Article published in:
Narrative Inquiry
Vol. 29:1 (2019) ► pp. 1–28

Generational styles in oral storytelling

What can be learned from narrative priming?

| University of Potsdam
When it comes to autobiographical narratives, the most spontaneous and natural manner is preferable. But neither individually told narratives nor those grounded in the communicative repertoire of a social group are easily comparable. A clearly identifiable tertium comparationis is mandatory. We present the results of an experimental ‘Narrative Priming’ setting with French students. A potentially underlying model of narrating from personal experience was activated via a narrative prime, and in a second step, the participants were asked to tell a narrative of their own. The analysis focuses on similarities and differences between the primes and the students’ narratives. The results give evidence for the possibility to elicit a set of comparable narratives via a prime, and to activate an underlying narrative template. Meaningful differences are discussed as generational and age related styles. The transcriptions from the participants that authorized the publication are available online.
Keywords: generational styles, priming, sociolinguistics, experimental, positioning, narrative templates, French, doing storytelling, narratives from personal experience, spoken language
Published online: 02 July 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.18042.ger
Bibliography

Bibliography

Adam, J.-M., & Heidmann, U.
(2004) Des genres à la généricité. L’exemple des contes (Perrault et Grimm). Langages, 153, 62–72. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Archakis, A., & Papazachariou, D.
(2008) Prosodic Cues of Identity Construction: Intensity in Greek Young Women’s Conversational Narratives. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 12(5), 627–647. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bamberg, M.
(1997) Positioning Between Structure and Performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1–4), 335–342. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bamberg, M., & Georgakopoulou, A.
(2008) Small Stories as a New Perspective in Narrative and Identity Analysis. Text & Talk, 28(3), 377–396. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Barthes, R.
(1966) Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits. Communications, 8, 1–27. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bartlett, F. C.
(1932) Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bock, K. J.
(1986) Syntactic Persistence in Language Production. Cognitive Psychology, 18(3), 355–387. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chafe, W.
(1986) Beyond Bartlett. Narratives and Remembering. Poetics Today, 15, 139–151. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1998) Things We Can Learn From Repeated Tellings of the Same Experience. Narrative Inquiry, 8(2), 269–285. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Comparini, L.
(2013) The Use of Justifications in the Linguistic Construction of Agency and Social Connection in Latina Mother-Child Conflict. Journal of Pragmatics, 57, 57–67. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Coupland, N., Nussbaum, J. F., & Grossmann, A.
(1993) Introduction: Discourse, Selfhood, and the Lifespan. In N. Coupland & J. Nussbaum (Eds.), Language and language behaviors series: Vol. 4. Discourse and Lifespan Identity (pp. x–xxviii). Newbury Park (CA): SAGE.Google Scholar
Davies, B., & Harré, R.
(1990) Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20(1), 43–63. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
De Fina, A., & Georgakopoulou, A.
(2012) Analyzing narrative: Discourse and sociolinguistic perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Deppermann, A.
(2013) Positioning in Narrative Interaction. Narrative Inquiry, 23(1), 1–15. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
[ p. 20 ]
Gerstenberg, A.
(2011) Generation und Sprachprofile im höheren Lebensalter: Untersuchungen zum Französischen auf der Basis eines Korpus biographische Interviews. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.Google Scholar
Gerstenberg, A., Fuchs, S., Kairet, J., Schroeder, C., & Frankenberg, C.
(2018) A Crosslinguistic, Longitudinal Case Study of Pauses and Interpausal Units in Spontaneous Speech Corpora of Older Speakers of German and French. Speech Prosody, 9. (online) CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, C.
(2015) Narrative as Talk-in-Interaction. In A. de Fina & A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.), The Handbook of Narrative Analysis (pp. 197–218). Malden, MA, Oxford, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hamilton, H. E.
(1999) Language and Communication in Old Age. Some Methodological Considerations. In H. E. Hamilton (Ed.), Language and Communication in Old Age. Multidisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 3–22). New York, London: Garland.Google Scholar
Hausendorf, H., & Quasthoff, U. M.
(2005) Sprachentwicklung und Interaktion im Spracherwerb. Eine linguistische Studie zum Erwerb von Diskursfähigkeiten. Radolfzell: Verlag für Gesprächsforschung.Google Scholar
Holšánová, J.
(2008) Discourse, Vision, and Cognition. Amsterdam, Philadelphia (PA): Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, B.
(1999) Lingual Biography and Linguistic Variation. Language Sciences, 21(3), 313–321. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2006) A New Role for Narrative in Variationist Sociolinguistics. Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 46–55. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Köber, C., Schmiedek, F., & Habermas, T.
(2015) Characterizing Lifespan Development of Three Aspects of Coherence in Life Narratives: A Cohort-Sequential Study. Developmental Psychology, 51(2), 260–275. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W.
(2013) The Language of Life and Death: The Transformation of Experience in Oral Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W., & Waletzky, J.
(1967) Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (pp. 12–44). Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Laham, S. M., & Kashima, Y.
(2013) Narratives and Goals. Social Psychology, 44(5), 303–310. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C.
(1955) The Structural Study of Myth. The Journal of American Folklore, 68(270), 428–444. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mahowald, K., James, A., Futrell, R., & Gibson, E.
(2016) A Meta-analysis of Syntactic Priming in Language Production. Journal of Memory and Language, 91, 5–27. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Marini, A., Boewe, A., Caltagirone, C., & Carlomagno, S.
(2005) Age-Related Differences in the Production of Textual Descriptions. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 34(5), 439–463. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McNamara, T. P.
(1994) Theories of Priming: II. Types of Primes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23(3), 507–520.Google Scholar
Nelson, K.
(1993) The Psychological and Social Origins of Autobiographical Memory. Psychological Science, 4(1), 7–14. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Norrick, N. R.
(1998) Retelling Stories in Spontaneous Conversation. Discourse Processes, 25, 75–97. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
[ p. 21 ]
Ochs, E., & Capps, L.
(2001) Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge (Mass.), London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ouyang, J., & McKeown, K.
(2014) Towards Automatic Detection of Narrative Structure: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14, Reyjkjavik, Iceland, May 2014). LREC, 9, [1–8].Google Scholar
Paltridge, B.
(1995) Working with Genre: A Pragmatic Perspective. Journal of Pragmatics, 24, 393–406. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pascher, F.
(2016) Narrative Struktur und Erzählstrategien in autobiographischen Anekdoten französischer Studenten (Unpublished master’s thesis). Freie Universität: Berlin.Google Scholar
Phoenix, C., Smith, B., & Sparkes, A. C.
(2010) Narrative Analysis in Aging Studies: A Typology for Consideration. Journal of Aging Studies, 24, 1–11. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, M. J., & Ferreira, V. S.
(2008) Structural Priming: A Critical Review. Psychological Bulletin, 134(3), 427–459. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Polanyi, L.
(1981) Telling the Same Story Twice. Text & Talk, 1(4), 315–336.Google Scholar
Praat = Boersma, P., & Weenink, D.
([2015]) Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer. Retrieved from http://​www​.praat​.org
Propp, V.
(1968) Morphology of the Folk Tale [1928]. Translated by Laurence Scott. Bloomington: The Americal Folklore Society and Indiana University.Google Scholar
Sacks, H.
(1995) April 24: Second Stories. In H. Sacks & G. Jefferson (Eds.), Lectures on conversation. Volumes I & II (1st ed., pp. 764–772). Oxford: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Smith, G. G., Majchrzak, D., Hayes, S., & Drobisz, J.
(2011) Computer Games versus Maps before Reading Stories: Priming Readers’ Spatial Situation Models. Educational Technology & Society, 14(1), 158–168.Google Scholar
Walker, V. G., Roberts, P. M., & Hedrick, D. L.
(1988) Linguistic Analyses of the Discourse Narratives of Young and Aged Women. Folia Phoniatrica, 40, 58–64. CrossrefGoogle Scholar