This paper focuses on the signalling of emphasis as a common emotive display via emphatic speech style. Through structural analysis of empirical data from natural conversations S. isolates the constitutive prosodic and other linguistic signalling cues of the emphatic style and shows how prosodic marking is used to evoke context-related interpretations of emphatic 'involvement peaks' in climaxes in story-telling. A sequential analysis demonstrates that interlocutors orient themselves to the identified clusters of signalling cues.