The subject of this study is Modern Greek (MG) personal storytelling, an unexplored yet vital mode of communication in Greeks' everyday socialisation. The investigation aimed to explore its text-constitutive mechanisms and elucidate their context-sensitivity along two axes; culture-dependence and the audience variable as shaped by the distinction storytelling to adults (SA) versus storytelling to children (SC). The data that formed the basis of this research are tape-recorded oral personal MG stories addressed to adults and children, which make up the following two corpora: i. The basic corpus comprising 40 prompted storeis and ii. The free corpus comprising 170 naturally occurring intraconversational stories. These were supplemented by a written corpus of 120 stories and an oral corpus of 80 children's stories. The above data were analysed on the basis of a tri-level functional model of narrative discourse, that of binding, unfolding (Coste 1989, Bamberg & Marchman 1991) and evaluating (Labov 1972). This was critically abstracted from discourse-analytic studies of storytelling as an analytic tool to unlock the stories' local organisation or linear ordering along a horizontal axis (binding), their global organisation or hierarchical ordering along a vertical axis (unfolding) and their expressive or affective component (evaluating). The two specific segmentation methods which were applied to the data for operationalising the binding-unfolding-evaluating scheme were stanza analysis (Gee 1985, 1989a.b) and highpoint analysis (Peterson & McCabe 1983 and Fleischman 1990). The data analysis first of all brought to the fore a pervasive tripartite patterning as a culturally-determined mechanism of binding and unfolding.