Aims and Organization 48757 Stanley ref Manage in Olo

1 Introduction

1.1 Aims and Organization

One of the primary distinguishing features of man as a species is the rich communicative ability among species members. This communication occurs primarily through language. Language has a number of functions, such as the transfer of information, showing group solidarity, and communicating emotional states Brown and Yule 1983. In all these the communicator is giving information about the state or activ- ity of some object. That object may be real or imaginary. It may be a single individual or a group, coded as a either a unit or as a collection of units. For example, given a set of five human males there are a variety of ways to refer to them. We can refer to them as individuals by name: John, George, Bill, Pat, and Harry. We can refer to them as a collection of individuals by using such terms as the men or the boys. Or we can refer to them as a unit with a collective term such as the gang Fleming 1978. Another collective term that I have used all along is them. The pronominal form is a common way of referring to an object. According to work by Brown 1983 and Givón 1983e pronominal forms are the single most common referential form in English. Givón 1983e found pronouns account for 57 percent of the referential forms in spoken English. Brown’s work on written English Brown 1983 while showing a lower percentage, 27 percent, had pro- nominal forms being the most frequent referential device. Much interest has been expressed in determin- ing why pronouns are used. Because they are such a common type of reference, linguists and psycholinguists have wanted to determine both why language producers 1 employ pronouns versus other reference forms, and what effect the use of reference forms has on language comprehenders. The study of referential form has been going on for many years. Much of the work has been done in- side the sentence boundary. Bloomfield 1933 talks about pronouns as one word class that substitutes for other word classes. In his view pronouns are used to replace nouns in an utterance. Bloomfield characterized the pronominal substitute as being used to replace a recently mentioned antecedent, al- though he acknowledged that in certain cases like it’s raining, the pronoun has no antecedent. The early work of many linguists involved limiting the scope of the research to describing the structures that can be found in a sentence. One branch of the study of reference has evolved from this perspective. Refer- ential phenomena have been viewed as one means of gaining insight into the syntactic rules that oper- ate inside the sentence Chomsky 1980; Cullicover 1976. While some linguists felt that they needed to limit the scope of their investigation to the sentence Chomsky 1957, 1965, among others there was an increasing awareness of the need to examine the whole context of an utterance Ballard, Conrad, and Longacre 1971; Grimes 1975, 1978; Longacre 1968, 1970; Pike 1964; Wise 1968. The interest in discourse in general extended to trying to determine the conditioning environments which govern the choice of referential form. Grimes edited a volume that looked at this question in a number of languages Grimes 1978. This present work is intended to build on this discourse tradition. 1 1 Language producer is used to include both speakers and authors. Much work has been done both on spoken and written communication. The same holds for language comprehenders, which includes hearers and readers. This study has two goals. The first is to provide an account of the different referential forms in Olo, a minority language in Papua New Guinea, and to show why different referential forms are chosen. To adequately explain the different referential forms, they must be set within the context of a grammati- cal description. Therefore a basic grammar of Olo is included in this work. Making information about Olo more widely known is the second goal of this study. The main thrust of the basic grammar revolves around the morphosyntactic devices used to realize participants in Olo. While the description of Olo is focused primarily on morphosyntactic issues of interest in discourse analysis, it is broad enough that someone interested in languages of Papua New Guinea should find some useful material. The gram- matical analysis is based on language data collected during a period of ten years 1981–1991 while I worked in Papua New Guinea under the auspices of SIL International. The discourse analysis is text based. The texts were either recordings of stories told primarily to Olo speakers or written for Olo speakers. The texts are given in appendix A. Chapter 1 gives a general background on the Olo-speaking people and a general outline of the theory of reference being pursued in this work. Chapter 2 gives a basic introduction to the Olo language. Chapter 3 defines reference and lays the groundwork for examining reference from a cognitive per- spective, while chapter 4 discusses the methods employed in the analysis of the data. Chapter 5 dis- cusses the results and summarizes the conclusions of the study.

1.2 The Olo Speakers and Language Affiliation