AbstractEnergized by seminal scholarship within narrative studies; communication studies of aging and dementia; and formulaic language, we examined a wide range of stories told multiple times within two different longitudinal collections of verbal interactions involving two women in their 80s (one US American; one French). Based on multifaceted analyses of these longitudinal series of stories, we identified a new type of narrative, the “narrative crystal”. We characterize the internal formal architecture of two illustrative crystals (one from each corpus) before illuminating how such crystals function for their speakers as reassuring interactional “stepping stones” within their larger discourse surroundings. Our findings sketch a possible developmental process regarding how meaningful personal experiences come to be transformed over the lifespan: from the inchoate qualities of first-time tellings shaped by the interaction, through incrementally increased stability over the course of many tellings, to reach the highly durable nature of narrative crystals.

中文翻译：

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老年人的对话与“叙事水晶”的出现

摘要在叙事研究中受到开创性学术研究的推动；衰老和痴呆的传播研究；和公式化的语言，我们检查了在涉及两名 80 多岁女性（一名美国美国人；一名法国人）的两个不同的纵向口头互动集合中多次讲述的广泛故事。基于对这些纵向系列故事的多方面分析，我们确定了一种新型的叙事方式，即“叙事水晶”。我们描述了两个说明性晶体（每个语料库中的一个）的内部形式架构，然后说明这些晶体如何为他们的演讲者发挥作用，作为在他们更大的话语环境中令人放心的交互“垫脚石”。我们的研究结果勾勒了一个可能的发展过程，即有意义的个人经历如何在整个生命周期中发生转变：