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Project

Exploring the dialectic relation between narrative and context from an interactional sociolinguistic perspective: the case of World War II-testimonies

It is only recently that interactional sociolinguists have increasingly scrutinized the dialectic relation between the local level of narrative as an interactional accomplishment and the surrounding socio-cultural context and its big D-discourses (= socially accepted ways of thinking and acting). This is also thanks to positioning analysis (Bamberg 1997), which links the local levels 1 and 2 (viz. storyworld and storytelling world) to a more globally oriented level 3 (the construction of the narrators' identities vis-à-vis these big D-discourses). However, the full exploration of this last level is still under way. This project aims to contribute to elaborating this positioning level 3 by analyzing a uniquely compiled corpus of 20 pairs of repeated testimonies about World War II. This corpus not only allows for an exploration of iterative patterns in the stories and of the narrators' identity work, but also for a critical comparative analysis along three dimensions by which we aim to uncover efficient ways of studying the relation between text and context.

Date:1 Oct 2016 →  30 Sep 2020
Keywords:narrative analysis, discourse analysis, Interactional sociolinguistics, World War II, testimonies, positioning analysis
Disciplines:Linguistics