Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences. Katherine Bischoping

my husband never sits, waits for his children,

       I am the only one.

       and then suddenly I just fell asleep

       and then I stood up

       and I went to my bedroom

       and as I went to my bedroom to get onto my bed,

       I heard the shots,

       because before the shots,

       (my heart) gave three – three thumps

       I just – my heart just went you know.

      Source: Blommaert, 2008: 434, author’s emphases

      Textbox 3.9: A Summary of Strategies for Listening to Sounds of Story

       Observe the effects of repetitions on listeners and in conveying meanings.

       Watch for what breaks in repetition do.

      Chapter Summary

      The premise of our ‘fine-grained’ strategies is one dear to psychoanalysts and literary scholars alike: that people drop clues to their perspectives in the minutiae of their narratives. Strategies based on this premise can stand alone, or can complement any of the broader strokes analyses of the last chapter. In particular, realists can use them to pick up what they would think of as narrators’ biases, while constructionists can embrace narrators’ interpretations as objects of analytic interest in their own right. The strategies include focusing on how narrators adhere to or depart from the Labov and Waletzky model of storytelling, or on how narrators use the language of agency to reveal their evaluations of who a story’s prime movers are. They also include examining how interpretations are conveyed by a story’s imagery and figurative language, and on the meanings inherent in a narrative’s rhythms and repetitions. These fine-grained strategies sometimes take for granted that a narrative has an audience, for example, one that might be persuaded by repetitions or trusted enough to be given the details. But, for the most part, they treat stories as texts, rather than as embodiedly told, in the moment, to a listener whose responses shape the telling.