In Other Words

Deborah Schiffrin looks at two important tasks of language--presenting 'who' we are talking about (the referent) and 'what happened' to them (their actions and attributes) in a narrative--and explores how this presentation alters in relation to emergent forms and meanings. Drawing on examples from both face-to-face talk and public discourse, she analyzes a variety of repairs, reformulations of referents, and retellings of narratives, ranging from word-level repairs within a single turn-at-talk, to life story narratives told years apart.

• Shows what the study of repetition and 're-doing what we say' can tell us about basic processes of discourse
• Draws data and methods from a wide range of disciplines, such as interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, and semantics
• Addresses basic problems in the study of reference and narrative, and raises new and intriguing questions for the field