Publications

Publication details [#47851]

Norrick, Neal R. 2008. Using large corpora of conversation to investigate narrative: The case of interjections in conversational storytelling performance. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13 (4) : 438–464.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/ijcl

Annotation

This article describes a hybrid corpus linguistic approach to conversational storytelling, whereby one first identifies a feature of interest in a small set of narratives, then moves to a general investigation of this feature in large corpora of transcribed conversation, focusing only later on the distribution and functions of this feature within narrative portions of the corpora investigated. Interjections are conversational units par excellence with no syntactic relation to adjacent clauses, so that investigation of large corpora is particularly vital for determining their patterning and functions in conversation. It is shown that interjections play a number of important roles in the organization of conversational storytelling, first in justifying tellability, next in marking narrative climaxes, particularly within constructed dialogue, then in evaluating the narrative point, and finally in receiving and commenting on the storytelling performance. Furthermore, there is a description of combinations of interjections and the interaction of interjections with exclamative clauses.