Embodiment in Moroccan Arabic storytelling: language, stance and discourse analysis

Abstract This article examines an oral story that displays how embodiment is crucial for understanding language in interaction. It demonstrates how stance, which refers to the way speakers or hearers evaluate the topic of conversation, is an embodied activity. Drawing on theories of discourse analysis, this study examines natural data collected in Morocco and argues that storytelling is a social and interactive practice. A shopkeeper recounts an unusual dining event, which started with commensality and ended with a physical dispute. The storyteller tells his story, enacts its events, and displays stance through intricate forms of embodiment, including contrasts and different ways of producing and copying gestures. Analysis shows that telling a story, beyond a matter of verbal narrative, is performed through embodied enactments to allow for achieving co-participation and alignment. The data also reveal a unique way of intensifying storytelling through both verbal and embodied repetition of selected story events.