Conversational Storytelling Routines and Narrative Structure in Greek and Latin Comedy, with an Appendix on Conversational Humour

Oral storytelling is not a monological or exclusively narrative event, but thoroughly interactional and embedded in a larger conversational context (cf. Schegloff 1997; Herman 1999; Norrick 2007; 2018). The recipients of the story usually add in crucial ways to the ongoing course and content of the storytelling by expressing their uptake and involvement (ranging from passive backchannelling sounds like ‘hmm’ and ‘yes’ to active questions and comments) and by voicing their stance towards the narrated events; at the completion of the story some form of update is typically due (cf. Stivers 2013).
Greek and Latin comedy, with their lively and quick-witted interactions and comic exaggeration, offer an excellent corpus to analyse not only the conversational structure and routines of storytelling used (cf. Risselada f.c. for Latin), but also to compare fixed expressions and formulaic turns used in both languages. By contrasting Aristophanes and Plautus, we can distinguish e.g. phrases that seem to be cross-linguistically conventional from language-specific expressions. As an example of the former we find e.g. τί δ᾽ ἐστίν and quid est (both equivalent to English ‘What ?’) as a ‘go-ahead’ reaction to a story announcement. Moreover, we are looking in both languages for linguistic reflections of the social relations between the storyteller and his audience, in terms of the ‘conversational space’ attributed to the recipient(s) and the type of phrases which both tellers and recipients use.