Postscript: Plurifunctional narratives

Abstract

In this brief postscript I reflect on these stimulating papers, starting with hopefully well-accepted general precepts, and then commenting on shared themes, from the nature of narrative entextualizations as objects to the interactive social engagements from which they emerge. Linguistic anthropology and the comparative study of talk-ininteraction take as axiomatic the plurifunctionality of utterances, which always operate on formally laminated but analytically distinct levels to perform multiple sorts of communicative and sociocultural actions. Furthermore, metapragmatics—a metatheory of what we can do with talk— involves everything from highly regimented, explicit, and available phenomena to problematic, di‰cult, and largely invisible sorts of action (Silverstein 1981), frustrating the search for definitional precision when comparing folk metapragmatic concepts. Two corollaries follow: that a complex layering of biographical and ethnographic background is required even to identify an interactive fragment as a member of some metapragmatic category (such as ‘narrative’) in the first place; and that all communicative ‘moves’ are interactively negotiated and emergent. First a complaint: utterances are not only multifunctional, but also multimodal. In these for the most part audio-only narrative studies, with data usually in English or presented in free English gloss, one often feels that formal interactive elements may be rendered invisible by design. Ochs (1979) pointed out decades ago that when our data are reduced to the transcripts we use, we must be especially careful how we choose to transcribe. Is there only one possible standard of transcriptional detail? Does the original language matter? Can we somehow read the Italian through an English gloss? Or interpret significant visible action through a desultory textual paraphrase? In introductory linguistics, one hammers home the dictum: ‘form first!’1 Formal marks of a genre or an activity are only available for scrutiny if communicative form is taken seriously. Fasulo