This book explores two important tasks of language - presenting who we are talking about (the referent) and what happened to them in a narrative - and how this alters according to emergent forms and meanings. Drawing on examples from word-level repairs within a single turn-at-talk, to life story narratives told years apart, it shows how words, structures and meanings are combined in new ways and re-used in new contexts for new listeners. An invaluable resource for scholars wishing to understand how discourse is shaped and re-shaped over time, place and person.

Deborah Schiffrin is Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University.

1. Variation; 2. Problematic referrals; 3. Anticipating referrals; 4. Reactive and proactive prototypes; 5. Referring sequences; 6. Reframing experience; 7. Retelling a story; 8. Who did what (again)?; 9. Redoing and replaying.