Conversational Storytelling

Sharing stories or personal experiences in everydayconversation may constitute the basis for allstorytelling activities including telling folk taleslegends fictive stories or even writing novelsplays and films. This book analyzes first-personnarratives in the everyday interactions of speakersof Japanese. Most of the data come from severaldozen hours of tape-recorded conversations. Thisstudy discusses the thematic organization of thestories their social functions and the use of tenseand aspect in narratives. It aims at establishingthe links between linguistic strategies andcognitive and contextual processes as well astesting the cross-linguistic and cross-culturalvalidity of existing findings in narrative studies ofstorytelling practices in English among otherlanguages. Thus this book provides usefulinformation for students and specialists of tense andaspect sociolinguistics discourse analysisnarratology cognitive linguistics literary studyas well as teachers of Japanese and English andanyone interested in storytelling and language.