Telling stories: language, narrative, and social life

Units of the Driver's License Story 17.1 The Occurrences of the Two Forms, the Da and Desu/Masu Forms 17.2 The Sequential Structure of the "Stalker" Telling Stories is the outcome of the 2008 Georgetown University Round Table in Languages and Linguistics (GURT), titled Telling Stories: Building Bridges among Language, Narrative, Identity, Interaction, Society, and Culture.We could not have put together such a stimulating and high-quality collection of papers without the effort of all those who contributed to the success of the conference.Indeed, GURT 2008 provided narrative analysts from all over the world with an opportunity to present and discuss their work.Thus we are indebted to all those who helped us organize this edition of GURT.In particular, we would like to thank Georgetown's Faculty of Language and Linguistics and the Linguistics Department for their generous support.We also want to acknowledge the work of all the students who volunteered to assist us in the many tasks related to the conference.Of special note is Jermay Jamsu, our webmaster and master of other electronic issues, and Inge Stockburger, whose calm demeanor qualifies her as an event planner if she ever decides to leave linguistics (hopefully she won't)!Special thanks go to Manela Diez, who devoted her efforts to resolve the innumerable small and big problems that come with the organization of an event of this kind.GURT simply could never happen without her.And of course we are grateful to the many student volunteers who managed registration, book displays, technology, copying, displaying posters, and so on.