Abstract
This work shows that morphosyntactic variation in the form of tense-mood-aspect (TMA) and referring expressions in Yapese narrative act in concert to give rise to an enhancement in the imagined storyworld at high points of narrative action.
Drawing on accessibility theory, typological work in the textlinguistic tradition, and a perceptually grounded version of the situation model framework, the dissertation argues that representations of the most highly salient entities and clauses in narrative tend to exploit semantic resources which work to create a rich simulacra of perceptual experience.
The work takes the form of a case study, examining
a corpus
of narrative and non-narrative text in Yapese, a language of
Micronesia. It is
found that a foregrounding distinction conditions the split between
independent
pronoun TMA markers and clitic pronoun TMA markers. Highly foregrounded
clauses
in Yapese narrative may be zero-marked, they may take the inceptive nga, or they may be in the perfect
non-present ka qu. Nga invokes a
semantics of
goal-satisfaction or effect, event types which have been shown to
enhance the
processing of connected clauses in laboratory studies. Ka
qu is an instance of frame-breaking pragmatic reversal.
Front
Matter (Title page, Acknowledgements, Abstract, Lists of Tables
& Figures, Table of Contents, Key to abbreviations)
1.
Introduction
2.
Yapese: A Brief Sketch
3.
Events in Narrative: Textlinguistic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives
4.
Foregrounding and Backgrounding in Yapese Narrative
5.
Objects in Text and Representation
6.
Referring Expressions and the Situation Model in Yapese
7.
Spatial Deixis in Yapese
8.
Referring Expressions and Narrative Foregrounding
9.
Conclusion: The Texture of Text
Appendix: Pronouns and Agreement
Markers
Notes
References