Direct reported speech in storytellings: Enacting and negotiating epistemic entitlements

This paper presents a study of participants’ use of direct reported speech (DRS) in storytelling during dinner table conversation in French. Focusing on reported dialogues, the analysis corroborates earlier conversation analytic findings showing that speakers regularly use linguistic, prosodic and paralinguistic resources to stage the characters whose speech is being reported; thereby speakers display their stance on behalf of those characters and their conduct. Additionally, the analysis documents that speakers use DRS within reported dialogues as a powerful means for depicting their own adequate conduct in the face of a purportedly “deviant” conduct of a third party. In the specific context of our data, in which an au-pair interacts with her host family, such direct reported dialogues are used both by the mother and the au pair as a means to enact shared expectations about the appropriateness of a caregiver’s conduct in the face of the “deviant” conduct of a child. In light of these findings, the representation of past dialogues by means of DRS appears as a practical resource by means of which participants enact identities such as mother and caregiver and thereby reflexively construct and negotiate the related epistemic entitlements.