Tales from the Vienna woods:Sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic considerations of narrative analysis

The analysis of narratives is being attempted by many sciences. This paper focusses on the historical and therapeutic approaches (in this issue) and differentiates their analyses from a socio- and psycholinguistic point of view. Several points are focussed on: there exists significant evidence that persons of different social status, sex, culture personality etc. realize different and systematic narratives - the knowledge about these variations helps to explain communicationconflicts and frameconflicts. Also, the meaning of a narrative is very complex - there are manifest and latent meanings, some are only to be arrived at through the context and other data available about the storyteller. Thus, socio- and psycholinguistic provide the researcher with many categories and criteria for a systematic analysis of empirical data, of spoken language, like narratives