Structure of a Story-Telling Performance Among Carpatho-Rusyns in Zakarpats'ka Oblast' of Ukraine: A Case Study

Abstract

This article analyses the transcript of the story-telling session with two participants, an 89-year-old woman and a 54-year-old man, that I audio-recorded in August of 2014 in the village of Novoselytsia in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine. Although Western  krainian and Rusyn folk stories have been extensively collected since 1880-s (Hnatiuk 1897, 1898, 1900, Rozdol's'kyi 1899, 1900, etc.), entire story-telling sessions in these region have not been studied. My transcript reflects certain features of story-telling performance's macro- and micro-structure that either do not get recorded or get edited out in publications of folk texts, such as interaction between participants, discourse markers for organizing performance, repetitions, and digressions into everyday reality. After analyzing these features using Hymes' approach to linguistic and discourse markers in folk performance, I foreground the precise mechanism through which the collective creation of folklore [Jakobson and Bogatyrev 1980 [1929]] takes place.