Sharing memories, family conversation and interaction

Abstract

Shared memories play a central role in everyday communications. They are usually based on interpersonal and cultural knowledge of a shared past among group members (e.g. family, friends, partners, etc.). These memories are verbally conveyed in everyday conversations in real-world settings. Shared memories are also utilized to create a feeling of connection and maintain a consistent feeling of identity among group members. In family conversations, shared memories function to structure and synchronize the shareable life story of the family as a group. Family members are strategically engaged in processes of remembering and forgetting, which are modelled according to the specific goals of a particular interaction. In these cases, family members construct a sociocognitive system shaped by the physical and social environment in which they are located. This system operates by connecting autobiographical knowledge, which is distributed among family members, but forms part of shared past experiences. By interrelating distributed episodic memories, this sociocognitive system endows family members with the ability to manage distributed autobiographical knowledge. In order to perform this cognitive task, they make use of a wide set of discursive epistemic strategies such as presuppositions and implicatures, justifications, rejections and reminders of shared knowledge of the past. The aim of this article is to show the ways in which a shared past is managed, communicated and negotiated in an everyday family conversation by means of discursive epistemic strategies. The conversation was about five historical dates linked to Argentinean political history.

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