Narrative is viewed by numerous linguistic and non-linguistic disciplines as inescapably fundamental in human life, central to the (re)constitution and interpretation of personal, social, and cultural reality. The narrative texts which we are engaged in as part of our everyday life form an endless list that includes personal stories, comic strips, jokes, autobiography, personal letters, gossip, legal testimonies, novels, news reports, fairy-tales, retellings of plots of films and TV series, etc. These texts, popular or artistic (literary), not only crosscut the spoken, written and electronic modality, but are nowadays increasingly multi-modal (e.g. verbal-visual-musical). The importance of narrative as a mode of communication has been eloquently put forth by Bruner who identifies (1986, 1990) two major ways of knowing and discursively interacting with reality: (a) the narrative mode, which encodes and interprets human reality, experiences, beliefs, doubts and emotions; and (b) the paradigmatic (logicosemantic) mode, which deals with natural (physical) reality, truth, observation, analysis, proof and rationality. The current ‘fascination’ with narrative is in many respects a rediscovery: narrative has figured in all categorizations of communication on the basis of rhetorical mode (or stance) from Aristotle’s Poetics to modern day rhetorical theory. In the light of the above, it is not surprising that narrative analysis is one of the best and most extensively researched areas of the multidisciplinary study of discourse (van Dijk 1993), embracing a wide spectrum of disciplines (e.g. linguistics, psychology, history, law, anthropology, semiotics, literary criticism, etc.) and theoretical and methodological approaches. Any attempt to typologize narrative analysis is bound to be schematic. On this understanding, following Mishler (1995), this paper distinguishes between models which focus on (i) reference (relationship between real-world and narrative events) and temporal order, (ii) textual coherence and structure (narrative strategies), and (iii) narrative functions (Mishler 1995). This distinction will be rephrased in the present discussion in terms of the following three configurations of narrative properties: referential, textual, and contextual. The referential properties are concerned with the organization of the world that a narrative reconstructs, thus capturing the text’s external relations (Martin 1992). The textual properties refer to the organization of the text itself (i.e. text-internal relations); finally, the contextual properties refer to the interface between internal and external, that is, with the interaction between the text and its immediate (situational) and wider (sociocultural) context of occurrence. All three sets of properties will be tackled here on the understanding that there are inevitable overlaps, intersections and indeed cross-fertilizations amongst them; also that any critical enquiry into linguistic studies of narrative is a daunting task with a forbiddingly ample domain. The present paper will be mainly concerned with sociolinguistic and discourse narrative studies. These have focused on oral, non-literary narratives, which are in turn either spontaneously occurring in conversations or elicited by the analyst; the latter mainly involve oral histories or life stories (e.g. Josselson & Lieblicht 1993; Linde 1993).