Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Language of Life and Death
  • Cited by 104
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139519632
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139519632
Subjects:
Sociolinguistics, Language and Linguistics
Information

Book description

We share the experience of others through the stories they tell of the crucial events in their lives. This book provides a rich range of narratives that grip the reader's attention together with an analysis of how it is done. While remaining true to the facts, narrators use linguistic devices to present themselves in the best possible light and change the listener's perception of who is to blame for what has occurred. William Labov extends his widely used framework for narrative analysis to matters of greatest human concern: the danger of death, violence, premonitions and large-scale community conflicts. The book also examines traditional epic and historical texts, from Herodotus and the Old Testament to Macaulay, showing how these literary genres draw upon the techniques of personal narratives. Not only relevant to students of narratology, discourse and sociolinguistics, this book will be rewarding reading for anyone interested in the human condition.

Reviews

‘Erudite, thoughtful and personal, an engaging book to be read and pondered, as much for the fundamental issues raised and the fascinating data analyzed as for the solutions offered.’

Neal R. Norrick - Saarland University

'Labov’s vision of our human desire to make sense of the most terrible and terrifying of our experiences is remarkable, panoramic, and a poignant tribute to the value of listening to eachother keenly.'

Alyssa McCabe Source: Journal of Sociolinguistics

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents
References
References
Abrahams, Roger. 1970. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: Aldine.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, Part I. 1934. London: J. M. Dent.
Anshen, Frank. 1969. Speech variation among Negroes in a small Southern community. Ph.D. dissertation, New York University.
Aristotle. 2009. Poetics. At .
Auerbach, Eric. 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Fiftieth Annniversary Edition, trans. Trask, Willard. Princeton University Press.
Bamberg, Michael. 2006. Stories: big or small. Why do we care?Narrative Inquiry 16: 139–147.
Bamberg, Michael and Georgakapoulou, Alexandra. 2004. Small stories as a new perspective in narrative analysis. Text & Talk 28: 377–396.
Bauman, Richard. 1984. Verbal Art as Peformance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Bell, Allen. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13: 145–204.
Bindoff, S. T. 1977 (1950). Tudor England. London: Pelican Books.
Bower, Anne. 1984. The construction of stance in conflict narrative. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Chesterton, G. K. 1909. Tremendous Trifles. London: Methuen.
Churchill, Winston. 2002. Marlborough: His Life and Times. University of Chicago Press.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge University Press.
Cukor-Avila, Patricia, and Bailey, Guy. 1995. An approach to sociolinguistic field work: a site study of rural AAVE in a Texas community. English World-Wide 16: 159–193.
Dundes, Alan (ed.). 1973. Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Dundes, Alan (ed.). 1984. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Evans, Richard. 2001. The two faces of E. H. Carr. History in Focus, Issue 2: What is History?. University of London. (accessed November 10, 2008).
Fludernik, Monika. 1991. The historical present tense yet again: tense switching and narrative dynamics in oral and quasi-oral storytelling. Text 3: 365–398.
Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge.
Freeman, Mark. 2006. Life “on holiday”: in defense of big stories. Narrative Inquiry 16: 131–138.
Genette, G. 1972. Narrative Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Georgakapoulou, Alexandra. 2008. Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis. Narrative Inquiry 16: 122–130.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. New York: Harper & Row.
Goldman, S. R., Graesser, A. C. and van den Broek, Paul (eds.). 1999. Narrative Comprehension, Causality and Coherence: Essays in Honor of Tom Trabasso. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Goodman, Nelson. 1954. Facts, fictions, and forecast. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Greimas, A. J. 1977. Elements of a narrative grammar. Diacritics (March): 23–40.
Grote, George. 1888 (1850). A History of Greece; from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Generation Contemporary with Alexander the Great, new edn., 10 vols. London: J. Murray.
Havelock, Eric A. 1967. Preface to Plato. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.
Helsig, Sarah. 2010. Big stories co-constructed: incorporating micro-analytic interpretative procedures into biographic research. Narrative Inquiry 20: 274–295.
Hight, George A. (trans.). 1913. The Saga of Grettir the Strong. London: J. M. Dent.
Hindle, Donald. 1980. The social and structural conditioning of phonetic variation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). 1989. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.
Hymes, Dell. 1981. “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ker, W. P. 1931. Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature. London: Macmillan.
Kiparsky, Paul and Kiparsky, Carol. 1970. Fact. In Bierwisch, M. and Heidolph, K. E. (eds.), Progress in Linguistics. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 143–173.
Kroch, Anthony. 1996. Dialect and style in the speech of upper class Philadelphia. In Guy, G., Feagin, C., Schiffrin, D. and Baugh, J. (eds.), Towards a Social Science of Languge, Vol. I. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 23–46.
Labov, William. 1972. Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, William. 1982. Speech actions and reactions in personal narrative. In Tannen, D. (ed.), Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk. Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1981. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 219–247.
Labov, William. 1984. Field methods of the Project on Linguistic Change and Variation. In Baugh, J. and Sherzer, J. (eds.), Language in Use. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp. 28–53.
Labov, William. 2001. Uncovering the event structure of narrative. In Tannen, D. and Alatis, J. (eds.), Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 2001. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 63–83.
Labov, William. 2006. Narrative pre-construction. Narrative Inquiry 16: 37–45.
Labov, William and Waletzky, Joshua. 1967. Narrative analysis. In Helm, J. (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 12–44.
Linde, Charlotte. 1986. Private stories in public discourse: narrative analysis in the social sciences. Poetics 15: 183–202.
Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Macaulay, G. C. (trans.). 1890. The History of Herodotus, Book I. London: Macmillan.
Macaulay, Ronald K. 1987. Polyphonic monologues: quoted direct speech in oral narratives. IPRA Papers in Pragmatics 1: 1–34.
Macaulay, Ronald K. 1991. Locating Dialect in Discourse. Oxford University Press.
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 1878. The Works of Lord Macaulay: History of England, Vol. II. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott.
Magliano, Joseph P. 1999. Revealing inference processes during text comprehension. In Goldman, Susan, Gaesser, Arthur and van den Broek, Paul (eds.), Narrative Comprehension, Causality, and Coherence. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 55–75.
Marx, Karl. 1867 (1932). Capital: The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings by Karl Marx, ed. Eastman, Max. New York: Carlton House.
Mitford, William. 1829. History of Greece, Vol. VI. London: T. Cadwell.
Munslow, Alan. 2007. Narrative and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Norrick, Neal R. 2005. The dark side of tellability. Narrative Inquiry 15: 323–344.
Ochs, Eleanor and Capps, L.. 2001. Living Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paul, , Herbert (ed.). 1904. Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone. London: George Allen.
Parry, , Adam (ed.). 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse. Oxford University Press.
Peltz, Rakhmiel. 1998. From Immigrant to Ethnic Culture: American Yiddish in South Philadelphia. Stanford University Press.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1997. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Prince, Gerald. 1982. Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative. The Hague: Mouton.
Prince, Gerald. 1994. Narratology. In Groden, M. and Kreiswirth, M. (eds.), The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticisim. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 524–528.
Prince, Gerald. 2004. Revisiting narrativity. In Bal, M. (ed.), Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Vol. I: Major Issues in Narrative Theory. New York: Routledge, pp. 11–19.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative (Temps et Récit), 3 vols., trans. McLaughlin, Kathleen and Pellauer, David. University of Chicago Press.
Riessman, Catherine K. 2002. Strategic uses of narrative in the presentation of self and illness: a research note. Social Science and Medicine 30: 1195–1200.
Roberts, , Geoffrey (ed.). 2001. The History and Narrative Reader. New York: Routledge.
Robertson, Jean. 1983. Language in oral histories: the shape of discourses about the past. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, Vols. I and II. Ed. Jefferson, Gail. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sawyer, Robert. 2010. Humans. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1997. “Narrative analysis” thirty years later. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7: 97–106.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. and Sacks, Harvey. 1973. Opening up closings. Semiotica 8: 289–327.
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1981. Tense variation in narrative. Language 57: 45–62.
Skinner, B. F. 1957. Verbal Behavior. East Norwalk, CT: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Speck, W. A. 1980. Thomas Babington Macaulay. In Cannon, John (ed.), The Historian at Work. London: George Allen & Unwin, pp. 55–67.
Stetson, Chess, Fiesta, Matthew P. and Eagleman, David M.. 2007. Does time really slow down during a frightening event? PLoS One. 2(12): e1295. (accessed December 6, 2012).
Trabasso, T. and Sperry, L.. 1985. Causal relatedness and importance of story events. Journal of Memory and Language 24: 595–611.
Wepman, Dennis, Newman, R. B. and Binderman, Murray. 1976. The Life: The Lore and Folk Poetry of the Black Hustler. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Whedbee, Karen E. 2008. Making the worse case appear the better: British reception of the Greek Sophists prior to 1850. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11: 603–630.
Whitman, Cedric. 1958. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2010. “Story” – an English cultural keyword and a key interpretive tool of Anglo culture. Narrative Inquiry 20: 153–181.
Wolfson, Nessa. 1978. A feature of performed narrative: the conversational historical present. Language and Society 7: 215–237.
Wolfson, Nessa. 1979. The conversational historical present alternation. Language 55: 168–182.
Zwaan, R. A. 1999. Five dimensions of situation-model construction. In Goldman, S. R., Graesser, A. C. and van den Broek, Paul (eds.), Narrative Comprehension, Causality and Coherence: Essays in Honor of Tom Trabasso. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 93–110.

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.