Conversational Storytelling

Sharing stories or personal experiences in everyday conversation may constitute the basis for all storytelling activities including telling folk tales, legends, fictive stories, or even writing novels, plays, and films. This book analyzes first-person narratives in the everyday interactions of speakers of Japanese. Most of the data come from several dozen hours of tape-recorded conversations. This study discusses the thematic organization of the stories, their social functions, and the use of tense and aspect in narratives. It aims at establishing the links between linguistic strategies, and cognitive and contextual processes, as well as testing the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural validity of existing findings in narrative studies of storytelling practices in English among other languages. Thus, this book provides useful information for students and specialists of tense and aspect, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, narratology, cognitive linguistics, literary study, as well as teachers of Japanese and English, and anyone interested in storytelling and language.