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Bahnaric North Bahnaric
West Bahnaric Central Bahnaric
North Central West Central
East Central South Central
Tampuon Bahnar
South Bahnaric: Chrau, Koho, Ma’, Stieng, Mnong
Figure 1: South Bahnaric family tree Sidwell Jacq 2003:4
There are three dialect groups of Bunong: Central, Southern, and Eastern Gordon 2005:525. The data analyzed in this paper belongs to the Central dialect group. The
Central dialect group can be further divided into the Bunor and Bu Preh dialects, which are the two primary dialects in Cambodia. The Bunor cover the central and northern
sections of Mondulkiri Province, while the Bu Preh are located to the east and across the border in Vietnam. There are some lexical differences between the two, but local
speakers state that they are mutually intelligible. This study represents the Central dialect as spoken in Cambodia.
1.2 Rationale for this study
Several linguists have documented various aspects of Bunong grammar, most notably Phillips 1973a, 1973b and Vogel 2000, 2001, 2006. Their research has
focused on the sentence level; therefore, much research is still needed at the discourse level. One particular area where a discourse perspective is necessary is in the study of
participant reference. Zero anaphora is a common device used for participant reference, especially in a
topic chain. Other referring expressions include pronouns, kinship noun phrases, and
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other noun phrases. A narrative may predominantly use one type of referring expression, such as kinship terms, while others use proper names. Are there criteria for choosing one
type over another? Given the various permutations and types of referring expressions available to the narrator, this study will shed light on what rules govern participant
reference in Bunong narratives. Some specific questions to be addressed are:
1 What methods are used to track participants within a narrative discourse?
2 What informs the narrator in his choice of encoding devices e.g. interference
of other participants, hierarchical organization of the text, ranking of participants?
3 What role does deixis play on the referring expressions in instances where it is
not giving information regarding spatial location, person, or time? 4
What role does information structure have on how participants are introduced or tracked through a narrative?
Understanding and being able to predict which referring expression best fits in a given environment has tremendous potential for translating texts into the Bunong
language. Knowing how and when to use a particular form leads to increased clarity and naturalness of the translated text. Furthermore, this study adds to the body of knowledge
regarding participant reference.
1.3 Theoretical framework
This study takes a discourse approach to understand the participant reference system in Bunong narratives. Understanding the environment in which a referring
expression is placed—at a boundary, within a topic chain, or in a confrontational
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situation—helps inform the type of referring expression used. When deictic terms relate to people, location, or time in the classic sense of the term e.g. you, here, now, they
usually can be understood at the sentence level. However, deictics often have metaphorical and textual functions Herring 1994 which only a discourse approach can
begin to explain. One way to frame this study of participant reference is by comparing it to the
metaphor of dimensions. The first dimension represents the various lexical items used in participant reference; the second dimension is the linear sentence progression; the third
dimension, the hierarchical paragraph and discourse structure; and finally, the fourth dimension represents the speaker’s and hearer’s perspectives from a cognitive
approach—what the speaker chooses to give more importance to which is marked grammatically and the speaker’s understanding of what the hearer understands. All of
these factors stay within the bounds of the speaker’s culture and the grammar of his language.
Because of the way language is crafted, the speaker is constrained by a linear progression of sentences. Givón’s work on topic continuity 1983 provides a good
strategy for looking at participant reference from a clause-to-clause perspective. And yet, clauses form sentences which are combined into paragraphs and episodes. These
paragraphs contain information that builds in a narrative, creating a hierarchical, third- dimension in a discourse. Hinds and Hinds 1979, as well as Fox 1987a, 1987b,
provide evidence and support for the episodeparagraph structure informing how a
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referent is coded. Finally, the cognitive science approach represents the ‘fourth dimension’ of factors that inform referring expression choice. Chafe 1976, Prince
1981, van Dijk and Kintsch 1983, Gundel et al. 1993, and Lambrecht 1994 were interested in what was in the minds of the speaker and hearer at the time of utterance and
how the speaker signals certain information to the hearer with language specific grammatical features. Van Dijk and Kintsch 1983:72 give four assumptions regarding
the processing features of utterances: 1 language users have a limited memory, 2 they cannot process many different kinds of information at the same time, 3 production and
understanding of utterances is linear, and 4 other factors beyond linguistic information are required for understanding, e.g. context, knowledge of the world, etc.
While many methods exist on how to track participant reference, no one approach will uncover all of the strategies a speaker has at his disposal when choosing a referent
form. Therefore, a multi-strategy approach is used to discover the nuances of participant reference for the language studied. The methodologies given by Dooley and Levinsohn
2001, Longacre 1995, Lambrecht 1994, and Gundel et al. 1993, all contribute to the tools used for analysis in this study.
1.4 Limitations
