Interactional remembering in conversational narrative

This paper investigates a range of verbal behaviors surrounding remembering, forgetfulness and uncertainty in the oral performance of personal narratives. Storytellers deploy-and their interlocutors orient to-talk about remembering for a whole range of interactional purposes in conversation: prefacing and closing stories, justifying tellability, marking transitions, and eliciting co-narration. Storytellers display forgetfulness in several ways, employing specific language resources to secure uptake and elicit help from listeners. A description of remembering for personal conversational narrative is sketched in terms of cognitive models with potential gaps. As tellers retrieve information, they get back in touch with scenes from the past, and they may comment on the clarity of the images recalled, as well as on difficulties in remembering. Paradoxically, when tellers register uncertainty in personal stories, it tends to authenticate the story rather than to raise doubts about it.