Conversational storytelling
Table of contents
A notable trend in pragmatics is the growing interest in emergent and contingent processes through which narratives are constructed in conversational interactions (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018a; Mandelbaum 2003). This is a departure from the traditional approaches that are drawn from literary and historical narratives (De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2012; Kasper & Prior 2015) and therefore represents a paradigm shift that “combines a focus on local interaction as a starting point for analysis with an understanding of the embedding of narratives within discursive and sociocultural contexts” (De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2012: 3). Stories in conversational interactions are routinely assembled during every-day talk through personal narratives of life events (Ochs & Capps 2002) or even in less eventful personal episodes through small stories (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008).
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