A study of storytelling in Japanese conversation

This study explores the nature of "storytelling" in participants' social interaction, an arena for participants to display their selves. Based on the assumption that telling a story is part of "storytelling" which is sequentially organized and centers around a story (Sacks 1974, 1992; Jefferson 1978), I investigate how past events become tellable (i.e., worth telling/listening to) through the participants' interaction in six naturally occurring face-to-face conversations among Japanese women. Focusing on the participants' uses of linguistic features and their sequences of actions, I examine how each story teller together with her story recipients introduces and forms her story as something tellable in terms of its appropriateness in the ongoing conversation, its characterizations, and the participants' concern for the "social circumstances" (Sacks 1992). Further, I explore how the ways that the participants participate in the storytelling relate to their interpersonal relationships and the way they display their social identities.; This study shows that story tellers create "circumstances" (Jefferson 1978) for telling their stories before they begin their stories not only in terms of topic coherence but also through the resources (e.g., ideas and expressions) that they use to form their stories and the way that they manage their interpersonal relationships with other participants as well as with the story characters. I also demonstrate how the story tellers show their concern for the "social circumstances" by introducing and forming their stories in such as way as to avoid jeopardizing their interpersonal relationships.; Through an examination of the story recipients' utterances during the story I show that the story recipients come to understand what the stories are about not only by monitoring the story tellers' uses of "evaluative devices" (Labov 1972) but also by noticing how the stories fit into the ongoing conversation. I also demonstrate the interactional nature of "evaluative devices" by showing how the story tellers form their stories by repeatedly describing an event with different "evaluative devices." Finally, I explore how the participants' conduct during the storytelling relates to their social identity (one dimension of their selves), and illustrate the potential power of analyzing storytelling for investigation of the self.