Storyline Concerns and Word Order Typology in East and West Africa

Storyline Concerns and Word Order Typology 6. Amharic(Ethio-Semitic) 56 6.1.The storyline scheme (upper bands) 56 6.2.Rank-shifting of gerunds 59 6.3.The storyline scheme (lower bands) 60 6.4.Peak-marking features 62 7. Silti (Ethio-Semitic) 622. SOME LANGUAGES OF SUDAN 641. Toposa (Eastern Nilotic) 65 2. Sabaot (Southern Nilotic) 66 2.1.The storyline scheme 67 2.2.The secondary storyline 69 2.3.Background activities/states 71 2.4.Flashback 72 2.5.Setting and author comment 74 2.6.Peak-marking features 74 3. Murle (East Sudanic) 753.1.The storyline scheme 75 3.2.An extended example 77 3.3.Perfectives as peak 78 4. Luwo (Northern Nilotic) 79 4.1.U-verbs versus a-verbs 79 4.2.Uverbs versus maa verbs 4.3.Akc: verbs 4.4.The resultant storyline scheme 4.5.U-verbs as a consecutive tense 4.6.The storyline scheme and constituency structure 5. Anywak (Northern Nilotic) 5.1.Indefinite and definite verbs 5.2.Consecutive clauses (compared with medial clauses in SOY languages) 5.3.Storyline scheme elements 5.3.1.Secondary storyline 5.3.2.Promoted indefinite forms 5.3.3.Lower storyline scheme elements 6. Avokaya (East Sudanic) 6.1.Avokaya as a weak SOY structure 6.2.The storyline scheme and its parameters 6.3.The status of speech verbs 6.4.Primary and secondary storylines 6.5.The cohesive band 7. Jur-Modo (East Sudanic) 7.1.Problems in rank-scheme analysis 'be' verbs and other statives as used in equative, existential, and descriptive clauses.Supportive material can involve dynamic verbs employed by way of illustration and anecdote.An awareness of this broad typology is essential for text analysis.The clause types and verb types that occur in one sort of discourse versus another differ radically not in regard to statistical count only, but structurally in regard to distribution in mainline versus supportive materials.In fact, the verb system (tense, aspect, and mood) of a language can be profitably viewed as a set of subsystems appropriate to each discourse type which is, in turn, characterized by the cluster of verb forms which it exploits.Noun phrases and kindred elements (pronouns, pronominal affixes, and zero anaphora) also are used differently according to the major discourse types in which they are found.Thus, sentence and paragraph structures can differ so markedly in, for example, narrative and procedural discourse versus hortatory and expository, as to give the impression of two sets of grammar at work in the same language, e.g. in certain languages of Papua New Guinea and of northern South America. Story line AnalysisThe importance of storyline analysis is twofold, (a) both in respect to the distinguishing of the storyline itself and (b) in respect to distinguishing other strands of narrative development which encode various degrees of departure from the storyline. Diagram II. Etic bands of salience in narrative Word Order TypologiesIn assuming these word order typologies I am speaking here of surface structures and of contemporary languages.It may, indeed, be strongly challenged as to whether deep structure order as opposed to surface structure order is a tenable distinctive.Wallace Chafe's arguments that linearization belongs to the surface carry with me considerable weight.I therefore dismiss such concerns as whether Amharic (surface structure SOY) is basically VSO or not [Bach 1970] and side with Hudson [ 1972 [ that this is not really a question rightly put.I also dismiss Creidler Storyline Concerns and Word Order Typology Miscellaneous ConcernsIn the following chapters I consider, in order, the SOY languages of Ethiopia (Chapter 1), then certain Sudanic languages, especially Nilotic (Chapter 2).In the course of the latter chapter, the concept of the "consecutive tense" is introduced and illustrated, and the mirror image parallelism of right-chaining SOY languages to left-chaining YSO and SYO languages is established.In Chapter 3 there is further attention to other (non-Sudanic) languages with a consecutive tense, and in Chapter 4, to languages without such a consecutive tense, thus concluding our three-way exemplification of storyline consideration in right-chaining, left-chaining, and coranking languages.Before closing this introduction, I want to acknowledge the cooperation of the following organizations in facilitating this research project: The Bible Society of Ethiopia, The Sudan Interior Mission, The Mekane Yesus Evangelical Church of Ethiopia, The Summer Institute of Linguistics, and the Nigerian Bible Translation Trust.These organizations provided facilities for text analysis workshops in various African countries and provided individual linguist-translators who cooperated in the project.My thanks to all the latter for their patience with me in my efforts to wrestle with problems of text analysis in languages with which I had had no previous experience.The good things which turned up are largely their discoveries, and whatever errors and misconceptions are found here are mine.I acknowledge individual contributions in various places in this volume, which could almost be considered to be multiply authored.For concerns clustering around the privileges and rights of my colleagues, both African and expatriates, I do not accompany this volume with a volume of texts.I, furthermore, look forward to the time when many of my colleagues who have collected research data on languages cited in this volume will publish research results in their own right.Not only do the data underlying this volume deserve longer and more explicit treatment, but there is also a considerable amount of preliminary writeup on participant reference in narrative discourse and on hortatory discourse which needs to see the light of publication.