ABSTRACT
Narratives are an important part of human discourse. Although they can be expressed through other media (e.g., painting, dance; see papers in Mitchell, 1980), it is through language that narratives find their most explicit and most unambiguous form. Storytelling is a universal practice, found in all human cultures. For the better part of human evolutionary history, the sharing of oral stories was the primary way of preserving a sense of cultural heritage (Ong, 1982). The propensity to tell stories can be readily observed by listening carefully to ordinary conversations. In many settings, storytelling is the primary genre of talk. In these settings stories beget stories, with tellers’ tales prompting listeners to tell their own stories (Georgakopoulou, 1995; Preece, 1992). As such, one would think that obtaining narrative data would
be a relatively straightforward and unproblematic task, involving only the unobtrusive observations and recordings of everyday verbal interactions.
