Co-narration in French conversation storytelling: A quantitative insight

•Storytelling in French conversation is investigated in a quantitative perspective.•The temporal evolution of turn, morpho-syntactic components and laughter are examined throughout narratives.•Narratives exhibit co-narration phases through the different responses provided by listeners.•Our results confirm that both speakers actively contribute to the elaboration of narratives.

This study addresses the issue of the interactional achievement of storytelling in French face-to-face conversations. Previous studies have described storytelling as a joint activity in which together, narrator and listener actively collaborate for a successful achievement. The main findings were either based on qualitative studies (Conversational Analysis) or established in experimental conditions that did not really fit the conversational context. Using the Corpus of Interactional Data, we argue that conversational storytelling can now be described in a more quantitative perspective in the scope of the emergent corpus-pragmatics approach. Turn, morpho-syntactic information and laughter are investigated. We test to what extent the temporal evolution of these components within speech production of each speaker throughout narratives provides evidence in favor of joint activity, i.e. co-narration systematically performed by both participants and resulting in a specific turn-taking organization.