Sharing stories or personal experiences in everyday
conversation may constitute the basis for all
storytelling activities including telling folk tales,
legends, fictive stories, or even writing novels,
plays, and films. This book analyzes first-person
narratives in the everyday interactions of speakers
of Japanese. Most of the data come from several
dozen hours of tape-recorded conversations. This
study discusses the thematic organization of the
stories, their social functions, and the use of tense
and aspect in narratives. It aims at establishing
the links between linguistic strategies,...