Deborah Schiffrin

The pear stories : cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production

The study of narrative discourse, as exemplified in the essays in this book, treats the unfolding of narrative and the expression of this unfolding narrative in words.1 The opening scene is set, characters and objects introduced, and events described, as the narrative shifts from scene to scene. In approaching this phenomenon, one may choose to examine the portioning of narrative content into discourse units (Chafe, Chapter 1), the selection of a prominent referent to take on the role of subject in a clause (Bernardo, Chapter 6), or the influence of the larger cultural context on the expression of events and evaluations (Tannen, Chapter 2). Or, one may focus on a phenomenon of narrower scope: the verbalization of characters and objects within the discourse. This is the domain of the essays that Downing and Clancy contributed to this book and of the present chapter. Though apparently narrow, the topic has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, one may consider the static aspect of nominal verbalization. The speaker is confronted by an object whose semantic substance requires expression. He must draw on his cultural knowledge and his understanding of his addressee in order to decide what is salient and hence worthy of verbalization, and he employs his semantic knowledge in the expression of the appropriate categorization. Downing deals with this facet ofthe problem. But

Jewish Argument as Sociability.

Talk that is argumentative in form can have sociable functions for members of some groups. In sociable argument, speakers repeatedly disagree, remain nonaligned with each other, and compete for interactional goods. Yet they do so in a nonserious way, and in ways which actually display their solidarity and protect their intimacy. The analysis raises questions about the adequacy of many current views about conversational cooperation, showing that the levels at which cooperation (and competition) exist are not always overt. The analysis also demonstrates the cultural relativity of norms of evaluation about dispute. (Conflict, conversation, cooperation, culture, evaluation, frames, key, pragmatics, rhetoric)

Discourse and Identity Construction

We describe and discuss discursive approaches emerging over the last 50 years that in one way or another have contributed to identity studies. Approaching identities as constructed in and through discourse, we start by differentiating between two competing views of construction: one that moves progressively from existing “capital-D” social discourses to the domain of identity and sense of self and the other working its way up from “small-d” discursive practices to identities and sense of self as emerging in interaction. We take this tension as our point of departure for a discussion of different theoretical and analytical lenses, focusing on how they have emerged as productive tools for theorizing the construction of identity and for doing empirical work. Three dimensions of identity construction are distinguished and highlighted as dilemmatic but deserving prominence in the discursive construction of identity: (a) the navigation of agency in terms of a person-to-world versus a world-to-person directionality; (b) the differentiation between self and other as a way to navigate between uniqueness and a communal sense of belonging and being the same as others; and (c) the navigation of sameness and change across one’s biography or parts thereof. The navigation of these three identity dilemmas is exemplified in the analysis of a stretch of conversational data, in which we bring together different analytic lenses (such as narrative, performative, conversation analytic, and positioning analysis), before concluding this chapter with a brief discussion of some of the merits and potential shortcomings of discursive approaches to identity construction.

CONVERSATIONAL COHERENCE: THE ROLE OF WELL

Conversational coherence is a co6perative enterprise in which speaker and hearer jointly negotiate (a) a focus of attention-a referent-and (b) a response which further selects what aspect(s) of that referent will be attended to. Because not all potential referents can be attended to simultaneously, discourse markers like w,ell help speakers locate themselves and their utterances in the on-going construction of discourse. Analysis of everyday talk shows that well anchors a speaker in a system of conversational exchange when the options which a prior referent has opened for upcoming coherence are not fully met. Thus well is sensitive to the information structure of questions, answers, the underlying conditions of requests, and various participation shifts in talk.*

How a story says what it means and does

Analysts of oral narrative are forced to face the problem ofhow what is said both conveys a meaning and accomplishes an action. This paper demomtrates by the micro-analysis of a single convenational narrative how several levels of discourse work together to create a story. Four questions are addressed: How is the story opened? How is the point ofthe story made? How does the story perform an action within a social interaction? How is the story closed? Their answers require attention to informational, sentential, textual, and conversational structure, each of which plays a role in more than one functional domain. Implications of the analysis for the study of other discourse genres is considered.

Making a list

The construction of everyday lists (in either speaking or writing) has received very little attention from discourse analysts. This article draws from a corpus of spoken lists to focus upon some key aspects of their discourse structure. A comparison between lists and narratives shows that different information structures are created in the two genres: a descriptive structure in lists and temporal and evaluative structures in narratives. These structures are built from both clause level syntax and textual organization. The article also proposes some ways in which lists can reveal knowledge structure and, thus, provide naturalistic data through which to consider both classical and constructivist models of categories.

We Knew That’s It: Retelling the Turning Point of a Narrative:

A paradigmatic means of conveying a turningpoint in a narrativeof danger is the line ‘we knew that’s it’ (Labov, 1972). In four tellings of a single narrative about danger during the Holocaust, anarrator varies this line in ways that maintain its collective focus on knowledge, but alter what is ‘known’. An analysis of changes in the ‘we knew [x]’ line reveals its relationship with the changingstructure of the narrative and with the shift toward multi-vocalic means ofexternal evaluation. Also suggested is the relationship of the overall narrative changes to the changing place of Holocaust discourse, narrative and oral history in memory culture, and the larger discourse of resistance and survival.

Anaphoric then: aspectual, textual, and epistemic meaning

Like many temporal markers, then has anaphoric as well as deictic uses. An analysis of then in everyday discourse shows that two anaphoric uses (viewed in Reichenbachs terms, as shifting or continuing reference time from prior text) are differentiated by clause position and have systematic effects on the aspectual meaning of predicates. Textual uses of then (in narratives and lists) and epistemic uses 0/then (in conditionals and initiation/response/evaluation sequences) follow the same pattern as the temporal uses.

Discourse and Identity: The discursive construction of teacher identities in a research interview

Introduction Contemporary approaches view identity as a discursive construction that can be conceptualized further through a number of different data analysis frameworks. In relation to the understanding of teacher identities, the more familiar analytical approach has been generated from different versions of critical discourse analysis. Accordingly, the intention is to explore teacher talk as a space for the articulation and the repression of “voice” (Bloomfield 2000; Britzman 1992; Ellsworth 1989; McWilliam 1994). This can be considered as a “top-down” approach because the voices expressed and withheld – in interview talk, for example – are embedded in the wider ideologies and discourses of power that constitute educational and other cultural institutions. From this perspective identity is represented and shaped through the social and discursive practices that are available to individuals and groups at particular moments. Consequently, as members of particular discourses, individuals are positioned to speak, think and act in particular ways and are able to take up or refuse that positioning (Davies and Harre 1990; Gee 1996). A much less familiar approach to teacher identity analysis is generated from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (Baker 1983, 1984; Johnson 2002a, 2002b; Paoletti 2000, 2001, 2002). Using this “bottom-up” approach, researchers have become engaged in conceptualizing identity as “the set of verbal practices through which persons assemble and display who they are while in the presence of, and in interaction with, others” (Hadden and Lester 1978: 331).

LANGUAGE, experience and history: ‘What happened’ in World War II

Sociolinguistics can contribute to our understanding of history by showing how language helps to develop and maintain a sense of a communal past. This paper focuses on the referring terms for the World War II experiences of European Jews and of Japanese Americans, as evinced through various sources of public discourse (newspapers, library cataloguing systems, book titles). The analysis of linguistic form and function combines with discussion of the social and cultural history of Holocaust awareness in the U.S. to show how the word Holocaust (as a referring term for the experience of European Jews) became part of an American lexicon. A comparison of this stable term with the variety of nouns and verbal expressions used to index the Japanese American experience allows us to more fully consider how language helps to create and preserve collective memory.