ABSTRACT
As the term itself implies, oral history is a specific form of discourse: history evokes a narrative of the past, and oral indicates a medium of expression. In the development of oral history as a field of study, much attention has been devoted to its linguistic and narrative dimensions. Most of this work, however, has been concerned with the analysis of the source, that is, of the speech and performance of the interviewees. Research, in other words, has focused mostly on genre in oral history: the use of folklore and anecdote; the influence of other oral or written forms of discourse such as epic, the novel or mass media; the analogies and differences between orality and writing, and so on.1
