ABSTRACT
For anyone who has become used to understanding what is past even partly through the medium of writing, it is difficult to conceive of the way in which we construct history in our minds using spoken language. Naturally even those of us who are heavily dependent upon the tools that writing has given us, still habitually construct oral histories. They range from the simplest 'I went fishing yesterday' to the more complex 'I went fishing five times last Summer' (or was it six?) to 'my father had a story about a fishing trip' and so on and so on.
