Telling stories in conversations is intricately interwoven with the interactive and local functions of story telling. Telling stories demands a certain kind of context and in itself establishes a particular interactive reality. Thus, narration is a specific kind of verbal interaction, governed by contextualizing devices, genre-specific cooperative regularities and corresponding verbal features. It plays an important role in institutional as well as in private modes of communication. The volume focuses on narration as a contextualized and contextualizing activity, which allocates specific structural tasks to the participants in the narrative process (narrator, co-narrator, listener). Thus, the research questions are oriented towards story telling under a functional and interactive perspective. The contributions analyze recordings of authentic narrations in different functions using different kinds of qualitative reconstructive methods. The data come from everyday as well as institutional settings and the languages covered are English, German, Greek, Hungarian, and Italian.

Table of contents

1. Introduction: Different dimensions in the field of narrative interaction Tabea Becker and Uta M. Quasthoff pp.1–11

Part I: Acquiring the world through narrative interaction p.13 2. Fantasy stories and conversational narratives of personal experience: Genre-specific, interactional and developmental perspectives Friederike Kern and Uta M. Quasthoff pp.15–56 3. The "Two-Puppies" Story: The role of narrative in teaching and learning science Richard Sohmer and Sarah Michaels pp.57–91 4. The role of narrative interaction in narrative development Tabea Becker pp.93–111 5. Humorous disaster and success stories among female adolescents in Germany Rebecca Branner pp.113–147

Part II: The co-construction of narratives p.149 6. Construction of self-narrative in a psychotherapeutic setting: An analysis of the mutual determination of narrative perspective taken by patient and therapist Eszter Beran and Zsolt Unoka pp.151–167 7. The role of metaphor in the narrative co-construction of collaborative experience Vera John-Steiner, Christopher Shank and Teresa Meehan pp.169–195 8. The use of interjections in Italian conversation: The participation of the audience in narratives Chiara Monzoni pp.197–220

Part III: Retold Stories p.221 9. Same old story? On the interactional dynamics of shared narratives Alexandra Georgakopoulos pp.223–241 10. Institutional memories: the narrative retelling of a professionel life Jenny Cook-Gumperz pp.243–261 11. Interaction in the telling and retelling of interlaced stories: The co-construction of humorous narratives Neal R. Norrick pp.263–283 12. Narrative reconstruction of past experiences: Adjustments and modifications in the process of recontextualizing a past experience Susanne Günthner pp.285–301

Index p.303