Publications

Publication details [#15502]

Green, David and Irit Kupferberg. 2000. Detailed and succinct self-portraits of addicts in broadcast stories. Discourse Studies 2 (3) : 305–322.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
SAGE Publications
ISBN
1461-4456

Annotation

Narrative discourse offers a viable perspective on sociocultural, psychological and professional dimensions of the self. Following Labov's early definition of evaluation, current studies explore linguistic and paralinguistic evaluative devices which participants in discourse use to present and construct their self. Organizing metaphors are a global evaluative device often used in broadcast personal stories to summarize local lexical and syntactic repetition. These metaphors constitute succinct self-portraits which facilitate interpersonal communication in a speech situation which is limited in time, and lacking in kinesic cues and shared knowledge. The present psycholinguistic study further explores the functions of organizing metaphors in addicts' broadcast stories, a narrative sub-genre which until now has not been studied. Qualitative data analysis shows that addicts use various evaluative devices and 'conspiracies' of devices when they construct their detailed self-portraits. We also identified organizing metaphors which summarized the detailed narrative portrait, and constituted succinct versions of the addicted self.