This seminar explores how language, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology inform each other in relation to narrative and social interaction. This class examines how people use talk and embodied interaction in a variety of situated activities to share their lives through storytelling. Each week we will read articles by linguists, linguistic anthropologists, and conversation analysts that provide a general theoretical framing for the week’s topic in conjunction with specific ethnographic case studies that illustrate use of particular narrative practices. These practices include: narrative sense-making in response to complaints, displaying affective alignments, constructing accounts, remembering through narrative, policing moral order, and other practices through which the social life of local groups is achieved.

Students will learn how to collect data, transcribe data, analyze data in-depth, and most importantly, formulate their perspectives on how people convey explicit or implicit meanings and intentions during talk-in-interaction.

Ochs, Elinor and Lisa Capps. 2001. Living Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

1. Book chapters and journal articles are provided in the iLearn system (https://ilearn.thu.edu.tw).
2. Print out PPT handouts and bring them to class.