Abstract
Memory and time are the two fundamental components of personal experience narrative. For a sole narrator with no competing claims for reliability, time distance from the narrated events is more or less irrelevant, and storytelling can proceed smoothly. However, what happens when more than one participant seems to have an equal claim to telling rights? We report a detailed micro-analysis of co-narrated stories of two brothers’ experiences as refugees over 35 years ago to understand how rights are negotiated when both participants have an apparently equal claim to narrative reliability. Our analysis demonstrates that while under normal circumstances the two speakers perform in “duet” – whereby they take the floor in fluid turns – when discrepancies are detected by either party, a round of negotiation following a predictable pattern is triggered before the narrative can continue. The “winner” of the negotiation – typically the speaker with the greatest recall of chronological detail – claims the rights to tell the story solo. The ability to convincingly demonstrate the reliability of one’s memories is therefore a crucial determinant in who can claim telling rights – the authority to be able to tell a story. Our findings support the role of remembered detail in underpinning this authority.
About the authors
Andrew Tanner is a graduate of the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include narrative and identity, language maintenance and immigration. He is currently a trainer in Documenting and Revitalising Indigenous Languages at the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity in Melbourne.
Lesley Stirling is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. She completed a PhD in Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 1989. Her research interests include discourse analysis and interactional linguistics, narrative, perspective and identity, the language and communication of clinical populations, meaning and grammar, and language typology. Her most recent book-length publication is Children’s Play, Storytelling and Pretense: Studies in Culture, Context and ASD (co-edited with Susan Douglas; 2015, Routledge).
Acknowledgments
“The past is a foreign country” is a quote from L. P. Hartley’s (1953) novel The Go-Between. We are grateful to the participants who kindly allowed us to record and analyze their stories, and to two anonymous reviewers who provided very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Appendix. Transcription conventions
- ((laugh)) ((surprised))
non-linguistic actions or manner of speech
- (.)
untimed pause
- (.4) (1.0) etc.
timed pause (number indicates seconds)
- spe-
self-interruption
- =
latched utterances
- [speech]
overlapped utterances
- spe:
lengthening of previous sound
- italics
non-English word
- ( )
inaudible or unclear speech
- (speech)
transcriber’s best guess at unclear speech
- °speech°
quiet speech
- .hhh
audible intake of breath
- sp(h)eech
simultaneous laughter and speech
- speech.
falling intonation
- speech,
list intonation
- speech?
rising intonation
- speech!
exclamation
- SPEECH
emphatic stress
- “speech”
reported speech
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