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Narrative Discourse From the mid-1980s onwards, narrative studies moved away from the abstract, formalist concerns of literary narratology towards a contextualist stance that went hand-in-hand with the interdisciplinary expansion of the ‘narrative turn’ across the humanities and social sciences. Narrative analysis thus broadened to include the study of ‘natural’ narratives alongside written literature, and the questions asked increasingly drew attention to the actual situation in which storytelling took place and the functions narratives might perform. In line with the emphasis on situated interaction, researchers concerned with the pragmatic aspects of narrative tend to focus on oral stories (although not exclusively so), especially narratives of personal experience. The context of the interaction varies considerably, including stories told at family meal times (Ochs et al. 1992; Blum Kulka 1993), in peer groups (Kyratzis 2000, Georgakopoulou 2003) and in interview situations, be they research generated (Wortham 2000; Jones 2002), in medical discourse (He 1996; Mishler 1997) or in a law court (Barry 1991; Harris 2001b). Given the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of studying narrative discourse, the application of pragmatic theory tends to be eclectic and overlap with other fields of interest, especially sociolinguistics, stylistics, conversation analysis and psycholinguistics. From a contextualist perspective, narrative

discourse is understood as one means by which speakers make sense of themselves, the world around them, and position themselves in relation to others. In order to differentiate this from

other kinds of texts and talk, narrative is minimally defined as a series of temporally ordered events (Labov 1972). Other factors may be considered as optional prompts of narrativity (that is, the perception of a text as more or less like a narrative), including the climactic organization of events around a problematic situation with a recognizable beginning, middle and end (Ryan 2006). Over the last four decades, numerous models have been put forward to describe narrative form. Within linguistics, Labov’s (1972) six-part outline has been highly influential, particularly of interest for the multifaceted concept of evaluation (Schiffrin 1997; Gwyn 2000). While pragmatics has not gone on to shape definitions of narrative per se (debated recently by Rudrum 2005), the need to account for social purpose has given rise to Martin and Plum’s (1997) typology of story genres. This typology differentiates narratives of personal experience from Anecdotes, Exemplums and Recounts. The linguistic resources of narrative discourse

have come under scrutiny for their interrelated structural and pragmatic functions. Longacre (1983) and Labov (1972) identify devices used to indicate the narrative peak (the pivotal moment where climax moves into resolution), the use of which may also be interpersonally motivated by the demand for vividness and relevance. Discourse markers (Norrick 2001), repetition and cohesion (Bauman 1984) all serve to organize relations between narrative segments, but, crucially, play equal roles in managing interaction between narrator(s) and their audience. Deixis and evidentials (Mushin 2000) are important for their part in constructing narrative perspective, and also for their indexical nature.