Participant transposition in Senegalese oral narrative

This article examines a Senegalese narrative practice in which speakers make co-present individuals into denoted characters in their stories, a process I refer to as "participant transposition." I analyze participant transposition in illness narratives recorded in Dakar, Senegal, during phases of which I am even recruited to play the part of the narrator's past self. I demonstrate how this narrative practice allows speakers to calibrate the realm of the story (the denotational text) with the storytelling event (the interactional text).