This book is about the co-construction of narrative in conversation. Fittingly, it is itself the result of intense co-construction between the author and numerous people who have contributed substantially and whom I owe gratitude.

The first thank you goes to Hans-Jörg Schmid at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, who provided generous assistance in the early stages when the corpus had to be built and annotated from scratch. As the book progressed he offered invaluable criticism of earlier drafts of individual chapters. His comments and suggestions were most insightful and constructive, motivating me to go to extreme lengths to make this study a worthwhile read. I am also deeply indebted to Rolf Kreyer at Marburg University, who not only read and commented on the manuscript in very great detail, providing most invaluable feedback, but also supervised the final stages of the post-doctoral thesis from which this book arose.

Another great thank you is due to Neal Norrick at Saarbrücken University. His outstandingly diverse and innovative research on conversational narrative has inspired a great many questions I have pursued in the book. He also supported this work immensely by inviting me to his workshop at the Boston ISLE2 conference and by inviting me to give a guest lecture at Saarbrücken University in fall 2011. On both occasions I presented case studies reported on in this book.

Matthew Brook O’Donnell at the University of Michigan provided invaluable help not only with the compilation and annotation of the Narrative Corpus but also with the query languages XPath and XQuery, without which hardly any case study in this book would have been feasible. His willingness to share his outstanding expertise in handling these technologies as well as his friendship are greatly appreciated.

Another friend to whom I am greatly indebted is Andreas Bagoutdinov, who did most of the ground work for the corpus and who often helped me with computer and query issues despite difficult personal circumstances. Franca Kirchberg’s assistance too was essential. She not only helped me get started with R and statistical thinking but also carefully advised me on how to use it with the case studies.

Further, I’ve learnt a lot from Stefan Th. Gries’s books on statistics in corpus linguistics and his R workshop held in Denton/Texas in 2011. Stefan was the first to demonstrate to me in fuller detail the breathtaking possibilities R offers. I am also greatly indebted to him for invaluable comments on an earlier version of the case study on turn order in Section 3.2 and for useful tips given in response to queries posted to the Google Group “Corp Ling with R” (http://groups.google.com/group/corpling-with-r) which he created and maintains. I am likewise grateful for inspirational thoughts on earlier versions of individual case studies contributed by Michael Hoey (Section 4.2) and Rebecca Clift (Section 6.4). Special warm thanks are due to Merja Kytö, general editor of the Studies in English Language series, and Helen Barton, commissioning editor at Cambridge, whose endorsement all the way through from proposal to publication was unfailing. The Cambridge University Press production team too deserve a big thank you. Under the guidance of assistant editor Fleur Jones, production editor Beata Mako and copy editor Cheryl Prophett have greatly helped out the finishing touches to the manuscript. Despite all these significant contributions, the usual disclaimer applies: all remaining errors and weaknesses of this book are entirely my fault.

Finally, I thank my family, my wife Andrea and my sons Ricardo and Lionel, not only for bearing with me during the years I have diverted much of my attention to this book (rather than to them) but also for providing the lively and loving environment without which such an endeavor would hardly be possible. Also, I owe much to my father-in-law Fred and, even more, to my parents, Günther and Jolanthe Rühlemann. It was undoubtedly their stories of experiences of love, hunger, despair, struggle, and hope that taught me the centrality of storytelling to who we believe we are and who we wish to be.