Article published In:
Narrative in ‘societies of intimates’Edited by Lesley Stirling, Jennifer Green, Tania Strahan and Susan Douglas
[Narrative Inquiry 26:2] 2016
► pp. 173–192
Edited by Lesley Stirling, Jennifer Green, Tania Strahan and Susan Douglas
[Narrative Inquiry 26:2] 2016
► pp. 173–192
Narrative in ‘societies of intimates’
Common ground and what makes a story
When the Australian writer Richard Flanagan accepted the 2014 Man Booker Prize for fiction, he said that “As a species it is story that distinguishes us”. While the prize was given for a literary work written in English, Australia and the surrounding regions are replete with a rich diversity of oral traditions, and with stories remembered and told over countless generations and in many languages. In this article we consider both the universality and the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic diversity of various forms of narrative. We explore the question of what a linguistic typology of narrative might look like, and survey some of the literature relevant to this issue. Most specifically, we ask whether some observed differences in narrative style, structure, or delivery could derive from social features of the communities which produce them: their social density, informational homogeneity, and the high degree of common ground they share.
Keywords: common ground, oral traditions, verbal art, narrative, ‘societies of intimates', typology
References (77)
Bamberg, M., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text and Talk, 28(3), 377–396. 
Bani, E. (2001). The morphodirectional sphere. In J. Simpson, D. Nash, M. Laughren, P. Austin, & B. Alpher (Eds.), Forty years on: Ken Hale and Australian languages (pp. 477–480). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Bartlett, F.C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bauman, R. (1986). Story, performance, and event: Contextual studies of oral narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baynham, M. (2003). Narratives in space and time: Beyond “backdrop” accounts of narrative orientation. Narrative Inquiry, 13(2), 347–366.
Berman, R., & Slobin, D. (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Berndt, C.H. (1963). Art and aesthetic expression. In H. Sheils (Ed.), Australian Aboriginal studies: A symposium of papers presented at the 1961 research conference, May 1961, Canberra (pp. 256–277). Melbourne: Oxford UP.
Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1–21.
. (1994). The ‘remembered’ self. In U. Neisser & R. Fivush (Eds.), The remembering self: Construction and accuracy in the self-narrative (pp. 41–54). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carruthers, J. (2012). Discourse and text. In R. Binnick (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect (pp. 306–334). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chafe, W. (Ed.). (1980). The pear stories: Cognitive, cultural and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Charola, E., & Meakins, F. (2016). Yijarni: True stories from Gurindji country. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Clark, H.H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Colby, B. (1970). The description of narrative structures. In P. Garvin (Ed.), Cognition: A multiple view (pp. 177–192). NY: Spartan Books.
Dautenhahn, K. (2002). The origins of narrative: In search of the transactional format of narratives in humans and other social animals. International Journal of Cognition and Technology: Co-existence, Convergence, Co-evolution (IJCT), 1(1), 97–123.
De Vries, L. (2006). Areal pragmatics of New Guinea: Thematization, distribution and recapitulative linkage in Papuan narratives. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(6), 811–828.
Ellis, E.M. (2016). Pictures from my memory: My story as a Ngaatjatjarra woman. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Evans, N. (2010). Dying words: Endangered languages and what they have to tell us. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Gardner, R., & Mushin, I. (2007). Post-start-up overlap and disattentiveness in talk in a Garrwa community. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 30(3), 35.1–35.14.
. (2015). Expanded transition spaces: The case of Garrwa. Frontiers in Psychology, 61: 251.
Givón, T. (1979). On understanding grammar. Orlando: Academic Press.
. (2005). Contexts as other minds: The pragmatics of sociality, cognition and communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Givón, T., & Young, P. (2002). Cooperation and interpersonal manipulation in the society of intimates. In M. Shibatani (Ed.), The grammar of causation and interpersonal manipulation (pp. 23–56). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Heath, S.B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(1), 49–76.
Heiss, A. (2003). Dhuuluu-Yala: To talk straight–publishing Indigenous literature. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Holmes, J. (1998). Narrative structure: Some contrasts between Maori and Pakeha storytelling. Multilingua, 17(1), 25–57.
. (2003). ‘I couldn’t follow her story...’ Ethnic differences in New Zealand narratives. In J. House, G. Kaspar, & S. Ross (Eds.), Misunderstanding in social life (pp. 173–198). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education.
Jack, F., MacDonald, S., Reese, E., & Hayne, H. (2009). Maternal reminiscing style during early childhood predicts the age of adolescents’ earliest memories. Child Development, 80(2), 496–505.
Jakobson, R. (1971). Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In T.A. Sebeok (Ed.), Style in language (pp. 350–377). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Klapproth, D. (2004). Narrative as social practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal oral traditions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.
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.
Margetts, A. (2015). Person shift at narrative peak. Language, 91(4), 755–805.
Mayer, M. (1969). Frog, where are you? New York: Puffin.
McAdams, D.P. (1993). The stories we live by. New York: Guilford Press.
McGregor, W. (1989). Writing Aboriginal: Oral literature in print. Meridian, 8(1), 47–56.
Minami, M. (2008). Telling good stories in different languages: Bilingual children’s styles of story construction and their linguistic and educational implications. Narrative Inquiry, 18(1), 83–110.
Minami M., & McCabe, A. (1995). Rice balls and bear hunts: Japanese and North American family narrative patterns. Journal of Child Language, 22(2), 423–445.
Mushin, I., & Gardner, R. (2009). Silence is talk: Conversational silences in Australian Aboriginal talk-in-interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(10), 2033–2052.
. (2011). Turn management in Garrwa mixed language conversations, In I. Mushin, B. Baker, R. Gardner, & M. Harvey (Eds.), Indigenous language and social identity: Papers in honour of Michael Walsh (pp. 207–221). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
Nelson, K., & Fivush, R. (2000). Socialization of memory. In E. Tulving & F. Craik (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of memory (pp. 283–295). Oxford University Press.
Norrick, N. (2000). Conversational narrative: Storytelling in everyday talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (1997). Narrative authenticity. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1-4), 83–91.
. (2001). Living narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Perkins, R.D. (1988). The covariation of culture and grammar. In E. Moravcsik, M. Hammond, & J. Wirth (Eds.), Studies in syntactic typology (pp. 359–378). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Polanyi, L. (1989). Telling the American story: A structural and cultural analysis of conversational storytelling. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Propp, V. (1975). Morphology of the folktale. Laurence Scott (Trans.), (2nd ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Ray, S. (1907). Reports of the Cambridge anthropological expedition to Torres Straits (Vol. III Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reese, E., Jack, F., & White, N. (2010). Origins of adolescents’ autobiographical memories. Cognitive Development, 25(4), 352–367.
Reese, E., Yan, C., Jack, F., & Hayne, H. (2010). Emerging identities: Narrative and self from early childhood to early adolescence. In K. McLean & M. Pasupathi (Eds.), Narrative development in adolescence (pp. 23–43). New York: Springer.
Ritz, M.A. (2010). The perfect crime? Illicit uses of the present perfect in Australian police media releases. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(12), 3400–3417.
Ritz, M.A., & Engel, D.M. (2008). “Vivid narrative use” and the meaning of the present perfect in spoken Australian English. Linguistics, 46(1), 131–160.
Rosaldo, R. (1986). Ilongot hunting as story and experience. In V. Turner & E. Bruner (Eds.), The anthropology of experience (pp. 97–138). Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Rumsey A., & Niles, D. (2011). Sung tales from the Papua New Guinea highlands: Studies in form, meaning, and sociocultural context. Canberra: ANU Press.
Ryan, M.-L. (2005). Possible-worlds theory. In D. Herman, M. Jahn & M.-L. Ryan (Eds.), Routledge encyclopedia of narrative theory (pp. 446–450). London: Routledge.
Schiffrin, D. (1994). Making a list. Discourse Processes, 17(3), 377–406.
Senft, G. (2006). Review of the book “Narrative as social practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal oral traditions, by D. Klapproth.” Journal of Pragmatics, 38(8), 1326–1331. .
.Slobin, D.I. (2004). The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (Eds.), Relating events in narrative (Volume 2: Typological and contextual perspectives) (pp. 219–257). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Speer, N.K., Reynolds, J.R., Swallow, K.M., & Zacks, J.M. (2009). Reading stories activates neural representations of visual and motor experiences. Psychological Science, 20(8), 989–999.
Stavans, A. (2003). Bilinguals as narrators: A comparison of bilingual and monolingual Hebrew and English narratives. Narrative Inquiry, 13(1), 151–191.
Stirling, L. (2010). Space, time and environment in Kala Lagaw Ya. In I. Mushin, B. Baker, R. Gardner, & M. Harvey (Eds.), Indigenous language and social identity: Papers in honour of Michael Walsh (pp. 179–203). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
. (2012) Tense and aspect shifts in Kala Lagaw Ya oral narratives. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 32(1), 157–190.
Strömqvist, S., & Verhoeven, L.T. (Eds.). (2004). Relating events in narratives (Volume 2: Typological and contextual perspectives). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tessler, M., & Nelson, K. (1994). Making memories: The influence of joint encoding on later recall by young children. Consciousness and Cognition, 3(3), 307–326.
Toolan, M. (1988). Narrative: A critical linguistic introduction. London: Routledge.
Trabasso, T., Secco, T., & van den Broek, P. (1984). Causal cohesion and story coherence. In H. Mandle, N.L. Stein, & T. Trabasso (Eds.), Learning and comprehension of text (pp. 83–111). Hillside, NJ: Erlbaum.
Trabasso, T., & Sperry, L.L. (1985). Causal relatedness and importance of story events. Journal of Memory and Language, 24(5), 595–611.
Trabasso, T., & van den Broek, P. (1985). Causal thinking and representation of narrative events. Journal of Memory and Language, 24(5), 612–630.
Trudgill, P. (2012). On the sociolinguistic typology of linguistic complexity loss. Language Documentation & Conservation, Special publication No. 3, 90–95.
. (2015), Societies of intimates and linguistic complexity. In R. de Busser & R. la Polla (Eds.), Language structure and environment: Social, cultural, and natural factors (pp. 133–147). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Turner, M., & MacDonald, B. (2010). Iwenhe Tyerrtye: What it means to be an Aboriginal person. Alice Springs: IAD Press.
Wallace, K.K., & Lovell, J. (2009). Listen deeply: Let these stories in. Alice Springs: IAD Press.
Winskel, H. (2010). A comparison of caretaker-child conversations about past personal experiences in Thailand and Australia. Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology, 41(3), 353–367.
Winskel, H., Luksaneeyanawin, S., & Yangklang, P. (2006). Language socialisation of the child through caretaker-child personal narratives: A comparison of Thai and English. RELC Journal, 37(3), 356–368.
Woodbury, A. (1998). Documenting rhetorical, aesthetic and expressive loss in language shift. In L.A. Grenoble & L.J. Whaley (Eds.), Endangered languages; Current issues and future prospects (pp. 234–260). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wray, A., & Grace, G.W. (2007). The consequences of talking to strangers: Evolutionary corollaries of socio-cultural influences on linguistic form. Lingua, 117(3), 543–578.
Zacks, J., Speer, N., Swallow, K., Braver, T., & Reynolds, J. (2007). Event perception: A mind-brain perspective. Psychological Bulletin, 133(2), 273–293.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Hill, Clair
2022. Multiparty storytelling in Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u. Australian Journal of Linguistics 42:3-4 ► pp. 251 ff. 
Ferguson, Matthew Robert
2020. International colleges and the cultivation of social capital in a divided Thailand: A narrative study of leadership perspectives at a Bangkok-based campus. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 15:3 ► pp. 227 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.