Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life

The Georgetown University Round Table in Language and Linguistics for 2008 was titled Telling Stories: Building Bridges among Language, Narrative, Identity, Interaction, Society, and Culture, and 17 of the papers delivered there are collected here. Among their topics are narrative performance on early commercial sound recordings, positioning as a metagrammar for discursive story lines, a tripartite self-construction model of identity, identity claims in interview and conversational data, interaction and narrative structure in dementia, concurrent and intervening actions during storytelling in family ceremonial dinners, multimodal storytelling and identity construction in graphic narrative, and the role of style shifting in the functions and purposes of storytelling as demonstrated by detective stories in anime. Annotation 穢2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)