Event coherence Dividing the Text

Table 4.4. Olo discourse linkers sequencers le sequence so close link sequence lo loose sequence wo ordered sequence leye lo major sequence eventresult yo non causal result leso casual effect eite reason result eis “so that”

4.3.5 Event coherence

The third commonly cited thread of an episode is event coherence. Event coherence is associated with episode structure because some types of events go together. ‘Chopping, carrying, and stacking, firewood’ go together as a group of activities, just as ‘ordering a meal, eating it, and paying for it’ do. The events cohere as components of an overall scenario. Events can also cohere by having partial over- lap of activity or being logically related. Events that are somehow related should be easier to process and make less demands on the comprehender, which could allow more resources to be allocated to tracking participants. Also events that go together in some fashion can be expected to have the same participants, whereas radically different events do not assume the continuation of character continu- ity. This makes breaks in event coherence a likely point for reidentification of participants. Event coherence is important as a possible point that would cause the reidentification of referents. However, determining event coherence is problematical. It is very difficult to divide the story in a noncircular way. Impressionistic marking of event coherence is not without risk, as the referential forms can influence the choice of degree of cohesion, which could create a degree of circularity in the analysis. In this work, the problem is dealt with by having a rigorous operational definition that recog- nizes the scalar nature of event coherence. As long as this is applied in the fashion intended, it should not be an impediment to a proper analysis. The second problem is one of deciding the level of diver- gence of two events and why. The theoretical approach I have taken involves the amount of semantic similarity and logical relatedness. Events that are completely identical have a complete coherence. At the other end of the spectrum are events that have nothing in common. The middle is more difficult to define. Given that identical events are maximally coherent, events that are not identical, but either in a generic-specific or set-subset relationship are the next level in coherence. If two events can be divided into some set of components a, b, c, d, e and a, b, c, d so that the only difference is the presence or absence of component e, it is obvious that the only difference between these two different events and two identical events is the presence of a single component. The third step is one of logical sequence or natural consequence. In this case, the second event is highly predictable from the preceding event. It can be predictable on the basis of text frequency, because of application of natural laws or logical en- tailment. So when a participant puts something, it has to be put somewhere. While in Olo it is not an absolute requirement that a placed object be specified in its spatial relation to the world, it is commonly done; so the resultant predictability is based not only on frequency, but also on logical entailment. Operationally I am assigning scalar values to the amount of divergence one event has from the fol- lowing event. An “event” is considered a single verb for Olo. A numerical value is assigned to the sec- ond clause in the sequence as an indication of how different it is from the preceding clause. Based on the preceding discussion, two clauses with identical verbs are considered a unity sequence and as- signed a value of 1. Examples of this are au au ‘come come’, elele elele ‘fell fell a tree’, or esi esi ‘hold hold’. Also considered a unity sequence is the use of e ‘go’ to indicate continued action. An example of this is given in 142, from the text Amerika. 4.3 Dividing the Text 67 142 p-osi nemple p-e p-e p-e p-e wo 3p-smite other.3p 3p-go 3p-go 3p-go 3p-go TS they smote and smote each other until… The second clause in an event sequence that is a case of generic specific action is assigned a value of 2, for instance unwei e ‘go up go’. Also assigned a 2 are second clauses in a sequence where both clauses use one of the different terms for cookingfood preparation, e.g., apli ‘cook’, eptawi ‘roast’, weisi ‘turn’ as in 143. 143 leyelo mulpou l-epe nimou-re pel-pe pe p-apli oweli, CB night m-this woman- PL p-3p they 3p-cook.3p food And then, this night, their women, they cooked food, p-aptei weli re p-apli lufe 3p-put sago.jellies and 3p-cook.3p sago.in.bamboos they put sago jellies and cooked sago in bamboos. The second clause in an event sequence which is considered “highly related” is assigned a value of 3. These would involve all the “put” verbs and their existential counterparts, as well as sequences of “mo- tion-arrival” and “arrival-existential” sequences. 144 ki k-au fale uf I 1s-come arrive village I came and arrived in the village. It would also include schema sequences of things like ‘get carry come’. These are often realized in another language as a single verb i.e., bring in English. 145 ku kapi m-afo m-apli m-aplei we get.3p 1p-put.3p 1p-cook.3p 1p-eat.3p We got them, put them into a bamboo, cooked them and ate them. In 145 all but the first in the sequence would be assigned a value of 3. The sequence of the first verb and the second would be assigned a 4. It is a logically related event sequence, but does not seem to be as “highly related” as the rest of the sequences. Finally, a 5 is assigned to anything not assigned another value.

4.4 Referential Forms