Narrative Organization and Contextual Constraints: The Case of Modern Greek Storytelling

Abstract Use of connective forms in oral narratives is increasingly investigated as a device for signaling higher level discoursal relations, thus serving the stories' global organization. I set out to explore connective forms as both local and global links using Modern Greek storytelling as its data. My aims are to uncover the stories' template of organizational relations and to demonstrate their context sensitivity. This is achieved by looking into linkage forms in storytelling for adults as well as in storytelling addressed to children. The results of the analysis bring to the fore an audience-shaped strategy of conti-nuity and explicit signposting in the case of stories for children, as opposed to a strategy of salient segmentational shifts that mainly relies on devices other than discourse markers in stories for adults. I show that these strategies are revealing of an interaction between the stories' textual choices and their im-mediate context of occurrence. In addition, they index and are shaped by the stories' wider sociocultural context of occurrence. (Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics)