Modern Greek Oral Narratives in Context: Cultural Constraints and Evaluative Ways of Telling

This paper focuses on personal (experience) storytelling in Modern Greek, a little explored discourse type, yet particularly vital and salient in the culture. Using as its data a corpus of naturally occurring stories in companies of intimates as well as a corpus of adults’ stories for children, the study presents their major evaluative resources. The aim of the discussion is to look into the contextualisation aspects of these resources, that is, to establish interpretive links between the stories’ formal choices and their situational and cultural context. At the textual level, it is shown that the category prevailing in the affective component of Greek stories between adults is what will be called the proximal evaluation. This serves the creation of a global performed mode which, contextually speaking, invokes and is shaped by the cultural agenda of functions underlying everyday narrative construction. By contrast, evaluation in stories to children proves to be less internalised, by heavily relying on "markers of intensity" and a specific case of audience-adaptation devices named "schema-driven". The motivations for this choice are traceable to the change of the stories’ narrative purposes shaped by their culturally constrained "recipient design". In addition to shedding light on the contextsensitivity of Greek stories’ evaluative "grammar", the above findings prove to be immediately relevant to the ways in which the society’s continuum of oraland literate-based discourse practices is shaped. (