Fundamental concepts in information structure

The text corpus provides examples of all three tenses being used in a variety of episodes in various combinations. However, if one of these tenses occurs outside of the orientation episode, it will normally occur in a relative clause.

5.4 Movement expressions

In Suba-Simbiti narratives the deictic center, or the notional location of the narrator which is usually the location of a major participant, is often made clear through the use of class 16 demonstratives. The story “Inheritance” is a good example. The major participants in the story include a father and his two sons. One son has traveled to Europe, and the other son has remained close to home. The deictic center of the story is the fathers home, which is evidenced in the following line: 46 Inheritance 3 Bhoono abhandë bha-ka-tighar-a yeeka hano now 2.other 3 PL - NARR -remain- FV home 16. DEM _ PROX ‘Now, the others remained here at home.’ Here, the class 16 proximal demonstrative hano shows that the deictic center of the narrative is the father’s house. Additionally, verbs of motion can also be used to convey the deictic center in a narrative. Consider the following example from “Inheritance:” 47 Inheritance 16a–b Hano uwa Bhoraaya oora ya-a-ghy-a uku-ush-a a-ka-haan-w-a 16. DEM _ PROX 1. ASS Europe 3 S . DEM _ DIST 3 SG - PST -go- FV INF -come- FV 3 SG - NARR -give- PASS - FV eketabho... 7.book ‘When the one in Europe came, he was given a book....’ The verb ukuusha ‘come’ conveys the fact that the deictic center of the narrative is the father’s house. 6 Information structure Information structure concerns the ways in which narrators help hearers and readers to identify new information in a sentence and to combine it with information that they already have in order to arrive at a coherent interpretation. Information structure in Suba-Simbiti is primarily concerned with the relative order of subject, verb, object and oblique constituents in a sentence.

6.1 Fundamental concepts in information structure

A sentence typically provides information about a specific entity; that entity is called the topic. Usually a topic is something that has been mentioned explicitly in a previous clause, but this is not always the case. In any communication event there is always a speaker and an addressee, and so they are both available as potential topics, even if they haven’t been explicitly mentioned already. A topic can also be a member of a group that has been previously mentioned, or something that is automatically associated with something or someone that has been mentioned already. Such things are part of the reader’s mental representation; or, as Dooley and Levinsohn 2001 state, the reader’s prior knowledge of the way things happen in the real world and his or her expectations of what the speaker means to say, both of which are based on the reader’s personal cultural experience. In a narrative the topic of one sentence may continue to be the topic of the following sentence, in which case it is called a continued topic. Alternatively, the topic may change, in which case it is called a switch topic. It is important to know whether a topic is a continued topic or a switch topic, as this can affect where it occurs in the sentence and the way it is referred to. Typically, a continued topic is expressed by an incorporated subject pronoun only, whereas a switch topic is expressed using a noun andor demonstrative before the verb. The information-bearing part of the sentence that is, the new information about the topic is called the focus. The focus may be expressed by a noun phrase termed argument focus. When the focus is expressed by a verb and optionally its complements, or by a copular construction, it is termed predicate focus. In some cases, such as in the orientation section of a narrative, there is no topic and so a whole sentence may contain only new information—this is termed sentence focus. Topic and focus can be represented in various ways within a sentence, following certain templates or generalized constructions known as sentence articulations. There are three primary sentence articulations: presentational, topic-comment and identificational. Presentational articulation uses sentence focus to introduce a new participant into a narrative without reference to any existing topic or