Using large corpora of conversation to investigate narrative

This article describes a hybrid corpus linguistic approach to conversational storytelling, whereby one first identifies a feature of interest in a small set of narratives, then moves to a general investigation of this feature in large corpora of transcribed conversation, focusing only later on the distribution and functions of this feature within narrative portions of the corpora investigated. Interjections are conversational units par excellence with no syntactic relation to adjacent clauses, so that investigation of large corpora is particularly vital for determining their patterning and functions in conversation. I show that interjections play a number of important roles in the organization of conversational storytelling, first in justifying tellability, next in marking narrative climaxes, particularly within constructed dialogue, then in evaluating the narrative point, and finally in receiving and commenting on the storytelling performance. I further describe combinations of interjections and the interaction of interjections with exclamative clauses.