Publications

Publication details [#7655]

Polanyi, Livia. 1978. False starts can be true. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 4 : 628–639.

Publication type

Article in journal

Publication language

English

Keywords

conversational strategy | false start | storytelling

Annotation

P. argues that so-called false starts in storytelling (such as 'I mean...I mean...did I ever tell you this story about the water?') are not errors but serve a strategic function in the conversational and interactional context in which the story is being told.