An Analysis of Conversational Narratives in Turkish

Abstract

Conversational narratives are performed in conversations as the spontaneous and interactional achievements of the teller(s) and the listener(s). With this concern, many studies in narrative tradition focus on conversational narratives in various languages. However, most of the previous narrative studies in Turkish concentrate on the investigation of oral narratives by disregarding the conversational aspects. This study aimed to investigate the narrative structures and conversational organizations of conversational narratives in Turkish. To this end, an analysis has been carried out in the interface of Narrative Analysis (Labov and Waletzky, 1967; Labov, 1972; 1997) and Conversation Analysis (Jefferson, 1978; Sacks et al., 1974). The data of the study include 100 single conversational narratives and 12 complex conversational narratives gathered from 11 recordings of natural conversations in Turkish. The findings of the study indicate that both single and complex conversational