Center stage: direct and indirect reported speech in conversational storytelling

This paper explores how speakers use direct reported speech (DRS) and indirect reported speech (IDRS) in conversational narratives to establish the importance of particular story characters to the plot and to display the interactional goal of the story. When the story is designed as being about a particular person, the speaker uses DRS to depict the character’s behavior and qualities, thus marking the centrality of the character to the plot. When the story is designed as being about a non-human phenomenon (e.g. the quality of healthcare, the noise in the neighborhood, etc.), the narrator may use IDRS to mark characters as secondary or even tangential to the plot. By manipulating the grammatical resources of reporting someone else’s talk, storytellers can also manipulate the centrality of the story characters to the interactional point of the narrative, or the story’s “aboutness.