51 Tunduma 5a–b
Pre-NO Pre-NI
S V
OC Post-NI
Post-NO
5a ---
Twámanyile P2
k ʉtɨ
[5b] we.knew
that 5b
[ ɨdala ɨlya kʉbhala ku Zaile lishilile
ANT ku Tunduma]
road of to.go to Zaire it.passed at Tunduma
We knew that the road to Zaire passed through Tunduma. As expected, the far past perfective is used with the stative verb in 5a to express a state which existed
before this point in the main event line. In 5b, however, a present anterior is used, although the situation described by this verb also has a far past time reference. It is common in Malila for a dependent clause to
contain a present tense form, but take its time reference instead from the clause on which it is dependent see also Journey 1a–c, for example, and the discussion on temporal relative clauses in section 3.1.
Further similar examples of backgrounded sections which occur non-initially in a narrative are found in Wedding 6a–b and 8a–b.
5.4 Movement of participants
It is common in the texts for the verb ‘go’ to be used both by itself and in conjunction with other verbs to show a move away from the deictic centre. The deictic centre is the major participant currently being
tracked, as in this example.
52 Bull 2c–d
Pre-NO Pre-NI S
V OC
Post-NI Post-NO
2c umuntu
ʉyo D:Ref
aabhala k ʉbhʉʉzya
PFV abhant
ʉ abhamwabho person that
he.went to.tell people fellow
2d ---
at ɨ
PFV [2e–2f]
he.said …that person went to tell his fellow people, he said…
Here the subject of 2c is the deictic centre and as this participant moves to another location, the verb ‘go’ is used. In contrast, in the next example, the participant who is the deictic centre is the object of the verb
in 12b and therefore the verb ‘come’ is used for the participant who moves towards the centre.
53 Basket 12a–b
Pre-NO Pre-NI S
V OC
Post-NI Post-NO
12a Umuntu
ʉyo D:Ref
ayinzile ANT
person that he.has.come
12b ---
amposhela] PFV
he.received.me That person came and received me.
Note here also that two inflected verbs are used, rather than one plus an infinitive. The latter option ayinzile k
ʉmposhela is possible, but would mean that the person came with the intention of receiving, as in ‘He came in order to receive me’.
6 Information structure
Information structure deals with the relationship between linguistic form and the nature of the
information it presents. Sentence structure reflects a speaker’s or writer’s assumptions about what the hearer or reader already knows. For example, the writer of a narrative may use a certain constituent
order when the information expressed by the object is what the sentence is about the topic, compared to when the object does not fulfill this particular role in the information structure. What is said about the
topic is termed the comment. A sentence in which there is a topic and a comment about that topic is said to have topic-comment articulation. If the topic of a sentence is the same as that of the previous sentence,
it is called a continued topic. If it is different, it is called a switch topic.
Another important information structure category is that of focus. For example, a writer may mark a constituent with a special particle when it fills an information gap in a reader’s mental representation of
a text. Such a constituent is called the focus of the sentence. If a whole sentence is given without any link to the established context, that sentence has sentence focus. If the subject of a sentence is already
established in the discourse context and the predicate fills an information gap about that subject in the reader’s mental representation, that sentence is said to have predicate focus. If, rather than the sentence
as a whole or the predicate, an argument of the verb is the focus, that sentence is an example of argument focus. A sentence with a focused argument is said to have identificational articulation, as it identifies
which argument should fill the gap in the reader’s mental representation of the text.
In Malila, the information structure categories outlined above are chiefly expressed through constituent order and syntactic structure.
6.1 Presentational articulation sentence focus
