Identifying individual and collective acts of remembering in task-related communication

Most previous research on communicative remembering has focused on memory t asks in which participants collaborate in constructing a joint version of s ome past event. In contrast, research on spontaneous acts of remembering in the context of other activities not focused on creating versions of the pa st has been neglected. A theory-based system conceptualizing communicative remembering as a form of collaborative action is presented for identifying individual and collective acts of remembering. Individual acts of rememberi ng are called memory utterances. A distinction is made between explicit and implicit memory utterances. Explicit memory utterances are references to p ast events. Implicit memory utterances are utterances in which the past is used without being the object of reference. Collective acts of remembering (collective memory processes) encompass memory utterances and other pragmat ically related utterances (eliciting questions, comments, acknowledgments, etc.). Excerpts from a corpus of task-related communication are presented t o illustrate these phenomena. Issues pertaining to coding are discussed in detail, and descriptive data illustrating the instrumental nature of acts o f remembering in this corpus are presented.