Embedded Context

To describe one scene, a speaker can make use of materials imported from a second. In this article, I investigate how recipients as well as speakers attend to the simultaneous presence of multiple scenes in their talk. Among the phenomena examined are (a) local metrics in which features of the current scene are used to describe a narrated one and (b) unattributed imported speech in which talk from another scene is used to make coherent moves within the current line of talk. Both of these practices create the possibility for a variety of subsequent recipient operations. These practices also reveal a form of narrative activity that does not have many of the canonical properties usually ascribed to stories such as focused bounded units.