| Summary: | This paper presents a qualitative analysis of narrative sequences extracted from a sample of semistructured
interviews to a group of former Second World War partisans living in the Camonica valley (in the province
of Brescia), for a total of roughly 15 hours of recordings. The analysis combines the interpretative frameworks of
conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics with the study of reported speech and of the strategies
of voice representation in dialogic and narrative texts. Special attention is devoted to the use of code-switching
as a ‘contextualisation cue’ (Gumperz 1982) in order to mark portions of reported speech and set them off from
the surrounding talk or from the main flow of a narrative episode, even in the absence of explicit recourse to
verba dicendi or other quotation devices. Our findings show that code-switching may serve as a quotative marker,
whereby speakers index the beginning of the reported utterances and shape the characters alternating in a dialogic
sequence by drawing on the various linguistic resources at their disposal.
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