Essentialization strategies in the storytellings of young Luso-descendant women in France: Narrative calibration, voicing, and scale

This article examines how young Franco-Portuguese storytelling participants use a particular set of strategies of narrative calibration and voicing to make essentializing claims in narrative discourse. Specifically, I analyze how storytelling participants shift between specific and generic deictics of verb tense and pronouns in ways that "jump scale" between reportively narrating single events and nomically asserting general "timeless" types and principles. Participants exploit such shifts between specific and generic forms in ways that also transform and enhance the voicing and uptake of the generalizing claims made. Through use of such strategies, participants implicitly invoke generational, historical, and national time scales. I argue for an approach to scale that integrates earlier discussions of event, context(ualization) and interdiscursivity.