Narrative in English Conversation

Christoph Rühlemann is a researcher at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany. He is the author of Conversation in Context (2007) and co-editor, with Karin Aijmer, of The Cambridge Handbook of Corpus Pragmatics (2015).

• Introduction; 1. Towards a working definition of conversational narrative; 2. Data, methodology, and tools; 3. How do narrators and recipients co-construct turntaking?; 4. Recipient design I: how do narrators mark discourse presentation?; 5. Recipient design II: how do narrators use discourse presentation for dramatization?; 6. How do recipients co-author stories?; 7. Summary, conclusions and directions for future research; Appendix 1; Appendix 2; Appendix 3.

'Rühlemann's book is a rare gem in the study of conversational narrative. It is based on a corpus specifically compiled for this study, breaks new ground with sophisticated computational and statistical tools, and is full of astute observations and qualitative interpretation. No scholar of narratives will want to miss this.' Stefan Th. Gries, University of California, Santa Barbara