Closing in on story openings and closings: Evidence from conversational stories in Greek

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to show the benefits of incorporating a conversation-analytic perspective in the analysis of Greek storytelling data with regard to the endpoints of a telling, that is, the opening and the closing. I specifically explore the types of story openings and closings occurring in a data set that comprises the conversations of a group of female adolescents in a small town in Greece. I also discuss the salience of economic openings (Jefferson 1978) realized by certain conventionalized devices and the importance and local design of what I call counter stories in the stories' closing. I juxtapose counter stories to second stories (Sacks 1992), which have been found within CA to be frequent after a story's closing and I assess the frequency of second stories told by the same teller and not by a story recipient in my data. Overall, I argue that these systematic openings and closings in my data are interrelated with the types of stories told and the participants' roles and relations. Finally, I ponder the implications of this close connection for CA work on stories as talk-in-interaction. © 2010 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden.