conference presentation, academic discourse, narrative structures, genre analysis, interpersonal function, spoken academic genres, personal pronouns

This paper investigates conference presentations with respect to narrative structures employed in this academic genre. The main hypothesis is that the genre employs a variety of linguistic structures and that these linguistic structures, respectively, are potentially dictated by the genre to which a particular text belongs. The study is rooted in Halliday?s systemic-functional framework (Halliday 1994), dealing with the concept of language metafunctions, and the genre-based approach to discourse analysis (Bhatia 1993, 2004). It elaborates on narrative theory by Labov (1972) and Toolan (1988, 2009), as developed to explore various ways in which basic narrative structures are studied in connection with their functions. The corpus consists of 41 conference presentations by native English and non-native Czech-English speakers in applied linguistics. The result of the study is that the narratives in the genre function as an argumentation-seeking strategy with strong interpersonal features.