ABSTRACT
As discussed in Chapter 1, the turn-taking system in conversation includes two components-turn construction and turn allocation-as well as sets of practices. However, as seen in Chapter 2, conversationalists have practices by which they can seek and obtain agreement to have extended series of turns in order to tell stories within talk-in-interaction relatively without interruption-that is, storytelling in conversation is possible because participants mutually agree (normally done seamlessly and implicitly) to modify the ordinary set of practices for turn allocation so that all of the participants are oriented to the coproduction of the story and its evaluation within the larger conversational context. In this chapter, I will argue that the modification of the turn-taking system in storytelling in face-to-face conversation is performed more explicitly in oral traditions. That is, the institutional setting in which traditional epics are performed has effectively eliminated turn allocation and the basic practices involved in turn allocation. Oral poets, because of their accepted role in society, are given the floor to perform the traditional epics and, therefore, once they have started their performance, they do not need to attend to maintaining control of the turns at talk, but rather they can perform without interruption.1 This discarding of turn allocation provides oral poets the space and time to devote to more elaborate turn construction within the register of the oral tradition, including more elaborate forms of prosody.
