Individual narration versus conversational narration: a bridge between variationism and interaction

Abstract

The  aim  of  this  research  is  to  compare  the  construction  and  the  coconstruction  of  narra-tions of personal experience in relation with sex and socioeconomic group factors, in speak-ers from Santiago de Chile. On the basis of a sample of 90 narrations, in the first place the construction of the individual narration is contrasted with the coconstructed one following Labov’s proposal (Labov and Waletzky ,1967, and Labov, 1972), and the sensibility of the nar-rations to variation is studied in order to prove two hypotheses:1on the one hand, that the prototypical labovian narrative structure—derived from narrations obtained using sociolinguistic interview—is valid to analyse the narration generated in interaction and, on the other, that coconstructed narrations between women are closer in their structure to prototypical labovian narrations. Results indicate that there would be a deep semantic structure invari-ant through all the stories, that does not depend on their collection instrument. It is proved, additionally, that it is only the socioeconomic group factor the one that correlates with the variation, and that the summary and the coda are the variable elements in the individual nar-ration. Nevertheless, in the conversational narration both complication and resolution vary.