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Article published In:
Categorization in multilingual storytelling
Edited by Matthew T. Prior and Steven Talmy
[Pragmatics and Society 10:3] 2019
► pp. 359–374
Special issue section

Membership categorization and storytelling

The cake story

| University of Southern Denmark
| Roskilde University

In this paper, we demonstrate how the collaborative and sequential unfolding of a story ties into the constitution of a membership categorization device which we have glossed as ‘us and them’. The data come from a focus group activity where first and second generation immigrants to Denmark have been asked to discuss their situation in Denmark. Using Ethnomethodological Conversation and Membership Categorization Analysis, we present one story which involves a story-teller and his family and an elderly Danish couple living in the same block of flats. In the telling of the story, co-participants align and affiliate, and disalign and disaffiliate, at sequentially relevant junctions. We will argue that not only do such phenomena indicate listenership and possible agreement to the moral of the story in its telling, but also to the morally implicative categorical work involved in the story’s telling.

Keywords: membership categorization, categorization device, alignment, affiliation, moral (of story), category and sequence, moral implication
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Data
  • Analysis: The cake story
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
Published online: 22 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.18010.day
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Burdelski, Matthew & Noriko Takei
2022. “He’s not Aussie Aussie”: Membership Categorisation in Storytelling Among Family Members and Peers. In Storytelling Practices in Home and Educational Contexts, ► pp. 375 ff. DOI logo
Lee, Yo-An
2022. Conversational storytelling. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 102 ff. DOI logo
Lee, Yo-An & John Hellermann
2020. Managing language issue in second language storytelling. System 93 ► pp. 102311 ff. DOI logo

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