The audience shaping of text-strategies in spoken discourse: Adults vs. children addresses and the case of Modern Greek

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Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 649-674

The audience shaping of text-strategies in spoken discourse" Adults vs. children addressees and the case of Modem Greek Alexandra Georgakopoulou* Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, School of Humanities, King's College, University of London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK Received July 1994; revised version January 1995

Abstract The effect of audience on spoken discourse construction constitutes a major analytic focus of contextualized discourse studies. Though suspending the turn-taking mechanisms of conversational discourse, storytelling is no less the product of teller and listeners interaction as well as audience accommodation. This recipient-design of spoken narrative is examined in this paper from the point of view of intergenerational communication, namely adult-child (aged 7-8) communication. Unlike most relevant studies which solely focus on adult-child narrative communication with the ultimate aim of exploring narrative development, the discussion attempts an extensive comparison of adult-adult with adult-child narratorial styles with the aim of elucidating the audience shaping of their differences. Additionally, the adult-child stories examined are not restricted to the well researched family storytelling, but originate in broad socialization contexts. The data comes from Greek society in which both cases of storytelling are at the heart of everyday interactions. The discussion brings to the fore substantial recipient design choices in narrative construction covering the stories' themes, structural patterns and text-strategies of audience involvement. In particular, involvement in stories for adults proves to rely on the orchestration of specific dramatization devices. By contrast, in stories for children it is based on the extensive use of narrative devices that can be characterized as accommodative (Coupland et al., 1991). The contextualization of these audience-shaped strategies sheds light on their interaction with culturally sanctioned narrative functions, storytellers' self-presentation and the negotiation of power or solidarity relations between tellers and audiences.

~* Thanks are due to all the people who let me record their stories, to Alex Nunes who assisted in the stories' translation into English and to Elizabeth Black and Hugh Trappes-Lomax for their valuable suggestions at the initial stages of this research. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. * Phone: +44 71 873 2629; E-maih [email protected] 0378-2166/96/$15.00 © 1996 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2166(95)0013-5

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1. Introduction

The notion of contextualization of discourse, in particular spoken discourse, pervades current linguistic research as a prerequisite for any enquiry into textuality. The aim is to explore the interconnections between language choices and their immediate and wider context of occurrence. Of the elements of the immediate communicative context of discourse, one which has been particularly emphasized is that of the addressee. The phenomenon of 'audience adaptation (accommodation)' or 'recipient design' (Schegloff, 1972), that is, of discourse shaping on the basis of knowledge of or assumptions about the addressee, is a major preoccupation of research on both spoken and written discourse (e.g. see Applebee, 1983; Crowhurst and Pich6, 1979; Nystrand, 1986; Rubin, 1982; also in literary narratology, e.g. Eco, 1979; Herrnstein-Smith, 1981; Rabinowitz, 1977; Suleiman and Crosman, 1980). One of the most influential speech accommodation models is the Communication Accommodation Theory which gives explanatory priority to recipiency considerations in its accounts of style- or code-choice (e.g. Bell, 1984; Coupland and Giles, 1988; Giles et al., 1987). Alternative, yet not incompatible, approaches to the audience effect on discourse construction are mainly informed by the paradigms of Conversation Analysis, Anthropological Linguistics and Ethnography of Communication (e.g. Goodwin, 1984; Sacks, 1972, 1974; Schegloff, 1972, and more recently papers in Duranti and Goodwin, 1992; Hill and Irvine, 1993). This line of research has partly focused on the audience's role in shaping conversational storytelling, which has been documented even for very young children's narratives (e.g. Menig-Peterson, 1975; Shatz, 1984). This role is commonly explored by means of capturing the 'contextualization cues' (Gumperz, 1982) which allow storyteller and audience to situate and interpret the narrative text respectively. Specific 'audience adaptation' devices that are commonly investigated involve the distribution of given-new information, the degree of implicitness as an indication of shared assumptions between teller and listeners (e.g. Johnstone, 1990; Scollon and Scollon, 1981; Stahl, 1989) and choices of linguistic forms such as tense (e.g. Wolfson, 1982; Bamberg, 1990). So far, it has been demonstrated that the audience of storytelling exhibits such a powerful effect on narrative construction as to even serve as the co-author or co-narrator of it (e.g. see Duranti, 1986; Goodwin, 1984; Mandelbaum, 1987). For instance, cases of the audience's explicit challenges to the storytelling have frequently been found to lead to its 're-drafting' or 're-scripting' (see Ochs et al., 1992). A major audience variable focused upon as determinant of discourse construction is that of age. Research on intergenerational communication contexts between young or middle-aged and elderly people has led to fascinating results regarding the audience accommodation strategies in operation (e.g. see Coupland et al., 1988, 1991). The opposite pole age-wise, namely children, has been focused upon in both written and spoken discourse, though with a different focus and emphasis in each of them. Adult--child spoken discourse has been mainly explored by narrative development studies which have concentrated on interactions between parents or caretakers and infants or at least preschool children (e.g. Bruner, 1990; Eisenberg, 1985; Nelson,

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1986). A very influential strand of research sprung from Ferguson's notion of 'baby talk' which was defined as a special simplified register, "one of a set of registers which are used in addressing people such as foreigners, retarded, or hard for hearing who are felt not to be able ... to understand normal language in the usual way" (1977: 209). Cross-linguistic studies of 'baby talk' identified simplification and clarification as the main processes which derived baby talk from adult speech (see Ferguson, 1977). Though a classic reference point in the field, the fascination with 'baby talk' and its universal elements was soon replaced by an emphasis on the conversational strategies that characterize totally spontaneous adult--child interactions (e.g. Heath, 1982; Sachs, 1979; Snow, 1984). In a similar vein, the emphasis shifted to the children's role in such interactions and their first attempts in text construction. The unanimous finding is that these attempts are heavily scaffolded by adults, who, among other things, "invite children to recount events, use questions to signal and provide the sort of information listeners require or expect .... assist with sequencing and model what constitutes "tellable content and acceptable delivery style" (Preece, 1992: 277, also see Fivush and Fromhoff, 1988; Fivush et al., 1991; Hausendorf and Quasthoff, 1992; Miller and Sperry, 1988). A similar type of research has explored children's narrative production by means of analyzing family dinner-time storytelling (e.g. Blum-Kulka, 1993; Blum-Kulka and Snow, 1992; Ochs and Taylor, 1992; Ochs et al., 1992). Once again, the focus is on adult storytelling from the point of view of modelling children's narrative skills and development. A last type of adult-child narrative communication focused upon in the literature involves children's narratives at school and their scaffolding by teachers. The main enquiry concerns the ways in which the narrative production of children from different sociocultural backgrounds "connects, mingles and conflicts with the narrative practices in school" (Michaels, 1981 : 306) and what this relation implicates for the child's transition from orality to literacy (Heath, 1983). While the above research has been valuable for elucidating processes of narrative construction and development, an equally vital focus of research, which is in fact far less explored, involves exploring and comparing the adult-adult with the adult-child narratorial styles, that is, placing emphasis on the adults' strategies of 'recipient designing' stories for children. Interestingly, this emphasis on the particularities of text construction when addressing children has been ventured more in written discourse, mainly in the study of textbook material or literature for children. The former are as a rule examined from the point of view of their linguistic complexity, or as commonly termed, readability which involves quantitative analyses of various linguistic categories (e.g. length of words and utterances, lexical repetition, etc.). Readability studies have been criticized both for the definitional problems surrounding linguistic 'complexity' and for their excessive focus on the sentential level at the expense of the discourse level (for a discussion see Coupland, 1983). Thus, the focus of studies of written discourse for children has lately shifted to discourse factors and communicative functions (Biber, 1991 : 73-96)~ This tendency has been extended to studies of children's literature as well. Though the area is surrounded by a general controversy as to the existence of a distinct and well-defined register of writing literature for children as opposed to adults, a general finding appears to be the 'closed-

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ness' of the texts' stylistic composition (for the terms open-closed texts, see Eco, 1979). This normally entails an oversimplified and patronizing code, based on cultural and ideological over-encoding, which leads to the prescription of the readerhood as reading below the capacity of adult readers (see Hunt, 1988; Luke, 1982; Stephens, 1992). As in studies of 'baby talk', here too, the notion of simplification is central as a major characteristic of audience adaptation in adult-child communication. Drawing on research presented above, this paper will approach the issue of recipient design in adult--child spoken narrative communication from a slightly different angle compared to the bulk of relevant studies. In particular, it will place its emphasis on postulating specific devices and aspects of narrative construction that differentiate between stories for children and stories for adults. In addition, its data will be storytelling to school-age children that occurs in naturalistic broad contexts of socialization rather than in the scheme of family interaction. To exemplify the data, before discussing them in detail, following are two short stories (in Greek), one related to adults, and the other to children, by the same narrator (25 year-old man). Though not involving the same topic, they are both about a childhood experience. The stories demonstrate what is interesting about the data in terms of their recipient design and what was felt that it was worth investigating once the data was collected: (1) to allo pou thymamai/j itan ena paidhi ki ithele na mou to paixei poniros/ kai me vazei pano sto ghyro/ katse na se ghyriso mou leei mia fora/ ki egho dhen afto to prama/ den eicha/ me vazei pano/ dhe tha aneveis esy tou leo~ ochi mou leei dhe tha anevo/ na sou kano esena/ kane tou leo~ kai me plakwnei malaka/ dhostou ghyro ghyro/ kai na mh borw tora na katevo ap afio to praghma/ kai na cho piastei/ iligos tora zaladha/ na cho kleisei ta matia mou/ kai na leo tora/ dhe tha mafiseis/ kai tou leo~ stamata re/stamata r e / r e stamata/ ochi aftos/ se kapoia stighmi tou ti dhinei na stamatisei/ kai ha ha h a / h a ha h a / h a ha ha/tou piano ki egho ti mouri apo dho/ tou ti vazo kato sto choma/ kai tin etriva tin etriva/ (he he)/mono afto thymamai/ the other thing I remember/there was this k i d / h e wanted me to think he was smart/and he puts me on the merry-go-round/let me give you a spin he says/ and I didn't (know?) this thing/he gets me on (the wheel)/aren't you getting on I ask h i m / n o he says I'm not getting o n / I ' l l spin you round/spin me I say/and boy does he start spinning m e / r o u n d and round/and I can't get off this thing/it starts getting uncomfortable/ and feeling sick now and d i z z y / m y eyes being closed (in the original all the verbs in proximal 'na imperfective' that will be discussed in section 3.4.2)/and I'm thinking n o w / a r e n ' t you going to let g o / a n d I tell h i m / o y stop it/oy stop it/oy stop it/no be doesn't/at some point he gets fed up and lets me g o / b u t (he is going) ha h a / h a h a / h a h a / a n d I grab him by the The transliteration from Greek is based on Tannen (1989: 202-203), with few minor changes. The main transcription devices employed in the examples are as follows: /: Indicates end of line which is the low-level analytic unit employed for the stories' segmentation (see note 5); [ ]: Denotes contributionfrom the audience; ( ): Editorial comments; (he he): Laughter.

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face here/and rub it in the dirt/and I rubbed and rubbed/(he he)/that's all I remember/ (2) loipon akouste na dheite tora/ ta skylakia dhen tha ta peirazete pote/ ghiati borei na sas dagosoune/ ena apo afta pighe na me dagosei mia mera/ otan imouna efta chronon peripou/ ki eicha vghei exo na pao volta/kai xafnika eida ena skylaki piso apo ena frachti/ kai skeftika na paixo ligho mazi tou/ ki archisa na to prokalo/ loipon to skylaki adedhrase/ archise na gavghizei/ egho synechisa na to prokalo/ mechri pou to skylaki to opoio fysika itan poly pio dhynato apo mena/ kai borouse na mou kanei kako/ pidhixe to frachti/ kai me pire sto kinyghi/ egho prospathisa na ksefygho/ den ta katafera/ den tha ta kataferna outos i allos/ ki an dhen itan enas kalos kyrios pou eiche to skylaki/ kai me eiche dhei pou pigha na paixo me to skylaki/ na to stamatisei/ tha me eiche faei/ loipon aftos to stamatise/ kai me malose/ me malose aschima/ apo tote den xanapeiraxa kanena skylaki/ ki ochi mono afto alla ta fovamai ta skylakia/ akoma kai tora pou eimai meghalos/ ghiafto sas leo ki esas na min ta peirazete/ listen to this one now/you should never goad doggies/'cos they can bite you/ one day one of them almost bit m e / I was around seven/I'd gone out for a walk/and suddenly I saw a doggy behind a fence/and I thought that I should play with it] and I began goading it/so the doggy reacted/he started barking/I kept on provoking him/ until at some point - the doggy who was much stronger than me/ and he could do me harm/ he leapt over the fence/ and started chasing m e / I tried to get away/I couldn't/impossible/and if it wasn't for this kind gentleman who owned the doggy (diminutive)/and who had seen me trying to play with the doggy/to stop i t / i t would have bitten m e / s o he stopped it/and he told me o f f / h e told me off really bad/since then I haven't done something like this again/and I'm very very cautious of doggies/even now that I'm an adult/so you should be careful too/you should never goad dogs/ As can be seen, the two stories are clearly very different in terms of their textual construction and of the rapport they attempt to establish with their addressees. The first can be generally characterized as much more dramatized and immediate, while the second is more explicit regarding its tellability and quite distinct in terms of its lexical and syntactic choices. In addition, devices such as the use of the historical present to refer to the events narrated and shifts to characters' speech that are used extensively in the stories for adults are missing from the story for children. This paper explores these textual differences and provides reasons for them. It does not only uncover the narrative devices that signal the stories' recipient-design. It also presents and discusses their contextual connections and implications: it investigates their interaction with the stories' functions and patterns of sociocultural action.

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2. Data The data on which this discussion is based is everyday storytelling from Greece. The motivation for comparing stories to adults with stories to children in Modern Greek society mainly lies in the vital role - as communication modes - o f both types of narrative in it. Even to the linguistically naive, Greek storytelling events present themselves as a major regulatory force o f the society's everyday interactions at a cross-generational level. This means that they constitute an indispensable component of both adult-adult and adult-child interactions, thus embracing the gamut of the c o m m u n i t y ' s socialization and acculturation processes. Compared to the 'western' storytelling as described and interpreted in the literature (e.g. Polanyi, 1989), the frequency and status of stories in Greek people's conversations would strike researchers as an idiosyncratic and core cultural component of everyday life. Prompted by this, this paper will employ a corpus of 170 Greek stories as its basis for exploring the audience accommodation strategies that bear upon narrative construction. These stories occurred spontaneously in relaxed conversational contexts of socialization between intimates, where they were tape-recorded. 2 O f these, 60 stories were primarily addressed to children in companies involving both adults and children (let us call them 'stories for children') as opposed to 'stories for adults' which form the majority o f stories in the corpus. 3 The quantitative analyses of this paper are based on 30 stories for adults and 30 stories for children. All storytellers were native Greek speakers with no distinctive regional or dialectic characteristics. They were either Athenians or residents of towns within commuting distance of Athens who had spent a fair amount of their lives in Athens studying or working. Therefore, they can be characterized as representatives of the mainstream Greek culture. Additionally, they roughly shared the same social and educational background: they were middle-class speakers who possessed a university or college (vocational training) degree. In terms of the narrators' gender, the sample has almost equal representation from each sex. As regards age, the narrators belonged to two age-groups: the ' y o u n g ' age-group and the 'middle-aged' group. Provision was made for the existence o f a relation of intimacy between storytellers and listeners, including the researcher. Intimacy covers both friends and relatives. This decision resulted from the consideration that storytelling is mainly fostered and thus captured best in friendly and relaxed environments among intimates. The same criterion of intimacy

2 These stories are part of the data of a research (Georgakopoulou, 1993) on the text-building mechanisms of Modern Greek narratives and their context-sensitivity. For the purposes of that study, a wide corpus of oral and written personal (experience) stories (400 in total) was collected in Greece. The collection of the stories on which this paper is based did not involve any form of elicitation whatsoever. 3 In accordance with the latest literature, the concept of 'addressee' is not interpreted as a unitary and homogeneous construct, here (see papers in Duranti and Brenneis, 1986). It is accepted that each act of communication presents differentiated participant roles with considerable subtlety that are not covered by the absolute dyad 'addresser-addressee'. Thus, the characterization 'stories for children' is not intended to suggest that addressee roles are so compartmentalized in the real world that adults are excluded as addressees in this case. What it suggests though is that the stories' primary addressees (sometimes the only ones, too) are children.

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applied to the adults' stories for children: the adult narrators were family friends, relatives or parents of the children-addressees. The latter were at the time of the data collection eight years old or so. They too came from middle-class families; they were on the whole good students with no notable learning problems. Stories were mainly elicited in 'get-together' activities in houses or outside the house in streetcafes. The usual occasion for the former is the celebration of name-days (Greek equivalent of birthdays). Additionally, festive dinner-parties over Christmas, Easter and other celebrations displayed numerous instances of storytelling. On such occasions, there were numerous stories that were addressed to children before they got involved in their own activities and socialized with each other. As a result, the corpus comprises instances of storytelling by the same narrator for an audience of adults as well as an audience of children. These cases are very useful for providing further insights into the audience shaping of narrative style.

3. Results 3.1. Storytelling initiation and recipientship

The first insights into the stories' audience shaping on the basis of the distinction adults-children came from their situational coding, in particular the dimensions of 'initiation rights' and 'recipientship' (see Blum-Kulka and Snow, 1992). First, as might be expected, the least amount of storytelling initiation came from children: only 8 stories from children emerged as responses to the 60 stories told by adults during these transactions. This finding is congruent with the participation structure in American family storytelling (e.g. Ochs et al., 1992). Additionally, children appeared to be the least preferred addressees of stories. Though stories for children are very common in Modern Greek contexts compared to the 'western' storytelling settings (e.g. Blum-Kulka and Snow, 1992; Heath, 1982, 1983; Ochs and Taylor, 1992), adults are still the primary and ratified recipients of adult stories occurring in mixed groups of adults and children. Ochs and Taylor (1992:331) reported a "recipiency imbalance" in their data, in that children were not explicitly ratified addressees of their parents ~ narratives in the same way that they were often obliged to explicitly address their parents. In the data at hand, the recipience imbalance is of a different sort but still at the expense of children: the adult narrators' allocation of recipientship rights between them and adults favours the latter. A major part of the stories' situational coding involved their participation structure. Here, Modern Greek storytelling, in congruence with other cultures' storytelling too (e.g. see Johnstone, 1990) proved to bear little resemblance to the American 'joint' narratives. It exhibited an essentially monologic texture with minimal interruptions and verbal interference on the audience's part except for brief supportive backchannelling. Explicit challenges to and re-draftings of the storytelling are systematically missing. Verbal participation in the story is normally exhausted in a small set of fixed ways of signalling approval (e.g. sopa: you are kidding me, or ela: come on, sovara: seriously, ti les: what are you telling me).

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This cultural constraint of an almost ritualistic autonomy of the teller (BlumKulka and Snow, 1992: 209) underlying the performance of Modem Greek stories is significantly more powerful in the case of stories addressed to children. There, the legitimacy granted to the teller's right to narrate his 'tale' uninterrupted seems to be an absolute constraint. Even backchannelling is restricted and as a rule non-verbal. This nicely matches the power-sharing arrangement of initiation and recipientship, already discussed, in which children are again presented as having the least mode of control over the narrating activity. Additionally, cross-culturally this is a well-documented finding: as a rule, children do not break into adults' storytelling (Stahl, 1989: 45), except in cultures which promote co-narration (Blum-Kulka, 1993; Blum-Kulka and Snow, 1992); even there though, their participation is minimal compared to that of the adults (e.g. Ochs and Taylor, 1992). 3.2. Plot content: The childhood theme

The stories' coding for plot content suggested that the essence of their tellable themes lies in the inscription of family life. With very few exceptions the stories, independent of whether their content is sensational or humorous, draw on family experience and either present a family member as their protagonist or involve family members as the story's characters except for the narrator. 4 The recipient-design of this culturally sanctioned theme in stories for children involves its interconnection with the childhood-theme, which is equally encoded in men's and women's stories. The striking propensity for the childhood-theme presents two manifestations: the experience narrated involves the narrator's childhood (70% in stories for children, i.e. the narrator as a child) or the narrator's child (30% in stories for children, i.e. the narrator as a parent). These two variations encapsulate the salient plot elements in stories for children. The accommodation strategy in the choice of the childhood theme can be argued to be related to the facilitation of the addressee's empathy and identification with the intratextual character. According to Coupland (1983: 40), this is the case in children's literature where the protagonist is a child. In addition though, it constitutes a major vehicle for certain narratorial modes that structure the stories' interactional plane and will be unravelled in this paper. One obvious implication of it, though, is that stories for children present a much higher percentage of non-recent experiences as narrative material compared to stories for adults which normally opt for (very) recent experiences. 3.3. Structural sophistication patterns: The non-climactic narration

An obvious methodological step before proceeding to further analyses was to capture audience-related differences in the stories' patterns of structural sophistication and plot development. For this purpose, the data analysis employed an amalgamation 4 The full implicationsof this finding are beyond the scope of the paper. It essentially suggests that one of the core storyablethematic componentsof Modem Greek narration is the opposition 'we' in the form of a family frameworkvs. 'others' or between a family ingroup and an outgroup.

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of Peterson and M c C a b e ' s (1983) highpoint analysis with Longacre's (1981) profile model. In the framework of highpoint analysis, which forms an adaptation of the Labovian model (1972), L a b o v ' s description of a narrative which builds up to a high point, evaluatively dwells on it and then resolves it, is treated as the classic pattern of narrative. The pattern of not resolving the high point characterizes ending-at-thehigh-point narratives. The rest of the patterns that Peterson and McCabe identified in a corpus of children's stories constitute non-climactic narratives: among them, the chronological pattern is made up of a simple description of successive events, while the two-event pattern is either too short for any highpoint pattern to be recognized or extensively reiterates and evaluates only one or two events. The results of the data analyses with regard to the above patterns suggested that there is a considerable difference between stories for adults and stories for children in their use of climactic narration: the latter manifested a significantly lower percentage of climactic patterns reflected both in the use of the classic pattern and in the use of the ending-at-the-high-point pattern (see Table 1). Table 1 Mean percentages of patterns of structural sophistication

Classic Ending-at-high point Two-event Chronological

Stories for adults (N= I 10)

Stories for children (N=60)

61.8 33.6 5.6 0

28.3 15 36.7 20

This audience-related distribution of climactic narration can be accounted for with reference to contextual parameters. As will be shown, it is the result of an interaction between audience considerations, storytelling themes and storytelling functions and purposes. Closely connected to this difference between stories for adults and stories for children is their difference in terms of Complicating Action (i.e. narrative action) and Orientation (i.e. descriptive and background) propositions. Specifically, stories for children employ significantly less action lines (31.9% vs. 49.9%, t(58)=2.34, p<0.05), in favour of more orientation lines 5 (42% vs. 25.5%). This finding arguably reflects an assessment of the addressees' decoding abilities on the narrators' part which results in an attempt to provide the young addressees with as much background information as possible. In addition though, it matches the predilection of non-climactic patterns in stories for children as opposed to the 'rapid action' climac-

5 The unit of line was adopted by Gee (1985): it is roughly as long as a clause and is essentially based on Chafe's influential idea units (1980). Lines with a unity of theme, time, place and perspective make up the next higher-level unit in Gee's scheme, namely that of stanza. Both units emphasize the existence of rhythmic recurrent patterns in narratives and capture the lines of their thematic continuity and discontinuity.

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tic stories in stories for adults. While the former rely on description and emotion (stories of 'being' rather than 'doing'), the latter rely on building up tension through a series of transpiring events. In the case of ending-at-the-high point stories, this is particularly evident in their dramatic ending, in the form of a punchline, at the peak of the action. The pattern is associated with humorous stories and is reminiscent of the structuring of narrative jokes as described in the literature (e.g. Bauman, 1984). As can be seen below, the action of a story that can be titled as 'Witnessing a political rally that went wrong', is exalted to its climax which ends in a punchline. The audience uptake is such that the climax is repeated almost verbatim: (3) ... milaghe bouf ta nerantzia apo kato na pighainoune/ na chtypane douv douv/ aftos na milaei/ se mia fasi omos ena ton pairnei/ ghiati molis pighainane ta nerantzia aftos eskyve/ fevghane ta nerantzia sikonotan/ milaghe sti synecheia/ sto telos tou travaei enas douuv/ opote leei aischos aischos aischos/ tora tha sas miliso ghia tin aghrotiki politiki/ (he h e ) / t a nerantzia na pighainoune synnefo/ na chtypane douv douv/ na vghainoune kati koritsia ekei pou eiche idhiaiteres kai na kanoune/ ochi allo sas parakaloume/ me to ena pou ton chtypise ton erixe kato/ paei mesa sas leo~ kai meta apo ligo vghainei exo/ aischos aischos aischos/ tora tha sas miliso ghia tin aghrotiki politiki/ ... he was speaking splat went the oranges/falling split splat/he kept on speaking/ but at some point one of them hits him/ because as an orange would approach he would duck/and then stand up again/and start speaking again/at the end somebody throws one and splat/so he says shame shame shame/I will now go on to agricultural policies/(he he)/(repetition of the climax) the oranges going splat/falling split splat/some girls who were his secretaries coming out and saying/please that's enough/when that one hit him he ducked/and he goes inside/and then he comes out/shame shame shame/I will now go on to agricultural policies/ (Thomas H., Story for adults) To illustrate the difference of the above 'rapid action' climactic pattern from the static, non-climactic narrative mode that characterizes most stories for children, following is an extract from a story told at a Christmas dinner-party. The extract is reminiscent of Hudson et al.'s (1992: 129) "moment-in-time stories", which achieve coherence through their richness of description and use of emotional evaluation: (4) ... kai thymamai apo tis proighoumenes meres pou katevaina kato sta maghazia/ evlepa tis vitrines/ kati pou dhen to chame kato stin eparchia toso edona/ ... evlepa tis vitrines pou tan stolismenes/ kai ton kosmo pu etreche ghia psonia/ tous mikropolites/ ki ola edhinan ena chroma ghiortis/ kai meta afto oloklirothike me ti ghiorti pou kaname sto scholeio/ pou douleva tin proti chronia/ ghiati edho pou ta leme ego meso tis dhouleias mou niotho ta Christoughenna/ douleva sena idhiotiko ekei pera/ eichame proti taxi/ stolisame loipon oloi tin taxi/etoimasame ti ghiortoula me tragoudhia me poiimata/ ekeini tin imera itan to kati allo/ isos epeidhi itan i proti chronia pou ekana ghiorti me mikra paidhia/

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vevaia kai tis alles chronies para poly edona ta thymamai ta Christoughenna/ alla isos ekeini epeidhi itan i proti chronia pou ekana mazi me ta paidhia mou echei meinei alismoniti/ ta paidhakia pou kanane ta traghoudhakia/ ta poiimatakia/ oloi aftoi oi ghoneis/ irthan sto scholeio/ traghoudisame mazi/ ... kai praghmatika itan allo praghma/ einai alitheia oti echo perasei ki alla Christougenna ma para polla Christougenna/ ma aria echoun meinei mes stin psychi mou/ otan ta thymamai niotho mia syginisi/ pane tora kapoia chronia/ kapoies dhekaeties dhiladhi/ ... and I remember how I'd go to the shops before Christmas/window shopping/ stuff you couldn't get in the country/I gazed at the shop-windows so prettily decorated/and everyone busy shopping/the stall salesmen/and everything had a festive colour] ... and all this came to a climax with the party at the school where I worked the first year/because come to think of it it's through my job that I experience Christmas/I worked at a public school over there/we had the first year infants/so we decorated the whole classroom/we prepared the 'little' party (diminutive) with cards and rhymes/that day it was really something/maybe because it was my first time spending Christmas with little children/of course I have vivid memories of other Christmas/but maybe because it was the first year I spent with my class that made it unforgettable/and it really was something/all the little kids who sang 'little' songs and poems (diminutives)/all those parents who came to the school/we sang together/.,, and it was really something special/ it's true I've spent other Christmas/quite a few in fact with my classes/but that year is unforgettable/when I remember it I am always moved/it's been a few years decades rather/ (Georgia K., Story for Children)

As can be seen, the effect of the increased static description and evaluation above is the sense of a slow narrative tempo compared to (3). The rest of the paper will elucidate the factors underlying this difference in mode of narrative delivery. 3.4. Recipient design and involvement 3.4.1. Accommodative devices as involvement strategies A major aim of the data analyses was to uncover the 'recipient-design' of the strategies which underlie the stories' evaluative component (i.e. expressivity, showing the story's point; Labov, 1972) and by which storytellers promote the addressees' involvement (for the term see Chafe, 1982) or engagement in them. The analyses suggested that in stories for children this draws upon what is stereotypically defined in the culture as associated with or appropriate for childhood or communication to children, covering genres such as traditional myths, fairy tales and literature for children. This means that the stories' involvement strategies are schema-driven, in that they instantiate a culturally constrained stereotypical mental pattern (i.e. schema, frame) of 'telling stories for children' or more generally of addressing children. As a result, their recipient-design nature is so overwhelming that their presence in stories for adults would by definition seem odd and out of place. From this point

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of view, the closed set of lexical, phrasal and thematic 'schema-driven' expressive devices of stories for children are reminiscent of Coupland et al.'s (1991 : 30) overaccommodative strategies: these were found to be an integral part of intergenerational contexts of communication with elderly people, indicative of an audience accommodation style which attunes to the communicative characteristics stereotypical of the group of the addressee (i.e. a form of elderspeak, in our case child-speak). The realizations of this overaccommodation involves opting for linguistic features of low complexity, explicitness and simplification. The claim of course about overaccommodative strategies in Coupland's work is that speakers draw on a more simplified register than what is needed to, a claim which we are not in a position to safely make with regard to our involvement strategies in stories for children. However, the two strategies are comparable in terms of their function of simplification and textual 'closedness' by means of evoking schemata that are assumed to be stereotypical of their group of addressees. In the case of stories for children, these schemata are culturally conventional, appropriate for and familiar to the child-addressees. In this way, they owe their evaluative function to involving the addressee by lending the stories "a character of familiar" thus "giving the impression, indeed the reality, of a shared universe of discourse" (Tannen, 1989: 52). A commonest accomodative device is the extensive use of diminutives normally formed by the suffix -akis (aki) and -oulis (oula): e.g. voltoula ('little' walk) instead of volta (walk), skylaki (little dog/doggy) instead of skylos (dog). In addition to their politeness function in Greek (Sifianou, 1992: 155-173), diminutives have also been reported to characterize talk to and by children as devices for "expressing affection ... and representing the world as a friendly place" (ibid.: 158). As is evident from example (4) above, they form an integral part of the style in stories for children, in an attempt to enhance the stories' tellability on the basis of assumptions about the audience (for the role of diminutives as a major element of expressive processes in baby talk see Ferguson, 1977: 225). The next popular schema-driven lexical choice is the use of what Anderson (1984: 62) called vocabulary "relevant to childhood" and what Coupland (1983: 40) referred to as "child-oriented" language. This involves the use of words that characterize children's talk and reflect their interests. In this way, the attempt is to present linguistically the addressee's assumed conceptual repertoire, that is, in Fowler's terms (1977: 98), his mind-style. The major thematic areas to which schema-driven vocabulary belongs are school, animals and games; it also embraces a ready-made stock of euphemistic phrases for referring to sad or unexpected events that are commonly associated with childhood: these occur extensively in the sensational stories of the data. Finally, part of the recipient-designed vocabulary is the inclusion of allusions to fairy tales commonly taking the form of formulaic phrasing as in the examples below: (5) ... sigha sigha pernousan ta chronia/ kylousan oi mines/kai kapote ematha pos afti i kyria arrostise varia/

slowly slowly the years went by (lit: went by the years)/the months passed/ and at some point I heard that this lady was very very ill/ (Ghiannis B.)

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Though not immediately evident in the translation, the lexical choices of the above example constitute a straightforward allusion to the fairy-tale style of narration, particularly in the formulaic phrasing employed for the passage of the time. The 'schema-driven' vocabulary of the following example draws upon the animal-theme which is common in fairy tales. As can be seen, the hare is typically presented as lover of freedom and referred to affectively by means of diminutives; also, the archetypal good-bad dichotomy comes into play in the underlying distinction between the 'good life in nature' and the 'bad life in cities': (6) ... omos o laghos ... dhen adeche ti f y l a k i ti fasaria to vromiko aera tis Athinas/ ithele na ghyrisei sto dasos tou/ na chairetai ti f y s i mazi me ta alia laghoudakia/ ... to a g h a p i m e n o m a s l a g h o u d a k i psachnodas na vrei tin eleftheria tou epese thyma ton k a k o n a n t h r o p o n tis megaloupolis/

... but the hare ... couldn't stand the prison the racket the polluted air of Athens/ he wanted to go back to his forest/to enjoy n a t u r e with the other little hares/... (later on in the story's coda): ... our beloved little h a r e in his search for freedom fell victim to the evil man of the city/ (Bessi F.) Overt references to famous fairy tales and children's books also form part of the accommodation devices: (7a) ... ki archisa na klaio na klaio na klaio/ ghiati nomiza pia oti eicha teleios chathei/ kai mou rchondan sto nou mou kai eikones apo p a r a m y t h i a / oti tha rchotan to vradhy ki egho tha mena ekei pera sto vouno moni mou/ san ta Psila Vouna tou Papadoni/ tetoia pramata/ [tou Papadoniou]/ a nai nai nai tou Papadoniou/

... and I started crying crying c r y i n g / ' c o s I thought I was competely lost/and

scenes from fairy tales came to my mind/that night would come and I'd be left alone up there on the mountain/like the High Mountains by Papadoni (famous Greek children's novel that was part of the national curriculum)/and things like that/[by Papadoniu] (interruption from the child-addressee to correct the name)/ah yes yes yes by Papadonin ... (Evi B.) (7b) ... paei ki i fili mou na piasei to vazaki/ opote me ena dhynato bam tis epese/ ke eghine san ti m a r m a r o m e n i neraidha tou p a r a m y t h i o u / ta mallia tis san plokamia/ to f o r e m a tis loutsa ...

... and my friend goes to grab the little vase/ whereby with a loud crash smashed on the floor/and she became like the 'marble fairy' of the fairy tale (allusion to the 'Sleeping B e a u t y ' ? ) / h e r hair like 'octopus legs'/her dress was soaked ... (Nikos G.) In terms of syntactic structuring, modification and causality constitute the two major instances of overaccommodation. These, too, can be characterised as linguis-

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tic reflections of the addressee's 'mind-style'. Most of the adjectives are non-restrictive in that they do not help the addressee to uniquely identify the modified object (Huddleston, 1988: 87); furthermore, they are banal modifiers which children learn to use as 'nice phrases' at school: e.g. o ghalanos ouranos (the blue sky), mia oraia voltoula (a nice little walk), mia iliolousti mera (a sunny day), oi giatroi me tis aspres podhies (the doctors in the white uniforms), to kokkino fotaki (the red little light). Two popular schema-driven modifiers are 'kalos-kakos' (good-evil) which allude to the good-bad dichotomy typical of the morality of folk tradition. Accordingly, people and acts are almost without exception characterized as 'kalos/kakos': (8) ... e kai perpatousa perpatousa perpatousa monachoula m o u s e

mia k a k i gheitonia/ pou oi anthropoi einai kakoi/ ki elegha ston eafto mou na mi stenochorietai ...

... and I walked and walked and walked all alone (diminutive) in this bad neighb o u r b o o d / w h e r e the people are evil/and I was telling myself not to worry ... (Aliki F.) Causal expressions also reflect a tendency for simplification which aims at suiting the addressee's presumed intellectual abilities. Thus, the majority of them would strike an adult addressee as self-evident, redundant and unfortunate or simplistic explanations: (9a) ... kai mou pire poly chrono mechri na tin voithiso na dithei/ ghiati kapoios pou echei spasei kati dhe borei na dithei m o n o s tou/ ... ... and it took me a long time to help her get dressed/because somebody who has b r o k e n something (a limb) c a n ' t get dressed alone/... (Aggeliki K.) (9b) ... eiche kryosei ki eiche pyreto/ ghiati itane m i k r o u l a kai d h e n katalavaine ... ... she had caught a cold and had a temperature/because she was a little little girl and didn't understand (her condition? : ambiguous) (Ritsa T.) Comparable is the phenomenon of deconfabulation of concepts which was reported by Freedle et al (1977:189) as a common strategy of simplification when talking to children. The process was found to involve the definition of concepts either with the head concept present (e.g. Victorians, that is, some people a long time ago) or with it missing (e.g. some people a long time ago). In the data, the former strategy is more predominant and frequently follows an almost rhetorical question to the addressee concerning his familiarity with the concept as in (10b) below: (lOa) ... ki etsi loipon ton evalan to baba mou stin edatiki/ opou vazoun osous einai varia arrostoi ...

... and so they put my dad in the intensive care/where they put people who are very sick ... (Alexandra B.)

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(10b) ... alla argotera otan tous eida na pairnoun mia sanida tou surf/ksereis ti einai to surf/(child) [e mou fainetai ... / den einai]/ einai mia sanidha pou anevaineis pano/ echei ena pani/ kai to chrisimopoieis otan eehei ligho aera/ na kaneis surf/ ... but later on when I saw them grab a w i n d - s u r f e r / y o u know what a windsurfer is/(child) [eh I think so isn't it]/it's a board on which you stand/it's got a sail/and you use it when there's a bit of wind/to wind-surf ... (Vivi P.) In some cases the definition is covert and takes the form of a paraphrase and/or elaboration of the notion: (lla)

... me tis sirines loipon dhynata fyghame ghia to Paidhon/ pou einai ena nosokomeio meghalo mono ghia ta arrosta paidhakia ... ... so with loud sirens we set off for the 'Paidhon' (the biggest children's hospital in Athens: its name is an archaic form meaning the 'Children's')/ which is a big hospital only for sick little children ... (Ritsa T.)

(1 lb) ... plakose loipon i pirosvestiki/ ksereis ekeina ta meghala kokkina aftokinita/ ta lasticha pano tous solines tetoia pramata/ ... ... so there came the fire engines/those big red trucks you know/the hoses on top the tubes things like that/... (Ghiannis A.) Finally, an involving device whose extensive use in stories for children fits in their overall accommodative strategy is that of intensity markers, namely emphasizers (also referred to as qualifiers: e.g. certainly, mainly, only), amplifiers (also referred to as quantifiers: e.g. very, too, absolutely, extremely, completely, see Quirk et al., 1985: 590-597) and affect markers. The latter are verbs, adjectives and adverbials which encode the speaker's "personal attitudes, including emotions, feelings, moods and general dispositions" (Biber and Finnegan, 1989: 94), and can be classified as positive (e.g. happy, luckily) or as negative (e.g. shocked, sadly). Such expressive words have frequently been reported as common in discourse for children (e.g. see Freebody et al., 1987). In stories for children, they form a very small corpus predictably over-encoded in instances of references to characters' mental states and/or emotive reactions (e.g. apaisio/tromero/fovero: terrible/awful, toso/toso poly: so/so much, etc.). Thus, their overt intertextuality combined with their extensive use underlie their accommodative function. 3.4,2. Involvement through proximity and dramatization." Stories for adults The above involvement strategies of stories for children present a striking departure from the involvement norms of everyday storytelling among adults. These are mainly channelled through performance devices (for the term see Wolfson, 1982; also see Bauman, 1986) which, as the name suggests, turn the narrative act into

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d r a m a in which the narrator puts the events on stage. Central in the creation o f this p e r f o r m e d a t m o s p h e r e is the strategy o f experiential iconicism (Enkvist, 1981: 101): this covers the d e v i c e s by which the i m m e d i a t e storytelling situation b e c o m e s m i m e t i c or an icon o f the taleworld so that the events are presented as if occurring and c o - w i t n e s s e d b y both teller and listeners at the m o m e n t o f their telling. The specific set o f devices that underlie this experiential i c o n i c i s m and p e r f o r m a n c e in M o d e m G r e e k stories are as follows: the H i s t o r i c a l P r e s e n t , the C o n s t r u c t e d D i a logue, 6 certain uses o f the i m p e r f e c t i v e p a s t , 7 the ' h a i m p e r f e c t i v e p a s t c o n s t r u c t i o n s ' , and lastly d e i c t i c s h i f t e r s such as tora (now), edho (here), etc. O f these, the ' n a imperfective p a s t ' construction is language-specific and e x c l u s i v e l y occurs in G r e e k narratives. It can be seen in action in extract (3): e.g. 'bouf ta nerantzia apo kato na pighainoune/ na chtypane dour dour~ afros na milaei/' which can be translated as ' s p l a t going the o r a n g e s / f a l l i n g split s p l a t / a n d he s p e a k i n g / ' . The e s s e n c e o f these d e v i c e s ' narrative function lies in signalling a shift from the distant and 'reminiscing' (Fleischman, 1990: 32) m o d e o f the past tense in which the narrator reports her m e m o r i e s , to the p r o x i m a l 'visualizing' m o d e o f the 'here and n o w ' o f the storytelling situation. Thus, the term chosen for them was proximal, which encapsulates the criterial feature o f storytelling p e r f o r m a n c e in M o d e r n G r e e k (for details see G e o r g a k o p o u l o u , 1994). A l l p r o x i m a l devices presented a strong cooccurrence and affinity in terms o f patterns o f use and functions in the data. In particular, the two m a j o r devices o f the historical present and constructed dialogue present a m u c h m o r e forceful affinity than their standard descriptions in the literature. 8 This is m a i n l y evident in the fact that shifts to one device positively correlate with shifts to the other device in the same story. On the whole, p r o x i m a l devices cluster together to the extent that the stories essentially revolve around segments o f historical present and constructed dialogue; the rest o f the devices are intercalated into their pattern. 9 A n y b r i e f interruptions to this pattern m a i n l y involve the insertion o f b a c k g r o u n d c o m m e n t s or any other narratorial asides. Thus, p r o x i m a l devices are easily r e c o g n i z a b l e as the b u i l d i n g blocks o f the stories' m a i n plotline. Furthermore,

The term "constructed dialogue' is adopted from Tannen (1989) as an umbrella-term for instances of dialogue, direct speech and thought animation in a narrative. The idea underlying the term is that the inclusion of characters' speech (and thoughts) in narration does not imply their factuality, i.e. that they have actually been uttered. 7 These involve the occurrences of the imperfect in the stories' climactic part to encode physical or emotive reactions to the climactic events. The device establishes a subjective mode of presentation which emphasizes the connection between the speaker and the event as a proximal relation. 8 For instance, the percentage of co-occurrence of the quotative verbs with the historical present is much higher in the former: 97.1% of the quotative verbs are in the historical present (cf. 17%, 63% and 35% in Ess Dykema, 1984; Schiffrin, 1981; and Wolfson, 1982 respectively). The predominant quotative verb in the data (97% of the verbs) is the verb leo which introduces instances of both direct speech and thought (as a rule self-reported thoughts). 9 On average 37.2% of the stories' lines present the use of at least one proximal device. To put this figure into perspective, it suffices to mention that, in terms of frequency, common textual devices in the data normally occur in between 15% and 20% of a story's lines. A two-way ANOVA showed that this extensive use is unaffected by narrator variables such as sex, F(6,228)=1.89, age, F=1.76, or sex x age, F=1.82.

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their intricate plotting forms the general frame for the second integral part of the global performed mode in Modern Greek: this is a specific reiteration (the term covers forms of repetition, parallelism and paraphrase) mode which interweaves its symmetrical patterning in the frame of historical present and constructed dialogue patterns of use and positively correlates with them (r(58)=0.3301, p<0.01). It essentially involves successive or non-successive narrative segments, that is, in our segmentation scheme, stanzas (see note 5), in symmetrically built patterns of thematic and structural similarity; to use Ong's (1982) terms, such stanzas echo each other. This plotting was, thus, named as the symmetrical inter-stanza patterning or mirroring. In Tannen's terms, repetition involves the audience with the speaker or writer and the discourse by "sweeping them up in what Scollon (1982) calls rhythmic ensemble, much as one is swept up by music and finds oneself moving in its rhythm" (1989: 17). In view of this, our reiteration mode is arguably an involvement device by means of establishing a recurrent sense and sound pattern which is fortified by the 'historical present-constructed dialogue' co-operation. To illustrate the orchestration of proximal devices with symmetrical reiteration schemes as the determinants of Modern Greek performed style, following is an extract from a particularly long story about the narrator's recent illness. The extract is from the narrative part between the climax (narrator's sudden stroke) and its resolution (the narrator's getting to the hospital). The beginning of a new stanza is indicated in the example by a new line:

(12) Ioipon mou lene aftoi/ katse kato mou lene na se tripsoume ekei/ ti epathes apotoma/ tous leo tha f y g h o / mou leei katse mu leei esy/ etsi pou eisai mou leei/ rain peseis pio kato rnou leei/ ochi tous leo~ dhen echo tipota/ kala eimai tous leo~ ... en to metaxy irthe ki i ghynaika mou/ tis leo etsi ki etsi/ afto epatha tis leo~ dhen echo tipota tis leo~ tora tha vgho mia volta exo tis leo~ ghiati mou leei tora arrostises esy kai tha vgheis exo/ etsi pou eisai mou leei/ tis leo dhen pathaino tipota/ kala eimai tis leo~ ... ... erchetai apexo ap to kafeneio enas/ o dhaskalos o Ghiannis/ re mou leei pos to pathes m o u leei/ etsi ki etsi mou leei/ etsi ki etsi to patha tou leo~ diighithika ekei/ alia tous leo dhen echo tipota tous leo~ kala eimai tora/ tora tous leo f e v g h o pao ghia to spiti/ e leei rain patheis tipota/ ... ... ekatsa ligho/ irthe apexo o Panaghiotis/ erchetai m e s a / t i epathes theie leei/ tou leo etsi ki etsi epatha/ eimai kala omos tora/ vgheno ki exo/ siko mou leei siko mu leei na se pao se ghiatro/ ti kala eisai/ rain patheis tipota . . .

... so they tell m e / s i t down they tell m e / s o that we can offer you a massage/ what's happened to you all of a sudden/I tell them I ' m leaving/ he tells me sit d o w n / i n your condition he tells m e / y o u may collapse a bit further down he tells me/ no I tell t h e m / t h e r e ' s nothing wrong with m e / I ' m fine I tell them/... ... meanwhile my wife came i n / I tell her so and s o / t h i s is what happened to me I tell h e r / I ' m fine I tell h e r / n o w I ' m going out for a walk I tell her/

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she tells me what are you going out now that you are ill/in your condition she tells m e / I tell her there's nothing wrong with m e / I ' m fine I tell her/... ... some guy walks into the coffee place/Ghiannis the teacher/well he tells me what's happened to you/so and so he tells m e / s o and so has happened to me I tell him/ I told the story there/but 1 tell them there's nothing wrong with me I tell t h e m / I ' m fine now/ I tell them now I'm leaving/I'm going home/he tells what if something happens to you in your condition ... ... I sat there for a while/Panayotis came in/he comes in/what's happened to you uncle he tells m e / I tell him so and so happened to m e / b u t I ' m fine now/I go out as well/ don't sit down let's go to the doctor he tells m e / l e t ' s get to a d o c t o r / w h a t if something happens to you in your condition ... (Panos B.) As can be seen above, the co-operation of historical present and constructed dialogue segments interwoven with inter-stanza reiteration covers four symmetrically patterned interactions between the narrator and people who are concerned about his illness. This provides the extract with a compelling rhythm and dramatization. Inter-stanza symmetrical patterning is very frequently employed in ending at the high point narratives or multiple-plan application stories. In these cases the part repeated or paraphrased, in addition to underlying the stories' performed mode, foregrounds what is different (i.e. not repeated/paraphrased). This commonly involves the climax or resolution of a theme/action/event which is contrasted to the preceding complicating action by means of breaking the matching pattern established in its segments (for a comparable technique in jokes see Bauman, 1984). In this respect, interstanza symmetrical patterning acts as a major involvement strategy which implicitly underscores the story's tellable events. To illustrate this, following is an extract covering a short story's complicating action. Here again reiteration co-operates with segments of historical present action and speech in narrative construction:

(13) ... akoume stamataei ena taxi exo/ chtypaei tin porta/ leei parte tin obrella tu kyriou Ilia~ loipon emeis paghosame/ leme kati epathe o anthropos/ ohi leei aftos/ tha rthei arghotera peskesi aftos/ stamataei allo taxi/fevghei ekeinos ekei/ chtypaei/ leei parte to kapeUo tou kyriou Ilia~ kokalosame ekei pali ki oi dhyo/ koitazame/ leei ki aftos min anisycheite/ tha rthei/ dhen pernane dio lepta/plakonei ena taxi apexo/ kouvalaghe ton llia alto~ leme kala ti simainoun ola afta/ ti eiche ghinei tora/ o llias eiche kerdhisei kapio stoichima ... we hear a taxi stopping outside the house/he knocks at the d o o r / h e says here is Mr Ilias's umbrella/

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well we f r o z e / w e say something has happened to h i m / h e tells us n o / h e ' l l just come a hit later/ a n o t h e r taxi s t o p s / t h e other one g o e s / h e k n o c k s / h e tells h e r e ' s M r Ilias's hat/ we froze a g a i n / w e were looking at h i m / h e s a y s / d o n ' t w o r r y / h e ' l l come/ two minutes later a taxi comes outside the h o u s e / t h a t one took Ilias home/ we say well w h a t ' s happened/(flashback: beginning of resolution) 'what had happened now'/Ilias had won a bet/... (Maria H.) As can be seen, the three segments of the 'taxi arrivals' are symmetrically built up forming a tripartite scheme in which the third stanza acts as its climax by means of the contrast to the other two: the third taxi carries the story's character rather than his personal objects. What is most important about the orchestration of proximal and reiteration devices in stories for adults is their dual function. As can be seen from the examples as well, in addition to acting as the major involvement and dramatization resources, they take over the stories' organization by establishing interconnections between different stanzas as well as signalling stanza-boundaries. 3.4.3. Audience accommodation: Involvement without dramatization While in adults' narrative interactions, the above devices exhibit an absolutely normative and predictable nature, their context-sensitivity is immediately evident in the case of stories for children. Both proximal devices and symmetrical reiteration patterns are significantly reduced in stories for children: only 6.6% of the stories' lines encode at least one of the devices. In addition, while all stories related to adults exhibit the use of proximal devices, only one fifth of the stories for children (i.e. 12 stories) do so. More importantly, even in the few cases employed, the devices present very localised and confined uses: e.g. a rapid shift to the historical present or constructed dialogue, a pair of symmetrically built stanzas, or, on the whole, nonpatterned repetition which lacks an intricate plotting. This means that what stories for children avoid is not only the devices' use per se, but the orchestration of the devices as well as of their dual function. As already shown, they instead channel their creation of involving narratives through certain (over)accommodative devices such as diminutives, child-oriented vocabulary and themes, intensity markers, etc. These serve a mediated and controlled involvement which guides and prescribes the addressee's decoding of the point. For instance, the high frequency of intensity markers suggests a process of "second-order interpretation" (i.e. interpretation requiring a thought process, see Maynard, 1985: 376) on the narrator's part regarding the events narrated, that is, an instantiation of narratorial judgement (for the use of markers of intensity as cues of explicitness and decontextualization see Chafe, 1985; Zellermayer, 1991). On the whole, the main difference between the involvement strategies in stories for children and those in stories for adults lies in that the latter show (i.e. immediately verbalize as if witnessing) rather than tell the events. As a result, they encourage a mutual sense-making and co-witnessing of them

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between the teller and the listeners. In terms of assumed teller-listeners relationship, this narratorial mode presupposes as well as fosters an egalitarian relationship of intimacy and solidarity. Thus, its avoidance in stories for children is not a chance and unmotivated textual choice. It is rather a contextually grounded adjustment of discourse strategies which is interconnected with a change in the perceptions of the addresser-addressee relations. The avoidance of narratorial dramatization does not encourage a sense of collaboration in and co-witnessing of the events narrated, which is the basis of an equal-to-equal relationship between the participants in a storytelling situation. As will be shown, it rather serves the textual encoding of a power differential between them. This power differential is intertwined with certain purposes of telling stories for children in Greece.

4. Audience accommodation in cultural context Our treatment above of the narratorial modes in stories for children as a vehicle for encoding a power differential between storyteller and listeners forms a contextualization frame of text-strategies. This means that it accounts for the differences in narrative construction between stories for adults and stories for children that were presented in this paper. The power differential is a well-documented "inherent and integral part of adult-child relationships in most cultures" (Hirschon, 1992: 36). What varies in different cultures is the ways in which "power is actually exercised in this particular set of adult-child" (ibid.: 36). Hirschon's ethnographic analysis in a specific community in Greece showed that the exercizing of the adult power over children is mostly in the form of verbal rather than non-verbal action: in particular it is encoded in speech acts such as promises, threats and lies and in false stories or fantasies (ibid.: 35-56). In our case, it can be argued that it underlies the text-strategies of everyday storytelling to children at the expense of the co-witnessing and immediacy qualities that are involved in the discourse of stories among adults. These differences in perceptions of teller-listener relations in each case of storytelling mediate the interaction between the stories' texture and their contextualization aspects, in particular the specific functions and purposes governing their telling. Specifically, the performance mode of stories for adults proves to be a compulsive and normative general framework which subsumes more specific functions under it, thus acting as the ideal vehicle for their realization. These functions are mostly dictated by cultural values and attitudes. Briefly, one such function is the common male self-foregrounding which underlies a great percentage of men's narrative production. In a similar vein, the teller's desire to gain in likeability by means of being a strong performer is a powerful function dictated by the cultural role of Greek storytelling as an arena for displaying artistry. This is particularly evident in humorous narratives. By contrast, the performed deliveries of sensational stories is inextricably bound up with the therapeutic function of self-exposure in which the sharing of the experience and the feedback from the addressee are crucial for rationalizing and comprehending it. Self-exposure, in a culturally sanctioned way, also determines most women's stories, whether humorous or sensational.

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Audience considerations in stories for children abolish the above common functions in favour of functions that can be subsumed under the umbrella-term of didacticism. The perception of the relation with the child-addressee as a power relation results in the creation of instructional texts which encode a set of cultural values with which the children are intended to identify. This compulsively didactic character suggests that, since fairy tales are no longer appropriate for 7-8-year-olds (the addressees' age), the task of acculturating Greek children into the codes of morality has been taken over by the narrativization of personal experiences in the shape of moral lessons. Naturally, the manifestations of this didacticism are not reducible to the prototypical case of constructing a narrative with a moral point explicitly expressed. Instead, they vary in terms of overtness. Cases of relatively explicit and overt didacticism account for roughly one third of the stories for children. These are typically encoded in stories which tell what happened to the narrator in order to warn the addressees against it. Story (2) at the beginning of this paper falls into this type of stories. Drawing on a typical sensational content for Greek childhood (dogs are common in the Greek countryside and children are very frequently warned against them), it creates a narrative tone that can be summarized as the 'voice of experience' talking about the lessons that have been learnt. In many cases, this voice of experience underlies stories which foster a comparison of the type 'the old good times' vs. 'today's life that falls short of the past'. The rest of the stories are characterized by forms of subtle and covert didacticism that have often been found in children's literature: these are based on narrative modes of control that explicate rather than show the material narrated (e.g. Stephens, 1992: 41; Hunt, 1988: 179). The all-embracing function of didacticism precludes functions such as the ones met in stories for adults. For instance, the addressee's feedback, essential in sensational stories, is no longer pursued. The telling of sensational stories is subsumed under the function of didacticism: sad or scary experiences are retrieved from the distant past as teaching devices. Comparably, in humorous stories the narrators are more preoccupied with getting their moral point across rather than creating the entertaining ending-at-thehigh point narrative pattern which maximizes audience engagement. This is evident in the following example. The brief one-episode story has an essentially humorous content, but this is couched in its didactic tone by which the narrator implicitly puts forward a contrastbetween the adversities of 'the old times' and the comforts of 'today's life'. The story is representative of a group of stories from the middle-aged group, who normally draw on their experiences as children during the harsh years of the world-war followed by the Greek civil war and the adverse post-war period. The moral message of such stories in the data constitutes an invitation to the addressees to appreciate the privilege of living in today's world and a reminder of their duties towards it: (14) otan pigha sto ghymnasio apo to chorio/ pigha sena oikotrofeio stin Paramythia/ triada chiliometra apo to chorio/ sto oikotrofeio/ ekei mesa imaste esokleistoi/ ekei troghame/ kai koimomaste m e s a / e kai tin proti vdhomada mas ftiaxane makaronia me kima/ egho dhen ixera ti simainei kimas/ kai itan ipochreotiko na ta f a m e ta makaronia me ton kima/ egho pigha na ta fao dhe borousa/ mourchotan na kano emeto/ ti na kano ki egho/ eicha ena sakaki/

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A. Georgakopoulou /Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 649~674 piano ta makaronia na poume mazi me ton kima/ ta richno mes stin tsepi/ kai perasa me to piato na poume etsi exo/ alla eicha ghinei olo ladhia/ sakaki kai padelonia eichan ghinei aischos/ milame ghia aischos na poume/ ghiati dhen ixera ti simainei kimas/ to vlepa na poume ghia kotsilia kotas/ tetoia ki alla cheirotera pernaghame tote ...

when I left my home town to go to high school/! went to this boarding school in Paramithia (common post-war type of schooling for the poor)/this was thirty miles from my home town/and I was on full board there/I ate there and slept there too/and in the first week they cooked us spaghetti bolognese/and I hadn't seen minced meat before/so I didn't know what the bolognese sauce was/and we had to eat whatever was served to u s / I tried to eat it but I couldn't/I felt like throwing up/what could I do/I took the spaghetti with my hands/and started filling my pocket with it/and in the end I left my plate there and walked out of the room/and there I was covered in sauce/from top to bottom/my jacket and my trousers were completely full of it/'cos I didn't know what minced meat was/it looked like chicken droppings to me/the things that we went through then ... (Kostas H.) The device of the child-character in the example above serves the creation of a distance and discrepancy between the I-narrator and the I-character. This subverts the creation of a sense of immediacy and proximity between the taleworld and the storytelling situation which is an indispensable element of the performed mode of narration. The 'voice of experience' in this case presents the adversities that have been coped with. In this way, the events narrated are communicated as being clearly part of the past which is retrieved for didactic purposes and is kept distinctly apart from the immediate storytelling situation. To sum up, the contextualization of the audience-shaped choices in stories for children has led us to their interconnection with the storytelling functions of didacticism and the encoding of status differences. This can be aligned with findings in the literature according to which switching codes or shifting styles commonly aims at marking discourse activities for a status difference between addresser and addressee (e.g. see Myers Scotton, 1988). In our case, the style-shifting is from an 'unmarked' register of dramatized everyday storytelling among adults to a register of telling stories for children with its own involvement strategies and textual norms. This proves that, unlike what findings regarding the 'oral-based dramatic styles', including the 'Greek style' (see Tannen, 1983) seem to suggest, the dramatized mode of Modem Greek storytelling is not an unexceptional norm, but simply one option of a wide repertoire of communicative resources drawn upon by the members of the community to suit contextual considerations.

5. Conclusions This paper set out to explore the similarities and differences in narrative strategies between everyday naturally occurring stories for adults and stories for children. The

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study was felt to be essential for shedding light on an area in which the recipient design of storytelling discourse when (primarily) addressed to children has not been emphasized. Part of the new focus of the discussion resided in the selection of the data: they came from naturalistic broad contexts of socialisation and from a society where both narrative cases are at the heart of everyday communication (i.e. Greece). Additionally, the children-addressees were at school-age instead of the favourable pre-school target age of the relevant literature. The analysis of the data yielded results which are clearly attributable to audience accommodation factors. First of all, thematically, stories for children were found to revolve around childhood-plots delivered by means of non-climactic narration, in particular moment-in-time narration. These two choices were intertwined with the rest of their text-building mechanisms, namely their (over)accommodative devices and the systematic avoidance of 'proximal' and 'reiteration' performance devices. The latter proved to act as the major axes of narrative organization and involvement in stories for adults. However, their normative and overwhelming presence was clearly overridden in the case of stories for children due to contextual considerations. These were the product of the interaction of the audience variable with the cultural agenda of storytelling functions. In particular, what essentially differentiated between stories for adults and stories for children was the perceptions of storyteller-listeners relationship as an egalitarian relationship in the former and as a power-relation in the latter. Closely connected to the power code of stories for children were their narratorial choices of didacticism. The significance of the above findings can be stated at the level of both languagespecific research and cross-linguistic research on spoken discourse. Specifically, with regard to Modem Greek, the findings can serve as a point of departure for further research into varied contexts of everyday communication as well as intergenerational interaction, with the aim of shedding light on (a) the connection between specific oral performance devices and addresser-addressee relations and (b) the interaction between narrative construction and the society's cultural macro-processes (e.g. the narratorial self-presentation and the encoding of status and power in narrative communication contexts, the 'cultural' biases and stereotypes in 'asymmetric' exchanges, etc.). At a cross-linguistic level, this study adds to the line of research on the contextualization aspects of spoken discourse by demonstrating the audience effect, in interaction with wider contextual constraints, on the shaping of discourse. Thus, it is hoped that the discussion has contributed to the enquiry into an area of spoken communication with an increasingly growing interest in it: this is the intergenerational communication, a systematic study of which is as 'timely' and vital as our understanding of the ethnography of interaction between different groups in different cultures can be.

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