent performance (Sacks 1992). A complete account of conversational storytelling must take into consideration the contributions of recipients and show how they are incorporated into the narrative performance in its interactional setting (Norrick 2010).
Ochs and Capps (2001) discuss a whole range of new perspectives to move beyond the traditional view of narrative as single teller production. By contrast with Labov’s insistence on past tense clauses in strictly sequential order, Chafe (1994) has demonstrated the significance of various linguistic factors besides sequence in the organization and remembering of stories, Hopper (1997) questions the ontological assumptions behind a posited underlying sequential order of discrete events in memory which are recapitulated in storytelling, and Bamberg (2005) argues that events, scenes, actors and actions are products of more global discourse activities rather than prerequisites for them. Labov’s narrow definition has given way to looser frameworks such as the small stories approach (Bamberg 2006, 2008; Georgakopoulou 2007; Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008; cf. Norrick 2000), while other researchers have shown the importance of wider perspectives, for instance Bruner on the narrative construction of reality (1987, 1991) and Linde on life stories (1993). Fludernik (1993, 1996) extrapolates from conversational storytelling to narrative in literary genres in insightful ways.
At the same time, we find scholarly interest in developmental patterns in narrative performance across the life span. First, there is research using elicited narrative productions from children as in the “frog story” experiments (Bamberg 1987; Berman and Slobin 1994). Then one finds investigation of narrative skills in children, based e.g., on data from family dinner-table talk where children relate stories at the request of their parents as a part of the socialization process (Ochs et al. 1989; Blum-Kulka 1993; and Blum-Kulka and Snow 1992). At the other end of the developmental curve, Matsumoto (2009, 2011) and Norrick (2009) have examined narrative and identity in elderly storytellers.
Cognitive narratology is a fairly recent development concerned with storytelling practices in its relation to mind (Herman 2009). Cognitive narratology studies narrative and mind in print texts, face-to-face interaction, cinema, radio and television broadcasts, computer-mediated virtual environments, and other storytelling media. It borrows eclectically from reader response theory, as described by Ingarden (1973), Iser (1978) and others, scripts/ schema theory, with its roots in the thinking of Bateson (1953) and Goffman (1974), but developed for narrative in conversation by Tannen (1978, 1979), discursive psychology, as elaborated by Edwards and Middleton (1986), Middleton and Edwards (1990) and elsewhere to describe emotion, temporality and related aspects of narrative (see Eder 2003; Ryan 2004; Herman 2007; Keen 2007).
Recently the forms and functions of narration in talk at work have been receiving increasing attention (see Muller 1997; Taylor et al. 2011). These studies have shown that organizational narratives provide perfect sites for investigating ‘individual and collective action and meanings, as well as the process through which social life and human relationships are made and changed’ (Laslett 1999: 392). Taking a narrative pragmatic approach allows examination not only of what people do with narratives in talk at work (that is the functions of narratives) but also how people do it in a moment-by-moment unfolding of a narrative (see Holmes 2005, Holmes 2006). Issues of power and gender arise in narrative interaction in talk at work, while narratives also reveal patterns of cooperate identity and cooperate culture.
5Conclusions
The treatment of cognitive aspects of narrative discourse centered, first, on narrative and memory and, second, on narrative in interaction. We explored the strategies and mental processing participants in conversation employ to get a story straight. The conversational evidence suggests a large role for rational contextual construction and evaluation vis-à-vis reliance on memory.
The consideration of social aspects of narrative discourse focused, first, on tellability and, second, on evaluation. Tellability and evaluation in storytelling both depend on and help constitute such social functions as breaking the ice, exchanging personal information, entertaining, identifying group values, goals, and expectations.
Finally, the discussion of methodological issues and applications mustered perspectives on the study of spoken narrative from Labov onwards, touching on developmental narratology, along with newer approaches to storytelling such as cognitive narratology, and recent research on narrative in talk at work.
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