40 Continued reference in “Chameleon”
Pre-NO Pre-NI
S V
OC Post-NI Post-NO
40a Mutuuju neefugunyira
NAR Hare
he ran fast 40b
--- neefugunyira
NAR he ran fast
40c ---
neefugunyira NAR
he ran fast Hare ran, ran, ran fast.
See sections 6.3 and 6.4 for more discussion of continued topics and switch topics. See also section 9.3 for discussion of over-specification of participants, which can be used for emphasis.
4.5 Pronouns
Independent pronouns are not very common in Jita narratives, but they do occur more often in direct speech. The 1S pronoun anye ‘I’ and the 2S pronoun awe ‘you’ both occur a number of times in speech in
“Chicken” 23b, 31e and 35b, “Chameleon” 6b, 8, 17, 32a, 49 and 71b, “Cows” 18h and “Mariro” 10b. When awe ‘you’ occurs, it is always a vocative. And in all cases but one Chameleon 71b, anye is
the subject. Note that there is one other use of anye in Canoe 1: The narrator of “Canoe” begins by introducing himself, so the entire narrative starts off with ‘I, my name, I am called…’
Outside of speech, demonstratives and emphatic copular pronouns e.g. niwe ‘is heshe’ are much more common than any other pronominal forms. There are also no clear examples of assistive pronouns
e.g. ‘and he’ in the corpus, other than three instances of being used in an accompaniment sense following the verb, such as nage ‘with her’ Canoe 55a and najo ‘with it’ Cows 4b and 5a.Instead of
using an assistive pronoun as a subject or connective, Jita uses the additive connective wone ‘also’ on occasions in which other languages might use an assistive pronoun see section 3.3.1 for examples.
There are also a handful of examples of emphatic pronouns scattered through the corpus. The 3S pronoun omwene ‘himself’ is most common Chicken 34a; Girl 15a and 42a; Well 8 and 36a, but
pronouns from other noun classes occur as well, for example, eryene class 5; Girl 39a, eyene class 9; Mariro 8b and akeene class 12; Mariro 19c. Each occurrence of these pronouns is in the subject
position, and in nearly every case, it would be clear who the subject is without the use of these pronouns. Therefore it appears that they are used primarily for emphasis and to show contrast.
5. Tense and aspect in foreground and background
In a narrative, events are organized chronologically. Consequently, foreground material consists of events that take place in chronological sequence. This sequence of events is called the event line also known as
the theme line or main line. Typically, most of the events on the event line will be actions performed intentionally by the participants in the story. Non-event material and events presented out of sequence
are classified as background material in narrative. Foreground and background are often distinguished through the use of tense and aspect.
5.1 Tense and aspect markers in Jita
Narratives primarily relate events which happened in the past. There are three past tenses in Jita. The hodiernal recent past P1 is used for events that happened on the same day. Hesternal yesterday past
P2 is used to describe events that happened the previous day. Distant past P3 is used for events that happened any time before yesterday, including long ago. Note that P2 does not occur at all in the text
corpus. Negative forms will not be considered for analysis here.
