Pfaender2023

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Pfaender2023
BibType ARTICLE
Key Pfaender2023
Author(s) Stefan Pfänder, Philipp Freyburger, Daniela Marzo, Ignacio Satti
Title Doing remembering as a multimodal accomplishment: On the use of mi ricordo (‘I remember’) in Oral History Interviews
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Conversational remembering, Oral history, Multimodal storytelling, Interactional linguistics
Publisher
Year 2023
Language English
City
Month
Journal Interactional Linguistics
Volume 2
Number 1
Pages 110-136
URL Link
DOI 10.1075/il.21011.pfa
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
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Abstract

The present study investigates how remembering is publicly displayed during storytelling in Oral History Interviews with Italian-speaking witnesses of labor camps during WWII. We focus on the use of the first-person indicative mi ricordo (‘I remember’). In this particular narrative genre, mi ricordo is recurrently used by narrators, as it makes the act of remembering publicly accessible. Drawing upon the methods of Interactional Linguistics, we identify two practices involving the use of mi ricordo: projecting the transition to the narration of a specific episode and displaying epistemic credibility towards facts. We argue that these practices correspond respectively to prospective and retrospective scopes of mi ricordo. Furthermore, a fine-grained multimodal analysis shows that narrators make the scopes of mi ricordo recognizable through recurrent multimodal gestalts, which encompass verbal, prosodic and bodily resources. In the discussion, we argue that the recognizable gestalts are routinized ways of dealing with the emergent character of remembering in oral history interviews and with the interactional tasks that are relevant in this particular communicative genre. The findings highlight that doing remembering is a multimodal accomplishment.

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