Storytelling

I couldn't keep my promise, after all. Yesterday afternoon after reading the article I was just weary. This week is going to be even worst than the last one. I'll have to finish reading four articles, write three essays, and write the first two pages of my Master's. (I still have no idea what I'm going to write about.) On the top of it all, my boss just happened to give me some extra-hours of work on Friday and Saturday... Still, lessons and writing assignments are not the only reason I'm feeling busy right now. Next weekend after work we, my fiancé and I, are going to travel to the countryside to meet the reverend. Today after lessons I had to run to the other side of the town to pick up my wedding dress... Did I mention we're getting married on November? Oh my, there's still so much to do before that!

This week I decided to kill two flies with one swat and write about  the article called "Sequential Aspects of Storytelling in Conversation" written by Gail Jefferson in 1978. As the title reveals us, it's an article about conversation analysis based on Harvey Sacks' lectures about story telling and it's structure. In the beginning of the paper Jefferson reminds us about Labov's and Waletsky's theories of spontaneous stories. These two men suspected that spontaneously told stories could also be subjects to formal analysis and found out that this kind of stories had formal properties. What Labov and Waletsky also mentioned was the relevance of social context when spontaneous stories were told. (Labov & Waletsky, 1966, pp. 12-13.)

The third person Jefferson mentions in his article is Harvey Sacks who has focused on the contexted occurrence of stories that are told in conversations. He points out that stories are sequenced objects that articulate with the particular context in which they are told. This means for example that the structure of a story depends on where, when and to whom it is told. Storytelling might or might not involve the following: A preface where a teller projects a forthcoming story, a second turn where a listener aligns himself/herself as a recipient, the next turn where the story is produced, and the next turn in which the recipient gives reference to the story that was just told. (Sacks, 1972b, Lecture 2.) (I guess it's important to mention that conversation analysis is built on turn-by-turn talk and that kind of talk was just represented in the earlier sentence.)

Jefferson says that: "Stories emerge from turn-by-turn talk, that is, are locally occasioned by it, and, upon their completion, stories re-engage turn-by-turn talk, that is, are sequentially implicative for it." (p. 220.) By saying that stories are local occasioned he means two different things. 1.) Something said in a conversation can remind a participant of a story that may (or may not) be topically coherent with the earlier talk. For example, you could be talking to me about the muffin you're eating and that could remind me about the cake I baked yesterday. (Not topically coherent.) 2.) A story can be methodically introduced into turn-by-turn talk.

What kind of techniques are there to inform the recipient that there's a story to be told? One technique is the use of a disjunct marker such as "Oh" or "Incidentally". Disjunct markers are signals that show us that the following talk (the story) is not topically coherent with the prior talk. The other technique is an "embedded repeat" meaning a form like "Speaking about X" or "Saying X". Disjunct markers and repetition can also cooperate together or the repetition of the X-word can appear in the end of the story and tie it with the prior talk. Another way to show the recipient that there's a story to come is the use of a temporal locator ("New Years we..."). These kind of techniques of informing the recipient that a story is about to begin are called "Story prefixed phrases" by Jefferson.

The rest of the article treats different kind of examples of storytelling taken from real conversations that Jefferson has recorded with his cooperators. From my point of view reading this article was very useful. I have to mention that I was excited to read for the first time something that Jefferson himself wrote since he was along with Sacks and Shegloff one of the founders of conversation analysis. He was the one who invented the transcription now used in our area, a real genius indeed. Since this was the first time I read about storytelling from the conversation analysis' point of view, I noticed I had some difficulties with the terminology and I had to read some parts twice. In the end I felt like I got the idea and I'm now understanding the complex world of conversations a little bit better. How do I find this theory about storytelling then? I think Jefferson's ideas (and Sacks' and Schegloff's) are brilliant! Those things he notices in real conversations are actually quite easy to notice in daily conversations. Soon I won't be able not to think about these theories every time I'm talking with someone!