Narrative Inquiry - Volume 26, Issue 2, 2016

When the Australian writer Richard Flanagan accepted the 2014 Man Booker Prize for fiction, he said that “As a species it is story that distinguishes us”. While the prize was given for a literary work written in English, Australia and the surrounding regions are replete with a rich diversity of oral traditions, and with stories remembered and told over countless generations and in many languages. In this article we consider both the universality and the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic diversity of various forms of narrative. We explore the question of what a linguistic typology of narrative might look like, and survey some of the literature relevant to this issue. Most specifically, we ask whether some observed differences in narrative style, structure, or delivery could derive from social features of the communities which produce them: their social density, informational homogeneity, and the high degree of common ground they share.

This article seeks to identify aspects of narratives in Aboriginal Australia, which are distinctive from narratives typical of non-Indigenous Australia, based on comments which have been made in previous academic publications about these linguistic communities. Anecdotally, people unfamiliar with Aboriginal narratives may comment that a story which a traditional Aboriginal audience will find entertaining and rewarding, appears to them to be unengaging, lacking point, or repetitive. One goal of this article is to uncover some of the expectations that these different audiences have about what constitutes a ‘good’ story. To differentiate traditional Aboriginal narratives from stories encountered in the wider Australian community, ten features distinctive of Aboriginal narrative are proposed.

This article presents an examination of some of the linguistic and interactional features of a story emerging from talk in a remote Indigenous Australian community. In the data used here, the storyteller is an elderly Garrwa woman in Borroloola who speaks Garrwa and Kriol. The focus is on how the addition of a non-community member to the field of interaction affected the way the storyteller recounted events from a situation within the previous 24 hours. This is seen not only in what events are told, but also how the teller tailored her story to her audience in the context of telling — a recognition that stories are interactively achieved. Here I examine how she accommodated the knowledge states of her audience, how recipients responded and how this in turn affected the trajectory of the storytelling.

This article analyses the selection of person reference expressions in narratives in Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u, a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York Peninsula (Australia). The analysis takes the principle of topic-fittedness, one of a set of design principles proposed to account for the interactional conditioning of person reference formulation, and applies it to Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u narration. The ensuing anlaysis demonstrates that referring practices are conditioned by, and ultimately work to convey, manifold contextual aspects of the narrative and the speech event it is embedded in. The focus is on the narrator’s use and manipulation of kin-terms to highlight the interpersonal connection between themselves and characters. Kin-term expressions are shown to be fitted to the pragmatic-action being undertaken by the narrator: namely, to signal authority to quote another’s words in represented speech; to bolster authority to speak on a subject matter; and to develop a stance in relation to events being narrated.

The Gun-nartpa people of northern Australia use represented experience to mark prominence at narrative highpoints. The term ‘represented experience’ refers to verbal expressions that form paratactic relations with surrounding discourse. It encompasses the speech of story actors, environmental sounds, and sound-symbolic renderings of events. Such representations impart moments of drama to narrative discourse, in which shifts in perspective position the deictic centre at an imagined interpersonal space within the storyworld of the narrative. It is here, where the storyteller and audience enter the subjectivity of story actors, that elements of the narrative most clearly express its underpinning cultural proposals. The Gun-nartpa construe the cultural proposals that make up the notional structures of narrative discourse in terms of relational knowledge, in which conceptualisations of ‘belonging’ are of primary value. This relational frame of reference provides context for the interpretation of the evaluative implicatures that arise at highpoints, and lends coherence to Gun-nartpa narrative discourse.

In sand stories, an Indigenous narrative practice from Central Australia, semi-conventionalized graphic symbols drawn on the ground are interwoven with speech, sign and gesture. This article examines some aspects of the complexity seen in this dynamic graphic tradition, illustrating the ways that these different semiotic resources work together to create complex multimodal utterances. The complexity of sand stories provides an almost unique platform from which to investigate the rich diversity of the expressive dimensions of narrative and demonstrates what needs to be taken into account if we are to make meaningful comparisons of storytelling practices in a range of cultures and contexts.

Sequentiality is widely considered to be a universal and defining characteristic of narrative, however there has been relatively little research on narrative in non-European languages with oral traditions. Evidence from the Vanuatu language, Tirax, suggests that sequentiality is not the only nor fundamental strategy for narrative construction. The Tirax data show that while there is a general correlation between narrative clause order and the order of story events, there are many exceptions to sequential ordering. Furthermore there is minimal or no specialized marking to indicate the disruptions to sequentiality in Tirax narratives. The disruptions to sequentiality appear to be motivated by the storytelling imperatives of hooking an audience and keeping them immersed in the story. The data suggest that the difference in cognitive pressures involved in remembering, constructing and comprehending the spoken narrative, compared with the written one, is reflected in different ways of organising information in a narrative.

Using Ochs & Capp’s (2001) five dimensions of narrative, I analyse small stories that emerge during informal conversation among Javanese speakers. Of particular interest are the dimensions of Linearity, Tellership and Moral Stance. While many of these narratives are organised in chronological order, nearly half emerge from their conversational context non-chronologically. The primary organising strategy found among the non-chronological narratives is repetition combined with elaboration. I call this pattern of narrative organisation reiterative storytelling. While reiterative storytelling may not be unique to Javanese, it is pervasive and particularly characteristic of Javanese interactional style. Reiterative storytelling is shown to support the co-constructed development of both narrative and evaluative detail and thus to provide a way for interlocutors to forefront the social motivations behind particular storytelling events.

Recent sociolinguistic research on narrative has underlined the understanding of place as being both spatially defined and socially constituted through shared experience as well as contestation. Drawing on studies on the philosophy of place and the ‘small stories’ perspective, this study approaches place as an abstract concept in which spatial environment, people, objects, and activity come together as a unified, complex structure. Two Indonesian narratives are examined to illustrate the connectedness between the different elements that make up that structure. Ambiguous uses of temporal phrases and person references suggest that these elements (e.g., people and objects) are often undifferentiated. It is argued that the narratives are not simply stories about place but are stories enabled by place, that is, by presence in a spatial environment, encounter with people and objects, and engagement in shared activities through time, and which highlight self-identity as being deeply embedded in the identities of others.

We consider a corpus of conversational narratives which arise in the complex, multiparty setting of pre- and post-game stretching sessions of a women’s elite basketball team. Our focus is on the characteristics of story openings within this corpus, and we consider how stories are launched; how roles of story opener and teller are distributed within the group, reflecting both entitlement to tell stories and social relationships between the participants; and what strategies are used to introduce different kinds of stories into the interaction. We suggest that the team from which the stories derive represents a modern-day ‘society of intimates’, and show that patterns of story opening and telling reflect this — and correlate with institutional and social roles and relationships.