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This article addresses the emergence of networked narration found in Facebook updates. Drawing on anthropological approaches to co-tellership (Ochs & Capps, 2001), we trace how storyworlds are co-constructed by multiple narrators via the communicative affordances which have developed in the Facebook status update: namely, the practices of commenting, liking, linking, tagging, photosharing, and marking geographical location. Our longitudinal analysis of 1800 updates elicited from 60 participants over a period of four years suggests that the rise of what we call a 'networked narrative' allows individuals to participate collectively in the construction of 'shared stories' (Georgakopoulou, 2007), and through this process for narrators to co-construct their social identities through their interactions with others. We argue that the distribution of storytelling as it takes place on Facebook may be found in other online and offline contexts, and challenges earlier, linear models of narrative form that have dominated discourse-analytic and literary-critical narratology.This article puts forward a new metaphor for describing the narrative practices that emerge in social media: networked narrative. The metaphor of a network with its multiple nodes, pathways and dimensions departs from the linearity inherent in earlier but seminal models of narrative. Attempts to define narrative are still debated (Ryan, 2006), but the widely accepted notion of narrative as entailing a sequence of events that take place in time necessarily implies linear ordering Requests for further information should be directed to Ruth Page,

This study investigates the organization of interaction through comments on the social networking site Facebook. Facebook offers a range of affordances that allow communication between users. These include written language in various settings (messaging, commenting, posting), as well as a range of non-verbal resources, such as uploading photos, sharing links, the “like”-button. Our analysis focuses on the post+commenting section, which users treat as a quasi-conversational space. Much as conversation is organized through the sequential unfolding of turns through time, the interaction in the comments section is organized according to a pattern that lets users “make sense” of the communication as a coherent exchange. This comment organizing mechanism, which is enacted through tying practices, operates on written language rather than spoken, and so needs to accommodate different affordances than turn-taking does: it has to be able to co-ordinate contributions not just through time, but through space as well. The theoretical significance of this research then is its exploration of a complex mechanism that is used by humans to maintain social order through writing and reading practices. In particular, it takes into account how the context of the website shapes people's communication through the resources made available.

CLU-SAL publishes monographs and edited collections, culturally oriented grammars and dictionaries in the cross-and interdisciplinary domain of anthropological linguistics or linguistic anthropology. The series offers a forum for anthropological research based on knowledge of the native languages of the people being studied and that linguistic research and grammatical studies must be based on a deep understanding of the function of speech forms in the speech community under study. His research focuses on spoken English, with a particular attention to narrative as well as verbal humor, and is rooted in the wide field of pragmatics. His monographs include Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk and the popular Conversational Narrative, which has recently been reprinted in paperback edition.He co-edited a handbook on phraseology and volumes on the Foundations of Pragmatics and on Humor in Interaction, which has also seen a reprint in paperback. After many years as Special Issues Editor, he is now Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Pragmatics. He also serves on the Consultation Board of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) as well as on the editorial boards of a number of journals from the fields of pragmatics and humor studies (e.g. Text and Talk and Humor).In this millennium only, he has published more than 50 articles in peerreviewed journals and edited volumes reflecting his manifold interests in language in use, its forms and functions, including topics as diverse as conjunctions, interjections, pragmatic markers, tellability, swearing, remembering, listener practices, similes, scripted performances, laughter, conflict, and the construction of identities in talk. Uniting his two passions, language and cooking, he has worked on recipes as early as 1983. His recent addition to the field of culinary linguistics is on "Conversational recipe telling" (2011).The articles in this volume were written and assembled as a token of gratitude and affection for our teacher, mentor and colleague.1. We would like to thank the student helpers of English linguistics, above all Isabel Schul and Daniel Recktenwald, for their help, and also our colleagues at the English department of Saarland University and everybody else for not "spilling the beans." Aperitivo Overview of the volume Maximiliane FrobeniusSaarland UniversityThe present volume contains a collection of original research articles from multiple disciplines, revolving around the common theme of language and food and the manifestation of the two within their cultural framework. This section gives a brief overview of the general structure of the volume and of the individual contributions.Similar to the intricate task of composing a four course meal for invited guests, the assembling of an edited volume demands a sense of "what goes together. " The metaphor of the menu serves as the vehicle for the order of contributions: we start with an introduction to the whole field of research (Antipasti), move on to contributions in the form of original research ar...

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Video blogs are a form of CMC (computer-mediated communication) that feature speakers who talk into a camera, and thereby produce a viewer-directed performance. Pointing gestures are part of the resources that the medium affords to design vlogs for the absent recipients. Based on a corpus of 40 vlogs, this research categorizes different kinds of common pointing actions in vlogs. Close analysis reveals the role multimodal factors such as gaze and body posture play along with deictic gestures and verbal reference in the production of a viewer-directed monologue. Those instances where vloggers point at referents outside the video frame, e.g., elements of the Web site that represent alternative modes of communication, such as written comments, receive particular attention in the present study, as they require mutual knowledge about the shared virtual context the vlog is situated in.

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