Pragmatic roles in central Somali narrative discourse

This paper compares the marking of pragmatic roles in Central Somali oral narrative discourse and elicited question-answer pairs to illustrate the claim that information structure must be studied within the context of particular discourse genres. The study of pragmatic roles in Central Somali is esp...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal:	Douglas Biber
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN FR
Publicado:	LibraryPress@UF 1984
Materias:	Somali questions information structure discourse focus Philology. Linguistics P1-1091
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/da93c07c706f45fa9bb899d90d275c60
Etiquetas:	Agregar Etiqueta Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!

id	oai:doaj.org-article:da93c07c706f45fa9bb899d90d275c60
record_format	dspace
spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:da93c07c706f45fa9bb899d90d275c602021-11-19T03:55:36ZPragmatic roles in central Somali narrative discourse10.32473/sal.v15i1.1075170039-35332154-428Xhttps://doaj.org/article/da93c07c706f45fa9bb899d90d275c601984-04-01T00:00:00Zhttps://journals.flvc.org/sal/article/view/107517https://doaj.org/toc/0039-3533https://doaj.org/toc/2154-428XThis paper compares the marking of pragmatic roles in Central Somali oral narrative discourse and elicited question-answer pairs to illustrate the claim that information structure must be studied within the context of particular discourse genres. The study of pragmatic roles in Central Somali is especially interesting because clause-level focus is explicitly marked through the particle yaa. The functions of this particle in elicitation question-answer pairs and narrative discourse are compared, and it is shown that elicitation data exhibit only a few of the possible functions of yaa, viz. as a marker of assertive and contrastive focus. In contrast, narrative discourse provides examples of yaa as a marker of both event-clause focus and discourse topic. This result is discussed within the context of discourse coherence and is shown to be not as surprising as it first appears. In addition, narrative focus constructions (defined as the most salient section of new information in a narrative text) are shown to be formally well-defined and functionally important in giving coherence to a narrative, although no counterpart has been found in elicitation data. In conclusion, it is noted that pragmatic roles should be studied in a broad range of discourse genres in addition to elicited question-answer data, since each genre may illustrate different functions of the same constructions.Douglas BiberLibraryPress@UFarticleSomaliquestionsinformation structurediscoursefocusPhilology. LinguisticsP1-1091ENFRStudies in African Linguistics, Vol 15, Iss 1 (1984)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN FR
topic	Somali questions information structure discourse focus Philology. Linguistics P1-1091
spellingShingle	Somali questions information structure discourse focus Philology. Linguistics P1-1091 Douglas Biber Pragmatic roles in central Somali narrative discourse
description	This paper compares the marking of pragmatic roles in Central Somali oral narrative discourse and elicited question-answer pairs to illustrate the claim that information structure must be studied within the context of particular discourse genres. The study of pragmatic roles in Central Somali is especially interesting because clause-level focus is explicitly marked through the particle yaa. The functions of this particle in elicitation question-answer pairs and narrative discourse are compared, and it is shown that elicitation data exhibit only a few of the possible functions of yaa, viz. as a marker of assertive and contrastive focus. In contrast, narrative discourse provides examples of yaa as a marker of both event-clause focus and discourse topic. This result is discussed within the context of discourse coherence and is shown to be not as surprising as it first appears. In addition, narrative focus constructions (defined as the most salient section of new information in a narrative text) are shown to be formally well-defined and functionally important in giving coherence to a narrative, although no counterpart has been found in elicitation data. In conclusion, it is noted that pragmatic roles should be studied in a broad range of discourse genres in addition to elicited question-answer data, since each genre may illustrate different functions of the same constructions.
format	article
author	Douglas Biber
author_facet	Douglas Biber
author_sort	Douglas Biber
title	Pragmatic roles in central Somali narrative discourse
title_short	Pragmatic roles in central Somali narrative discourse
title_full	Pragmatic roles in central Somali narrative discourse
title_fullStr	Pragmatic roles in central Somali narrative discourse
title_full_unstemmed	Pragmatic roles in central Somali narrative discourse
title_sort	pragmatic roles in central somali narrative discourse
publisher	LibraryPress@UF
publishDate	1984
url	https://doaj.org/article/da93c07c706f45fa9bb899d90d275c60
work_keys_str_mv	AT douglasbiber pragmaticrolesincentralsomalinarrativediscourse
_version_	1718420579266068480

Pragmatic roles in central Somali narrative discourse

Ejemplares similares