Ungdomars berättande En studie i struktur och interaktion

Sammanfattning: In any human culture the telling of stories for representing past events is likely to have a centralplace. The aim of this dissertation is to describe storytelling among Swedish adolescents from astructural, interactional and functional perspective, and to demonstrate how the meaning of thestory is interactionally constructed.The material consists of a corpus of 258 stories taken from 30 hours of tape recordings of conversations between adolescents, aged 10-15, of both sexes, mostly in naturally occurring situations. The majority of the recordings were made in the late 80's and early 90's, while others datefrom 1974-1984.The study tries to combine the theoretical and methodological ideas of conversational analysis(CA) and sociolinguistic discourse analysis. The method is basically qualitative and the analysesare carried out through detailed scrutiny of pieces of recordings and transcriptions. The aspects ofstorytelling that arc studied include the way the stories are introduced and accounted for in the ongoing conversation, how they are designed by the teller in order to propose and make the listeneraccept a certain version of what happened, and how the listener through his contributions duringthe telling can accept, modify, reject and negotiate the meaning proposed by the teller. Another aspect studied is how the stories serve as means for self- and other-presentations.The results show that, both as tellers and listeners, Swedish adolescents make use of many different strategies to structure the telling and evaluate the story. These include verb tense, word orderand different kinds of discourse markers as well as highly emotional and dramatizing features suchas reported speech, onomatopoetic expressions and laughter. A very important evaluative deviceis the discourse marker ba. Dramatization is also found in many of the listener's contributions tothe telling.It is also shown that there are substantial differences between boys and girls, both in the use of (some of) these dramatizing features and in the way they construct and present themselves and others in the stories. This seems to be due to the fact that storytelling serves different functions in groups of boys and girls. Finally, it is argued that there are some indications of an ongoing change in the narrative style of Swedish adolescents.