2. Dialogues within oral narratives

The objective of this chapter is to analyze ‘constructed dialogues’ in the spoken discourse of conversational narratives. These sequences, formed by quotations that represent past, possible, or imaginary dialogues in an unrehearsed and non-literal presentation, are contextually and pragmatically dependent by nature. First, the structure and organization of constructed dialogues are analyzed, followed by their relationship with certain social variables. Based on an analysis of two corpora of oral Spanish, the present study illustrates the need to examine language-in-use structures in real spoken language, thus emphasizing the advantages of corpus linguistics to deal with highly-contextualized linguistic phenomena.