Direct Speech, Self-presentation and Communities of Practice

This book investigates direct speech representation in Greek adolescents' storytelling. In particular, it examines how narrators present themselves and other characters as interactional protagonists through representational strategies in the stories they produce. Direct speech is viewed as a narrative device that contributes to the construction of the narrators' own identities. Bringing together relevant theories of speech representation, narrative analysis and identity construction, the book combines a qualitative with a quantitative analysis of direct speech in the narratives under investigation. The work argues that in the corpus of adolescent discourse used the deployment of direct speech and its specific sub-devices points to the socio-cultural norms that define the participants' extra-linguistic worlds.

Acknowledgements \ List of tables \ List of abbreviations \ Transcription conventions \ Introduction\ Chapter1: Speech Representation and Direct Speech\ Chapter2: Narrative and Self-presentation \Chapter3: Data and Methods \Chapter4: Distributions, Frequencies and Factors Affecting Direct Speech Variation \Chapter5: Voice Representation, Gender and Dominant Discourses \Chapter6: Self-presentation \ Chapter7: Self through Other-presentation \ Overviewand Conclusions \ Appendix\ References \Index