The reporting space in conversational storytelling: Orchestrating all semiotic channels for taking a stance

Reported speech has a significant role as a practice of stance taking in conversational storytelling. The dialogic nature of reported speech is reflected in the reporting speaker's capacity to simultaneously assign a stance to and take a stance on the reported speaker and event. The current paper focuses on the relationship of the lexico-syntactic and the embodied features of enactments in stance taking. The paper adds to previous research the notion of reporting space, a frame for potential active multimodal involvement in the stance-taking activity by all participants of the telling event. The teller enacts a character's talk and embodiment in a virtual space and place of the telling, thus setting up a reporting space which allows further enactments from all participants of the storytelling event. The analyses of the examples show that recipients indeed make use of the reporting space provided by the teller and produce subsequent, fitting enactments. They make use of the reporting space, i.e. the reference points provided by the prior enactments, in producing such further enactments, which adds further elements to and elaborates the reporting space. The recipients tie their multimodal contributions to the reporting space by way of resonating lexico-syntactic, prosodic and embodied features.