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This book investigates the forms and functions of storytelling in everyday conversation. It develops a rhetoric of everyday storytelling through an integrated approach to both the internal structure and the contextual integration of narrative passages. It aims at a more complete picture of oral narrative through analysis of a wider range of natural data, including personal anecdotes told for humor, put-down stories told for self-aggrandizement, family stories retold to ratify membership and so on, as well as marginal stories and narrative-like passages to delineate the boundaries of conversati

AbstractMy contribution traces the evolving notion of tellability in the study of narrative over the last thirty-odd years: Tellability was initially seen as an objective property of textual content, but research on narrative in real contexts of talk has increasingly recognized the various ways interactional factors can override content as grounds for relating a story. I advance a set of research strategies based on investigation of the discourse structures that accompany the negotiation of tellability in context and the syntactic markers of tellability, specifically requests for stories like "tell me" and "tell her," correlating with features of recipient design in narration. This will reveal distinctions in presuppositions about who knows a story already, who else should be included, and who may conarrate, demonstrating how tellability varies from one participant to another even in the same context.

Abstract
This article investigates the flow of information in conversational narrative performance in light of research on the epistemics of talk in interaction and epistemic vigilance on the part of story recipients. Based on examples from a range of corpora, it reassesses the relationship between storytellers and recipients consistent with recipient design, and investigates cases of too little and too much information in narrative. Viewing narrative performance as sharing territories of knowledge provides new insights into the notions of telling rights and tellability as well as teller competence and credibility. The narrative performance may contain gaps and discrepancies along with clusters of copious information from which recipients must pick and choose to construct a dynamic narrative model to be tested against further information. In the communal presentation of family narratives, territories of knowledge merge, shared events are illuminated from separate perspectives, gaps in knowledge are filled, and evaluations are enriched.

Abstract
Negation in narrative has been described primarily as a resource for expressing evaluation, and secondarily in its role in
establishing orientation, but this article investigates a range of ways negated statements can contribute directly to complicating
action. Negation works through presupposition in the rhetorical figure of paralipsis with phrases like "to say nothing of."
Reporting "I don't see how she got in" presupposes that she got in. Semantic double negation in phrases like "never fail to"
contributes to the complicating action. Idiomatic negatives like "didn't go out" and negatives matching expectations like "didn't
go to sleep" mirror positive actions in the narrative model. Constructions coupling main clause negation with a positive embedded
clause produce statements entailing actions in the chain of events, as in "I couldn't face going back." Taken together, these
constructions provide powerful resources for contributing positively to the dynamic narrative model with negative statements.

Stories of personal experience have been a staple of research on narrative, while stories of vicarious experience have remained largely ignored, though they offer special insights into issues of epistemic authority and telling rights, coherence and evaluation, contextualization and stance-taking. This article investigates the largely unexplored matters of why conversationalists tell stories about other people, how they establish their authority to tell these stories, how they relate these stories to their current conversational context, and how they participant design these stories and shape them for purposes of identity construction in interaction. Speeches by Barack Obama provide a rich resource for investigating narratives of vicarious experience, illustrating a wide range of forms contextualized in complex ways, and told for a variety of purposes.

This article compares swearing in novels with swearing in everyday talk based on a representative sample of British and American prose fiction and a several large corpora of natural conversation. Swearing allegedly makes fictional dialogue more realistic, but up till now no one has attempted a systematic comparison of fictional and natural conversational swearing. Fiction writers incorporate swearing into their dialogue to delineate characters and to signal emotions, sometimes setting it off from non-swearing talk and commenting on it in various ways. Traditionally, the author's own voice contained no swearing. By contrast, in conversational narratives, tellers use swearing to obtain the floor, to evaluate action, to mark climaxes and closings, in addition to portraying their characters as swearing. Moreover, in conversation, tellers may hear their listeners swearing along with them, not only to support and evaluate, but also to oppose and even complain about their telling performance.

Evaluation constitutes a central feature of personal stories in conversation. Storytellers introduce evaluation into their narratives in various ways, including cases of appropriating assessments offered by their listeners. A storyteller may orient to the content of listener assessments and respond to them in various (positive or negative) ways, suspending the narrative in progress to comment or altering its direction. Shared assessments can lead to higher involvement and increased rapport with consequences for subsequent interaction between the participants. Rejections of listener assessments are much less frequent than ratifications: rejection of a listener assessment expresses the teller's refusal to have it count as part of the overall evaluation of the story in progress.

In this article, I explore strategies storytellers use to increase listener response to their performances, such as (1) repeating a salient phrase, particularly a piece of dialogue; (2) adding an explanation of the point of a story; (3) drawing out some consequence of the story; and particularly (4) the unobtrusive strategy of producing a minimal response to draw out a more extensive reaction from listeners. This last strategy came to light in a large-scale corpus-based search. Instead of working from a set of narratives, I begin by looking at a linguistic element, namely items from the class of discourse markers like so and y'know in all kinds of contexts in a very large corpus, and slowly narrowed my focus to narrative passages within the whole array of examples. In the process, I discovered distributions and functions for items, which have not been described in previous research on conversational narrative.

This article propounds a revised, two-sided notion of tellability – one which encompasses both the familiar lower-bounding side of tellability as sufficient to warrant listener interest and the generally ignored upper-bounding side where tellability merges into the no longer tellable of impropriety. It demonstrates how tellers and recipients of stories orient to the upper boundary of tellability in various ways, signalling discomfort as they approach the threshold of impropriety, but also conspiring to breech and go beyond the boundary of impropriety in the pursuit of greater intimacy and entertainment. It is within the framework of the lower boundary and upper boundary of tellability that narrators are free to construct their individual identities. (Tellability, Identity construction, Transgressive narratives, Conversational storytelling)

Intro -- Pragmatics and its Interfaces -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC data -- Table of contents -- Introduction: Pragmatics and its interfaces -- References -- Sociolinguistics vs pragmatics: Where does the boundary lie? -- 1. Introduction -- 1.1 Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics as separate areas of research -- 1.2 Sociolinguistics -- 1.3 Pragmatics -- 1.4 Sociopragmatics -- 2. Critical or social realism -- 3. Egalitarianism -- 4. Self-promotion -- 5. The "gender order" -- 6. Conclusion -- Transcription key -- References -- The interface between pragmatics and Conversation Analysis: The interface between pragmatics and Conversation Analysis -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Implicature -- 3. Speech acts -- 4. Presuppositions and well-formedness -- 5. Conclusion -- References -- Pragmatics vs rhetoric: Political discourse at the pragmatics-rhetoric interface -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Target of the present study -- 3. Pragmatics and rhetoric revisited -- 3.1 The pragmatics-rhetoric interface -- 3.2 Interfacing the pragmatics and the rhetoric of political discourse -- 4. Pragma-rhetorical approach to political discourse -- 4.1 Contextualisation through meaning negotiation and re-negotiation in political interviews -- 4.1 Contextualisation through meaning negotiation and re-negotiation in political interviews -- 4.2 Metadiscourse framing strategies in question-answer sequencing in parliamentary debates -- 4.2 Metadiscourse framing strategies in question-answer sequencing in parliamentary debates -- 5. Conclusions -- References -- Narrative studies versus pragmatics (of narrative): Narrative studies versus pragmatics (of narrative) -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Getting the story told: The bottom-up perspective -- 3. What stories do: The top-down perspective -- 4. Stories in story slots -- 5. Direct and indirect force for stories -- 6. Tentative conclusions

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to humor in interaction. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives, but all concerned with interactional aspects of humor. The contributors are scholars active both in the interdisciplinary area of humor studies and in adjacent disciplines such as linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, gender and translation studies. The volume effectively offers an overview of the range of phenomena falling in the broad category of 'conversational humor', and convincingly argues for the many different functions humor can fulfill, bypassing simplistic humor theories reducing humor to one function. All the articles draw on empirical material from different countries and cultures, comprising conversations among friends and family, talk in workplace situations, humor in educational settings, and experimental approaches to humor in interaction. The book is sure to become an important reference and source of inspiration for scholars in the various subfields of humor studies, pragmatics and (socio-)linguistics.