Story-telling

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Story-telling
Author(s):	Katharina König (University of Münster, Germany) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1883-2812)
To cite:	König, Katharina. (2026). (Story-)Telling. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ]

As a particular type of telling (Schegloff, 2007: 37ff.), storytelling constitutes a form of sequential organization in which interlocutors temporarily suspend ordinary turn-taking rules in order to create the floor for a speaker or a party of speakers to relate an event and their affective stance towards it. These ‘big packages’ (Sacks, 1992: 354; Jefferson, 1988) have received a lot of scholarly attention in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics (see Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018: Online-Chapter D; Mandelbaum, 2013 for an overview) regarding their overall sequential structure, the interactional coordination between teller and recipient and the grammatical, prosodic and embodied resources participants deploy.

Tellings can be produced as structurally complex turns consisting of several TCUs (i.e. as multi-unit turns, see C. Goodwin & Heritage, 1990: 299, Gardner et al., 2025). Alternatively, they may also be produced as multi-turn units, for instance when a telling is continued after speaker change has occurred (see Norrick, 2012; Rühlemann & Gries 2015). Consider the following extract taken and adapted from Stivers (2013: 202):

(1) (Stivers 2013: 202)

1   Lan:  Did I mention to you that I got yelled at    <-- story preface
2         by one of our neighbours today? 
3         (0.2) 
4   Gio:  No,                                          <-- go-ahead response 

          ((5 lines joking deleted)) 

10  Lan:  The dawg got out the gate.                   <-- telling begins
11        (0.5) 
12        (The)/(That) back gate. 
13        (0.2) 

          ((telling continues)) 

41  Lan:  And she said uhh, “|you guys gotta do 
42        something to restrain him.” 
43        (0.8) 
44  Gio:  [(She said)]-
45  Lan:  [(       ) ] 
46  Gio:  She said (we had to do something) tuh        <-- clarification  request
47        restrain him? 
48  Lan:  Yeah. 
49        She goes (.) “|you had better tie            <-- telling continues
50        up that do:g.” and I said well it’s pretty 
51        well contained back there she goes 
52        “|Obviously not!” hh                         <-- possible story climax
53  Gio:  hh Didju tell her to (just) fuck off         <-- affiliative uptake

When a story is not invited or otherwise contextually expected, speakers can typically project a telling with a fitted pre-sequence, a pre-telling or a story-preface (Sacks, 1974), which establishes tellability in the given context (Ochs & Capps, 2001) and serves to secure primary speakership for the upcoming turns (line 1 in the above example). The preface also indicates the type of telling that is about to be produced (e.g., a humorous story, a troubles telling, a complaint story, a hypothetical scenario), thus providing cues for its possible completion as well as the speaker’s stance on the narrated event. Addressees can then give a go-ahead response (line 4 in the above example) or resist the initiative to produce a multi-unit telling. Once they agree to suspend the usual turn-by-turn talk, a single speaker or a party of speakers (on collaborative storytelling see Dressel, 2021; Mandelbaum, 1987) has the floor until the telling is brought to (possible) completion.

Addressees are expected to provide structurally aligned responses in mid-telling (Stivers 2008, such as continuers or head nods). However, they may also produce structurally disaligned responses such as clarification requests (lines 46-47 in the above example, Mandelbaum 2010), or more disruptive ‘byplay’ such as teasing or heckling (M.H. Goodwin, 1997). Tellers may then continue or resume their original course of action (Jefferson, 1972). Upon story completion, a different recipient uptake is due: Here, recipients are expected to affiliate with the teller’s stance (Stivers, 2008, see line 53 in the above example) otherwise it will be treated as noticeably absent and possibly understood as resistance to some aspect of the telling (e.g., its sequential fit or the teller’s stance, Selting, 2017). Participants then negotiate how to continue; they may return to regular turn-by-turn talk, offer second stories that relate to the previous one or the teller may expand their story.

While earlier accounts have focused on the overall structure of oral storytelling (Labov & Waletzky, 1967), conversation-analytic studies emphasize how the interaction between teller(s) and addressee fundamentally shapes a story’s delivery. By aligning to the projected course of action, addressees actively support and co-construct storytelling as an activity (Mandelbaum, 2010; Stivers, 2008). Storytelling is recipient-designed from the start as tellers have to take into account if addressees are likely to affiliate with their stance and what recipients already know (see line 1 in the above example). When speakers tell a story twice, they need to adapt it to the recipients’ upgraded epistemic position or invite them to join in as co-tellers (Günthner, 2005; Norrick, 1998). Addressees take active part in co-constructing affective stances by, for instance, displaying empathy (Kupetz, 2014) or by producing co-animations of depicted characters (Cantarutti, 2022).

Moreover, tellings are shaped by their sequential position; it influences how speakers design their turns-at-talk to introduce, deliver, or close a multi-unit telling. In naturally-occuring talk-in-interaction, stories can be initiated by a teller (as in the above example) or invited by others, they can be offered as second stories (Sidnell, 2010: 185ff.) or as ‘breaking news’ of ongoing events that need to be updated continually during the otherwise unfolding conversation (Georgakopoulou, 2013). In multi-activity settings, it is not always possible for speakers to produce stories as “focused bound units” (C. Goodwin, 2003); instead, tellings may be realized in intricately intertwined fragments.

Speakers use various grammatical, prosodic, and embodied resources (among others) to make stories and their sequential components recognizable, to distinguish between the here-and-now and the narrated world, and to cue their stance on the narrated events. Relating past experiences in present tense is a practice to highlight a dynamic and dramatic development (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018: Online-Chapter D, 9ff.). With ‘dense constructions’ (Günthner, 2011) narrators contextualize their emotional involvement in a rapidly unfolding series of events. Embodied resources contextualize shifts in footing (Sidnell, 2006; Thompson & Suzuki, 2014). The prosodic design of direct and indirect reported speech can index an evaluative stance toward these quoted utterances (Couper-Kuhlen, 1999; Günthner, 2002). Tellers systematically combine verbal, prosodic and embodied resources to cue for the climax of a story (such as marking the climax of a story using reported speech in dense accentuation and with frowning, see Selting, 2017) and they can index their affective stance with facial displays such as smiling before verbalizing it (Ruusuvuori & Peräkylä, 2009). Addressees make use of embodied resources to display attentiveness (for instance, by fixing their gaze on the storyteller, (C. Goodwin, 1984; Rossano, 2013), to align with the course of action (e.g., by mid-turn nods, Stivers, 2008) or to display affiliative surprise (Dix & Groß, 2023) without claiming speakership. These studies of turn design and recipient conduct again illustrate that storytelling is locally occasioned and collaboratively achieved.

Orienting to its “why that now?” (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973) epistemology, conversation analysis takes a special interest in the actions speakers accomplish with conversational narratives: “For the most part, people tell stories to do something – to complain, to boast, to inform, to alert, to tease, to explain or excuse or to justify […]” (Schegloff 1997: 97). Storytelling can thus help to create rapport and social solidarity (M. H. Goodwin, 1982). In institutional settings, stories may constitute a focal part of the communicative agenda (as for instance in therapeutic discourse, Deppermann et al., 2020) or they can expand task-oriented turns-at-talk (for instance, in building a defensive move when testifying in court, Galatolo & Drew, 2006). Storytelling thus constitutes an essential resource for managing social relationships in and through talk-in-interaction.

Additional Related Entries:

• Affective stance
• Affiliation
• Empathy
• Footing
• Go-ahead
• Multi-unit turn
• Participation framework
• Pre-expansion (sequence)
• Turn-taking

Cited References:

Cantarutti, M. N. (2022). Co-animation in troubles-talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 55(1), 37–58.

Couper-Kuhlen, E. (1999). Coherent voicing: On prosody in conversational reported speech. In W. Bublitz, U. Lenk, & E. Ventola (Eds.), Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. How to Create it and How to Describe it (pp. 11–33). John Benjamins.

Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Selting, M. (2018). Interactional Linguistics: Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge University Press.

Deppermann, A., Scheidt, C. E., & Stukenbrock, A. (2020). Positioning shifts from told self to performative self in psychotherapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 572436.

Dix, C., & Groß, A. (2023). Surprise about news or just receiving information? Moving and holding both eyebrows in co-present interaction. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 6(3).

Dressel, D. (2021). Turn-taking in collaborative storytelling: Et puis après (‘and then after that’) as a resource for resuming tellings-in-progress and negotiating tellership between story episodes. Linguistik Online, 112(7), 3–25.

Galatolo, R., & Drew, P. (2006). Narrative expansions as defensive practices in courtroom testimony. Text & Talk, 26(6), 661–698.

Gardner, R., Blythe, J., Mushin, I., Stirling, L., Dahmen, J., Dear, C. de, & Possemato, F. (2025). The Making of Multi-Unit Turns. John Benjamins.

Georgakopoulou, A. (2013). Storytelling on the go: Breaking news as a travelling narrative genre. In M. Hyvärinen (Ed.), The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (pp. 201–224). John Benjamins.

Goodwin, C. (1984). Notes on story structure and the organization of participation. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action. Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 225–246). Cambridge University Press.

Goodwin, C. (2003). Embedded context. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 36(4), 323–350.

Goodwin, C., & Heritage, J. (1990). Conversation analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, 283–307.

Goodwin, M. H. (1982). “Instigating”: Storytelling as social process. American Ethnologist, 9(4), 799–816.

Goodwin, M. H. (1997). Byplay: Negotiation evaluation in storytelling. In G. R. Guy, C. Feagin, D. Schiffrin, & J. Baugh (Eds.), Towards a Social Science of Language: Papers in honor of William Labov: Social interaction and discourse structures (pp. 77–102). John Benjamins.

Günthner, S. (2002). Perspectivity in reported dialogues. The contextualization of evaluative stances in reconstructing speech. In C. F. Graumann & W. Kallmeyer (Eds.), Perspective and Perspectivation in Discourse (pp. 347–374). John Benjamins.

Günthner, S. (2005). Narrative reconstructions of past experiences. Adjustments and modifications in the process of recontextualizing a past experience. In U. M. Quasthoff & T. Becker (Eds.), Narrative Interaction (pp. 285–301). John Benjamins.

Günthner, S. (2011). The construction of emotional involvement in everyday German narratives – interactive uses of ‘dense constructions’. Pragmatics, 21(4), 573–592.

Jefferson, G. (1972). Side sequences. In D. Sudnow (Ed.), Studies in Social Interaction (pp. 294-338). The Free Press.

Jefferson, G. (1988). On the sequential organization of troubles-talk in ordinary conversation. Social Problems, 35(4), 418–441.

Kupetz, M. (2014). Empathy displays as interactional achievements—Multimodal and sequential aspects. Journal of Pragmatics, 61, 4–34.

Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative Analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (pp. 12–44). University of Washington Press.

Mandelbaum, J. (1987). Couples sharing stories. Communication Quarterly, 35(2), 144–170.

Mandelbaum, J. (2010). Concurrent and intervening actions during storytelling in family ‘ceremonial’ dinners. In D. Schiffrin, A. de Fina, & A. Nylund (Eds.), Telling Stories. Language, Narrative, and Social Life (pp. 161–172). Georgetown University Press.

Mandelbaum, J. (2013). Storytelling in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (pp. 492–507). Blackwell.

Norrick, N. R. (1998). Retelling stories in spontaneous conversation. Discourse Processes, 25(1), 75–97.

Norrick, N. R. (2012). Listening practices in English conversation: The responses responses elicit. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 566–576.

Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (2001). Living Narrative. Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Harvard University Press.

Rossano, F. (2013). Gaze in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (308-329). Blackwell.

Rühlemann, C., & Gries, S. (2015). Turn order and turn distribution in multi-party storytelling. Journal of Pragmatics, 87, 171–191.

Ruusuvuori, J., & Peräkylä, A. (2009). Facial and verbal expressions in assessing stories and topics. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 42(4), 377–394.

Sacks, H. (1974). An analysis of the course of a joke’s telling in conversation. In R. Bauman & J. Sherzer (Eds.), Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (pp. 337–353). Cambridge University Press.

Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation. Volume II. Wiley-Blackwell.

Schegloff, E. A. (1997). ‘Narrative analysis’ thirty years later. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7(1-4), 97–106.

Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis I. Cambridge University Press.

Schegloff, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8(4), 289–327.

Selting, M. (2017). The display and management of affectivity in climaxes of amusing stories. Journal of Pragmatics, 111, 1–32.

Sidnell, J. (2006). Coordinating gesture, talk, and gaze in reenactments. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 39(4), 377–409.

Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation Analysis: An Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell.

Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment, and affiliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of affiliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41(1), 31–57.

Stivers, T. (2013). Sequence organization. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (192-209). Blackwell.

Thompson, S. A., & Suzuki, R. (2014). Reenactments in conversation: Gaze and recipiency. Discourse Studies, 16(6), 816–846

Additional References:

De Fina, A. & Georgakopoulou, A. (Eds.). (2015). The Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Wiley Blackwell.

Kotthoff, H. (2009). Joint constructions of humorous fictions in conversation. An unnamed narrative activity in a playful keying. Journal of Literary Theory, 3(2), 195–218.

Lerner, G. H. (1992). Assisted storytelling: Deploying shared knowledge as a practical matter. Qualitative Sociology, 15(3), 247–271.

Quasthoff, U. M. (1997). An interactive approach to narrative development. In M. Bamberg (Ed.), Narrative Development: Six Approaches (pp. 51–83). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Schiffrin, D., De Fina, A. & Nylund, A. (Eds.). (2010). Telling Stories. Language, Narrative, and Social Life. Georgetown University Press.