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7.2 Non-default codings
Many of the non-default codings can be explained by the VIP strategy of participant reference which is explained below. Other instances of under-coding in a
referring expression are described in section 7.2.4.
7.2.1 Very Important Participant VIP strategy
Within a given text there is often a hierarchy of participants. At the top of this hierarchy is a participant that is considered the VIP. A narrative may contain both a
global VIP for the entire text and local VIPs for shorter portions of the text as evidenced by referring expressions that are coded lighter than the surrounding participants.
7.2.2 Global VIPs
One participant from each of the narratives is considered a global VIP. For the Cow
story, the global VIP is the cow owner; for the Fish story, it is Jii-Mlii; and for the Life
story, it is the narrator, Mlong Chon. One criterion for choosing a VIP is how under- coded the participant is. The more central the participant, the less explicit the references
to himher. While a zero is the least coded referring expression, restrictions of topicality and a topic chain allow the listener to identify the referent without much ambiguity.
However, the third person singular pronoun is quite ambiguous—used for male or female, human, animate, or inanimate. For all three narratives studied, pronouns are
principally used for the VIP. In the Cow story, 80 1215 of all pronoun references
33
33
For the VIP counts, I did not include pronouns with relative clauses because this type of referring expression is explicit.
117
refer to the cow owner. Jii-Mlii, the VIP in the Fish story, accounts for 58 2136 of all pronoun references and Mlong Chon, the narrator of the Life story, makes up 83 56
of the pronominal references. While a pronoun is used at minor breaks to maintain topic continuity within a paragraph, a pronoun may also be used when there is a change of
subject, referring to a participant that is not active. In these environments, the listener must infer that the referent is either a local or global VIP.
Example 129 illustrates the global VIP from the Cow story, the cow owner, whose referring expression is under-coded with an ambiguous pronoun + numeral phrase.
In the previous clauses, the bull is the active participant. 129
+ +
+ +
K +
3S one CLF invite
eat together
‘He, the one man the cow owner, invited the bull owner to eat together.’ [Cow 13]
The Fish story restages Jii-Mlii, the global VIP, early in the story. In the clauses preceding example 130, the others who also went fishing are active. In example 130,
Jii-Mlii is referred to with a pronoun + thematic salience marker. The thematic salience marker marks the event as central to the storyline. While this reference is ambiguous,
recognizing that Jii-Mlii is the global VIP allows one to correctly identify the referent. 130
+ 3S
TSM fish have stone ‘She Jii-Mlii fished and got stones.’ [Fish 18]
The narrator of the Life story refers to himself with the first person pronoun. This accounts for the strong correlation of pronoun usage and the global VIP, Mlong Chon.
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Due to the inherent nature of first person narratives, the data for a global VIP is not as revealing for this type of narrative as it is for third person narratives.
7.2.3 Local VIPs
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