Introduction

Analyses in this book thus far have focused primarily on referring expressions: what problems arise as speakers try to use their words as links to the world? how is information status indicated? what happens when familiarity assumptions go awry? are there pragmatic solutions that help avoid problems? how are successive words connected within the different genres that provide textual worlds in which they reside? what happens when these problems are situated not only in everyday talk, but also in social, cultural, historical and ideological domains of Discourse?

This chapter and the next address some of these same questions. However, they do so not by analyzing referring expressions, but by analyzing how characters and actions are brought together in sequences of clauses that comprise a narrative. As noted in Chapter 1, evoking an entity through a referring expression and recounting an experience through a narrative share some common concerns. Both depend upon links between word and world, the building of sequences in which words connect, attention to recipient design, and an interplay among referential, social and expressive meanings. And just as referring expressions can be redone (sometimes, but not always, due to problems), so too, can narratives be replayed. All of these similarities allow the analyses in these two chapters to continue to address the tension between same and different, new and old, innovative and fixed – but in event sequences rather than referents.