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Grammar in Action: Building comprehensive grammars of talk-in-interaction
Edited by Jakob Steensig, Maria Jørgensen, Jan K. Lindström, Nicholas Mikkelsen, Karita Suomalainen and Søren Sandager Sørensen
[Studies in Language and Social Interaction 37] 2025
► pp. 194–226

Chapter 7
Parenthesis in storytelling in Danish talk-in-interaction

 | Aarhus University
This chapter investigates two types of parentheses in storytelling in Danish talk-in-interaction. The first type is used as a way of making early-turn recalibrations to the unfolding talk and deals with issues regarding the recipients’ displays of knowing or understanding referents before commencing the story proper. The second type of parenthesis does late-turn recalibration and deals with setting up the climax of the story. This can be a response to recipients not displaying participation (e.g., not looking at the speaker) or not showing affiliation with the already suggested mode of the story. Finally, the chapter discusses the various resources on which parentheses in storytelling can draw (e.g., syntactic projection, particles, and embodied actions) in relation to how they might be described within a grammar of talk-in-interaction.
Keywords: participation, multimodality, grammar, storytelling
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Early-turn recalibration
    • 4.2Late-turn recalibration
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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