Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American conversational and literary narrative*

The term "reported speech" is a misnomer. Examination of the lines of dialogue represented in storytelling or conversation, and consideration of the powers of human memory, indicate that most of those lines were probably not actually spoken. What is commonly referred to as reported speech or direct quotation in conversation is constructed dialogue, just as surely as is the dialogue created by fiction writers and playwrights. A difference is that in fiction and plays, the characters and actions are also constructed, whereas in personal narrative, they are based on actual characters and events. But even this difference is not absolute. Many works of fiction and drama are also based on real people and events, and many conversational storytellers to the consternation of their children and spouses but the delight of their hearers embellish and adjust characters and events. Many researchers (for example, Labov 1972, Chafe 1982, Ochs 1979, Tannen 1982, Schiffrin 1981) have observed that narration is more vivid when speech is presented as first-person dialogue ("direct quotation") rather than third-person report ("indirect quotation") and is more commonly found in conversational narrative (sometimes generally re­ ferred to as spoken discourse) than written expository discourse (but not of course in written literary discourse, precisely because fiction and poetry are akin to conversation in workings and effect). But there is more to it than that. The creation of voices, more than the depiction of actions, occasions the imagination of alternative and distant worlds that is the stuff of dreams and art. Friedrich (1979: 473) suggests that "it is the more poetic levels and processes of language, however defined, that massively model, con­