Publications

Publication details [#61081]

Mushin, Ilana. 2016. Linguistic cues for recipient design in an Indigenous Australian conversational narrative. Narrative Inquiry 26 (2) : 217–256.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/ni

Annotation

This article presents an examination of some of the linguistic and interactional features of a story emerging from talk in a remote Indigenous Australian community. In the data used here, the storyteller is an elderly Garrwa woman in Borroloola who speaks Garrwa and Kriol. The focus is on how the addition of a non-community member to the field of interaction affected the way the storyteller recounted events from a situation within the previous 24 hours. This is seen not only in what events are told, but also how the teller tailored her story to her audience in the context of telling — a recognition that stories are interactively achieved. Here the article examines how she accommodated the knowledge states of her audience, how recipients responded and how this in turn affected the trajectory of the storytelling.