A Linguistic Lens on Narratives in Professional Settings

Since the narrative turn in the 1990s there has been ongoing academic interest in the role of narrative as a meaning-making practice that reaches across time and place, and is reflected not only in ‘grand narratives’, or broad cultural scripts, but also in situated social realities and everyday oral and written practices. It is widely recognized that narratives are used to express and negotiate both individual and collective identities, which are performed through a variety of communicative modes and codes (De Fina, 2015; Fairclough, 1995). We are socialized in narrative frames of mind from an early age, and we continue to tell stories throughout our lives, in both personal and professional domains.

In narratological research, narratives have historically been characterized as being driven by micro components, the “basic elements of narrative” (Herman, 2009), which Toolan identifies as a combination of “events, characters and settings” (1988: p. 12), providing a minimal form that captures core problems of individuals and societies, drives stories forward, and makes them coherent. Departing from Labov’s (1972) influential model of naturally occurring narratives, more recent studies have explored ‘small stories’ (Georgakopoulou, 2006; Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008), an “umbrella term that captures a gamut of underrepresented narrative activities” (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008: p. 381) and include a variety of texts with which we are engaged in professional and public settings, such as news stories, social media posts, emails, instant messages, reports, proposals, case studies, clinical notes, ethnographic interviews, etc. These texts not only crosscut the spoken, written, and electronic modality, but are increasingly multi-modal. This multi-dimensional complexity reveals “the reflexive relationship between discourse and social change”, highlighting how each informs and drives the other (Candlin et al., 2017: p. 217). Furthermore, in professional domains, stories are often made not only to be told, but also to be sold, and emerge from multiple stakeholders’ collaboration, which complicates any assumption about the writer’s creativity and freedom of expression.

Research on professional discourse follows various lines of inquiry and offers diverse socio-critical perspectives on the use of language in institutionalized and workplace contexts. How are social and personal identities performed through the process of storying within professional discourse communities? Which genres are preferred over others in specific social groups and professional interactions? Which heterogeneous practices of intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Candlin and Maley, 1997) emerge in professional communication? How is narrative stance-taking constructed? How is the communicative success of the story evaluated? Do discursive practices in institutional settings maintain a critical distance from dominant ideologies or reproduce them? What ethical potential and risks are associated with different strategies for narrating experiences in professional contexts? What lexical and morphosyntactic features are typical of specific narrative texts? How are narrative and discourse analysis interrelated? These are some of the questions the AIA 2024 Seminar “A Linguistic Lens on Narratives in Professional Settings” seeks to explore.

References

Bamberg, M. and Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. Text & Talk 28(3), 377-396.

Candlin, C. N. and Maley, Y. (1997). Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in the discourse of alternative dispute resolution. In B.L. Gunnarsson, P. Linell and B. Nordberg (Eds.) The Construction of Professional Discourse (pp. 201-222). Routledge.

Candlin, C.N., Crichton, J. and More, S. H. (2017). Exploring Discourse in Context and in Action. Palgrave MacMillan.

De Fina, A. (2015). Narrative and Identities. In A. De Fina and A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.) The Handbook of Narrative Analysis (pp. 251-268). John Wiley & Sons.

Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. Longman.

Georgakopoulou, A. (2006). Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis. Narrative inquiry 16(1), 122-130.

Herman, D. (2009). Basic elements of narrative. John Wiley & Sons.

Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular (No. 3). University of Pennsylvania Press.

Toolan, M.J. (2013). Narrative: A critical linguistic introduction. Routledge.