Inter-interactional contexts of story-interventions by non-knowledgeable story recipients in (Italian) multi-person interaction

It is widely accepted that the audience plays an important role in the co-construction of narratives in conversation, in which the audience is co-author through story-interventions. The audience is not a heterogeneous entity but it may be differentiated in relation to the respective states of knowledge of single parties about the narrative being told. While most previous research on interventions has been based on the activities employed by knowledgeable participants, here we focus on interventions produced by (non-knowledgeable) story recipients – which are relatively fewer than the ones done by knowledgeable parties. Investigation of mundane multi-person (Italian) conversation reveals that the use of these practices is strictly related not only to the very details of the story but also to different features of the intra-interactional context(s).