The construction of emotional involvement in everyday German narratives – interactive uses of 'dense constructions'
| Panel: | P67 - Affect and Emotion in Interaction, Part 1: Everyday Conversation |
| Author: | Günthner, Susanne |
| Abstract: | |
| The construction of emotional involvement in everyday German narratives – interactive uses of 'dense constructions' This presentation will explore particular syntactic resources (such as averbal constructions, infinite constructions, minimal syntactic phrases etc.) used to contextualize affect and emotion. Instead of treating 'dense constructions' (e.g. averbal constructions "I:CH (.) mit meinen sachen rAuf, […] ICH (-) wieder rUnter,"; 'me (.) with my stuff upstairs, […] me (-) down again,') as elliptic constructions and conceptualizing them as incomplete or reduced sentence patterns, I shall explore their specific forms and functions in interactive usage. Based on everyday spoken German interactions, I will argue that 'fragmentary' or 'dense constructions' – even though they do not follow the rules of the standard grammar of German – represent conventionalized patterns participants use to fulfil various communicative tasks in specific communicative genres. In everyday narratives, speakers make use of these constructions as resources to stage the dynamics of past actions in quick succession. Furthermore, due to their syntactic and prosodic density, these patterns form scenic devices dramatizing the story-telling and contextualizing emphasis and emotional involvement. |
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