Temporal locations Dividing the Text

Because this study is text based, the normally used measurements of activation 1 are not possible. From psycholinguistic studies we can estimate the impact on activation of the different referential de- vices and we can quantify other parameters of the text. Measurements are made of referential distance RD and topic persistence TP. The values for RD and TP can be compared to a variety of previous works 2 as part of the crosslinguistic typology, although there have been changes in the exact imple- mentation of the referential distance methodology. In addition, the referential forms are examined in the light of changes in time, space, and event consistency.

4.2 The Textual Data

The texts used in this work are a collection of narratives gathered between 1981 and 1991 from na- tive Olo speakers. All but one of the texts are written narratives. Most are first-person narratives, with a varying level of speaker prominence in the discourse. Some analysts e.g., Payne 1993 eschew first-person narratives and instead examine traditional stories. Traditional stories are problematic in Olo as they are normally “known” narratives and as such there is no guarantee that the speaker does not adjust his style because the listener is expected to know the story. Stories told in the first-person have often been excluded on the assumption that the speaker is involved in the speech act and is al- ways mentally available. This assumption, while not false in itself, implies that the speaker would only ever use a single device in referring to himself, or to the group he is a part of. It is possible to examine only the third-person referents in a text that is a first-person narrative, which is what is done in this study.

4.3 Dividing the Text

The texts are interlinearized and supplied in appendix A. The texts are divided into their clauses. The clauses center around the verb, its core arguments, and any marginal elements like time or place. The serial clause construction is divided into its separate clauses. Clearly subordinate clauses, those with morphosyntactic marking and quotations, are included with the clauses in which they occur. The texts are also divided according to temporal criteria, location, and punctuation. Only two punctuation marks were used in the text: the comma and period. A semantic cohesion index is also calculated for each clause. A short description of the workings of the database is provided in appendix B.

4.3.1 Temporal locations

One of the consistently cited correlates with episode boundaries is a shift in temporal location. When a shift in time occurs, a comprehender has no way of knowing who has been brought onto the scene or who has left. This means that for the comprehender to know who the participants are, they need to be identifiable. This makes a shift in temporal location a logical place to reidentify partici- pants. By examining the changes in temporal location, we can mark off the different places in the text an episode shift is likely to occur. The temporal criterion used in this work is operationally explicit. Anywhere one of the temporal words occurs in the initial position, the boundary will be marked on the clause in which it occurs. When a temporal change occurs in clause final position marking a change in time, this will be marked in the following clause. This division is done so that the boundaries are con- sistently calculated as occurring between two clauses. In Olo, clause final temporal expressions give the time at the end of the event, not the beginning of the event. So the temporal boundary is between the clause with the clause final temporal expression and the next clause. Any other temporal expres- sion is marked in the clause in which it occurs. Nonexplicit time boundaries, like sleeping at night and then getting up in the morning, are marked as temporal changes. The time markers for the Somoro 64 Methods 1 The normal measurements are based on reaction times to word probes and reading times. 2 Examples of this are to be found in the topic continuity volume edited by Givón 1983b, and his more recent volume Voice and Inversion 1994b as well as Payne 1993. dialect of Olo are given in table 4.1. The first six, sungoi, sungoi sungoi liye, nempis, nempis liye, and nomul are not normally used in a narrative story after the first setting of the time for the story. The word fei ‘todaynow’ is used frequently, as well as nolowi ‘tomorrow’. The day and night are divided up by some inexact temporal divisions. These are given following fei in table 4.1. Table 4.1. Olo temporal divisions sungoi ‘a long time ago’ The time before the speaker was born is automatically in this time. sungoi sungoi liye ‘a time before sungoi’ roughly equates with an ancestral time. nempis ‘the day before yesterday and before’ nempis liye ‘a time before nempis’ has a sense of psychological distance nomul ‘yesterday’ fei ‘today’ if ili ‘dawn’ mul ‘morning’ epli nimin ‘noon’ ningli ‘afternoon 4–6 PM’ mulpou ‘night’ wem tangu ‘middle of the night’ nolowi ‘tomorrow, the next day’ nolowi nenpe ‘the day after tomorrow’ Because of the problems, both theoretical and practical, in dealing with temporal boundaries, I have adopted a simple approach to determining if a boundary occurs. If one of the time words that are given in table 4.1 occurs, then a boundary is said to have occurred. If an event, like sleeping, or the position of the sun i.e., the sun goes down, occurs in a text, a boundary is also considered to have occurred.

4.3.2 Spatial locations