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Important Participant VIP strategy which accounts for one referent being more prominent than all the others, and is marked in a special way to reflect this status. This
type of marking on a participant reference can take place on a global level, throughout an entire text, or just on a local level.
In applying the strategies described above, charts are made of all the participants and their respective grammatical markings. This chart is then used to determine a default
encoding depending on the syntactic environment. Once a default is established which often is a result of some sequential strategy, then special cases of under- or over-coding
can be identified. Cases of under- or over-coding can possibly be explained by determining if there is a VIP that informs the referring expressions for a particular
participant.
2.2.6 Discourse profile and operations approach to participant reference
Since participant reference is related to the organization and structure of a discourse, it is important to provide a narrative profile. The profile is the “mounting and
declining tension” as evidenced by the surface structure Longacre 1981:337. The surface structure also reflects the macrosegmentation the process of dividing a text into
chunks that match the narrative schema, which then informs divisions in the text that correspond to the notional structure of the story—exposition, inciting moment,
developing conflict, climax, denouement, final suspense, and conclusion. According to Longacre 1996:36, the discourse profile of a narrative text is usually comprised of the
following: title, stage, pre-peak episode, peak episode, inter-peak episode, post-peak
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episode, closure, and finis. Surface structure clues are important for identifying a peak, a portion of text that Longacre 1996:38 describes as a “zone of turbulence.” The peak
may contain a break from routine marking and be characterized by various prominence- marking devices. The existence of a peak may help to explain discrepancies in routine
participant referencing. In order to tease out the participant reference system, Longacre 1995 finds three
variables that influence this system: 1 referential form noun, pronoun, null reference, etc., 2 participant ranking, and 3 the discourse operations related to participant
reference. For referential form, he gives a comprehensive list of lexical forms, and yet certain forms are language-specific. In isolating languages, shifts in word order may have
a significant impact and may need to be added to this list. Regarding the rank of the participant, Longacre recognizes major participants central and non-central, minor
participants restricted or limited role, and props human or non-human. The fact that the rank of a participant may correspond to some distinct grammatical markings is similar
to Dooley and Levinsohn’s idea of a VIP. Finally, the third variable Longacre posits for influencing participant reference is the discourse operation the participant is performing.
Figure 5 provides Longacre’s list 1995:702 with additions made by Hwang 2007. I have also added an additional discourse operation to their list which is Initiating
Utterance.
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F First mention within a story
I Integration into the story as central
T routine Tracking
R Restaging or reinstatement
B Boundary marking episode or sub-episode
C Confrontation andor role change
L Locally contrastivethematic status
E Evaluation or comment by narrator
A Addressee in dialogue
U initiating Utterance
X Exit
Figure 5: Discourse operations
2.3 Bunong and other Mon-Khmer language research
