work on narrative
Genevieve Patthey-Chavez (ggpcinla who-is-at ucla.edu)
Fri, 3 May 1996 11:09:39 -0800
Elinor Ochs and a number of her students (Carolyn Taylor, Ruth Smith, and
others, memory fails me) worked on a whole variety of narratives for
several years. Among the more interesting threads of that effort was a
grounded look at distributed narratives like plans. By distributed Ochs et
al meant uttered in multi-party dinner-time conversations. In fact, many
narratives were quite literally spun together across utterances and
speakers (a la Ochs, Schieffelin, & Platt, 1979). Another researcher who
has looked repeatedly at narratives in a number of settings is Charlotte
Linde, whose book I've been meaning to read for a year or so. In my work
on problem-solving work in a computer lab, I found one class of
client-queries/descriptions that took the narrative form. They went
something like, "I was just doing something perfectly reasonable on this
machine and it went crazy." Some of my favorite lines of transcribed
discourse came from that data set. (Those of you who have transcribed
KNOW!!!)
Genevieve
Refs:
Ochs, E., Schiefflin B., & Platt, M. (1979). Propositions across
utterances and speakers. In E. Ochs & B. Schiefflin (eds.) Developmental
pragmatics (pp. 251-268). New York: Academic Press.
Ochs, E., Taylor, C., Rudolph, D. & Smith, R. C. (1992). Story-telling as
a theory-building activity. Discourse Processes. XV: 1.37-72.
Linde, C. (1993) Life stories. The creation of coherence. NY: Oxford.