Narrative Inquiry - Volume 28, Issue 2, 2018

In this paper, I analyse women’s interview narratives from the United States and Japan about their child rearing experiences to examine how stance-taking towards their experiences and their family members manifest itself differently. Paying attention to the narratives regarding their husbands’ role in child rearing, I examine how stance-taking may be perceived through overt and implied references in the use of linguistic resources. With the American English data, I discuss how the shift of personal pronouns combined with the discourse marker but create metaframes of the speakers’ stances, categorized as “abstract/positive” and “concrete/negative.” In contrast, Japanese narratives revealed that women’s stance-taking towards their husbands was marked through the concurrent usage of supportive giving verbs (-te kureru), indexing indebtedness on the side of the women, as well as nominalization forms that categorized their partners as certain types of men based on shared social expectations.

This paper focuses on the performance of small stories from two Cambodian men interviewed by the researcher about the relationships they form with men from the Global North. The analysis attends to the empirical significance of these performances by focusing on the mobilization of affect as an interactional linguistic and narrative resource that foregrounds social action in this context. In this way, these small stories reveal how these men may challenge and reshape dominant social discourses at this sexualised North/South interface. Bringing to the field of narrative inquiry approaches from queer linguistics, and Southern perspectives, this paper is therefore tasked with exploring what the field may potentially gain from these areas, especially regarding the theoretical and methodological possibilities of a North/South dialogue in the production of knowledge.

While overlap represents one of the major mainstays of conversation-analytic research, the phenomenon of overlap involving backchannels in TCU-initial position has largely gone unnoticed. This study addresses this gap focusing on backchannels occurring in overlap in storytelling interaction. The investigation combines both quantitative and qualitative methods and is based on small but representative samples drawn from the audio files available for the Narrative Corpus. The primary discovery of this study is that TCU-initial backchannel overlaps typically occur at points where the storytelling’s progressivity is decelerated, either due to delays in the backchannel’s production or to the teller interrupting the telling’s linearity to insert background information, upgrade references, or slip in digressions. An alternative environment for the occurrence of TCU-initial backchannel overlap is around the story climax. Data are in British English.

Police use of social media has increased in the United Kingdom since 2008 (Crump, 2011), yet there has been little qualitative exploration of how police-owned Facebook sites work to shape the identity of forces. This study explores the action orientation of small stories on the Facebook site of a UK metropolitan police force. The research considers the collaborative ways in which stories are positioned and constructed collectively by multiple narrators (both formal police posts, and the commenting public). Given the ability of social media to enact identity through interaction, this research explores how the identity of the police force is positioned, and repositioned, by social media activity. It concludes that both the opportunity for dyadic interactions that may underpin effective community policing, and the potential benefits of harnessing the opportunity for effective identity work, are currently being under utilised on police Facebook sites.

This study investigated the influence of the audience and narrator’s gender on spoken narratives produced by Chinese children. Sixty typically developing five- and six-year-old children were evenly divided into three groups. Each group was assigned one audience, being a teacher, a same-age peer, or a younger peer. The children were asked to view a wordless picture book and retell the story to the audience. The results showed that the children tended to use more macrostructure elements when telling stories to same-age peers, with boys using more macrostructure elements than girls. Girls used more words and more events when narrating to younger peers, whereas boys used more words, more diverse words, and more evaluative language when narrating to teachers. In addition, the children marked temporality more in narratives to younger peers than to same-age peers. The findings indicated that the audience and narrator’s gender influence the narrative production of Chinese children.

In this article we present findings from two separate narrative phenomenological studies interested in the narrative representations of experiences. While meeting original research aims, unexpected accounts of the meaningful experience derived from participation in the studies emerged. The shared methodological approach is introduced, followed by explorations of time, space, actors, and scenes as co-constructed story-telling and story-making considerations. The discussion highlights that while researcher positionality is itself not a novel focus, the potential influence of engagement in research must be acknowledged. The “data” therefore transcends the narrative shared to become a secondary experience with a constitutive influence on how the research relationship and participation in research is considered, analysed and interpreted.

This study explores how 16 individuals who grew up during the four-year long military siege of the city employ language to make sense of their everyday experiences in Sarajevo following the conclusion of the Bosnian War. Narrative inquiry is employed in this work to study sense-making, a psychological process based in language and situated in interaction with extant social and physical landscapes. During the study, participants wrote responses across the three narrative contexts (1) the prewar, (2) the acute war, and (3) the postwar. Data analyses examine how participants enact ecological landscape in narrative construction through varied use of prepositions across the three narrative contexts. Significantly higher use of prepositions in the acute war narrative context indicates that growing up amidst urban destruction gives rise to thought processes that draw on spatial and temporal relations in order to make sense of radical environmental changes in the landscape of war.

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.