Organization of Tellership in Multi-Party Face-to-Face Storytelling

The present paper delineates the interactive nature of storytelling in multi-party, face-to-face interactions by focusing on how tellership is negotiated and shifts among participants who have different knowledge states about the event that is being recounted. By employing a conversation-analytic approach to social action and storytelling, the study explicates the participation framework created among participants who may have different degrees of involvement depending on the moment's configuration of interaction. Through detailed analyses of storytelling activities extracted from naturally occurring casual conversations, the study explicates how the boundary between speaker and hearer becomes unstable as the story unfolds, illuminating the interactive nature of storytelling in multi-party, face-to-face interaction (108 words).