Schiffrin Deborah. In Other Words: Variation in reference and narrative

Cambridge University Press, 2006. — xvi, 373 pages. — ISBN13: 978-0-511-14654-1.What we say always consists of prior words, structures and meanings that are combined in new ways and re-used in new contexts for new listeners. In this book, 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 analyses 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.Bringing together work from conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, and variation analysis, In Other Words will be invaluable for scholars wishing to understand the many different factors that underlie the shaping and reshaping of discourse over time, place and person.Variation
Problematic referrals
Anticipating referrals
Reactive and proactive prototypes
Referring sequences
Reframing experience
Retelling a story
Who did what (again)?
Redoing and replaying