Edited by Dale Koike and Lidia Rodríguez-Alfano
[Dialogue Studies 7] 2010
► pp. 89–116
In oral narratives of personal experience, speakers must resort to a number of interpersonal devices to maintain the interest of their listeners during long conversational turns. Dialogue and the co-construction of meaning between speaker and listener take a rather different shape in these narrative environments than in the more balanced turn-taking of ordinary conversation. We propose that dialogue is implicitly codified in specific interpersonal features in the narrative (e.g., forms of address, onomatopoeia, swear words and other expressive vocabulary). This study examines the variety of these resources and their function at different moments of the narrative sequence in selected texts from a corpus of spontaneous oral narratives from Mexico City.