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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
Some linguistic research on the Bunong language has been published. Sylvain Vogel has written an introduction to the language 2006, as well as a paper carefully
outlining pronoun usage in Bunong 2000. In Vietnam, Richard Phillips also did linguistic research on Bunong Central Mnong and published two linguistic papers in the
Mon-Khmer Studies Journal; one addresses vowel variation 1973a and the other, verb constructions 1973b. All of these published studies focus on the phoneme, sentence, or
phrase level rather than the discourse level. While little has been written on Bunong specifically, other Mon-Khmer languages
provide some interesting phenomena as they relate to this study. Miller and Miller 2002:127 in their study of Bru, a Mon-Khmer language, noted that one role of deixis is
to give a referent “a feeling of more specificity.” Dorothy Thomas did a discourse analysis of Chrau, another Mon-Khmer language, and she states 1978:236 that,
“Another system to keep participants straight is to bring a participant into focus by adding a demonstrative after his name.” Burenhult studied Jahai, an Aslian language
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which is a distinct branch of the Mon-Khmer language family, and he finds that this language exhibits a very complex deixis system. He posits eight distinctive deictics
2005:84 that encode accessibility,
3
exteriority,
4
and elevation of location in relation to the speaker and addressee.
3
Burenhult 2005:85 describes speaker-anchored accessibility as “associated with referents conceived of as in some way accessible to the speaker, e.g. with regard to their proximity, perceptibility, reachabilityapproachability,
possession and topicality in discourse. Speaker-proximal location is typical.” Addressee anchored accessible is defined by him as 2005:85 “associated with referents considered by the speaker to be ‘cognitively accessible’ to the
addressee; i.e. referents which have the addressee’s current or previous attentionknowledge. Proximity to addressee is common.”
4
‘Exteriority’ takes two perspectives according to Burenhult, depending on whether one is talking from the speaker’s or addressee’s position. He defines it as 2005:86 “associated with referents located on the other side of the
speaker or addressee from the addressee’s or speaker’s position; distance is irrelevant.”
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Chapter 3 Overview of Bunong Grammar
3.0 Introduction
This chapter describes the phonology and orthographic adjustments used in the data, and provides an overview of the grammar.
3.1 Phonology
Bunong has 26 consonants Table 1 and 17 vowels including 15 monophthongs Table 2 and two diphthongs Table 3. The orthographic representation used in the data
corpus is given in parentheses where it differs from the phonemic representation.
Table 1: Consonant inventory
Labial Alveolar
Palatal Velar
Glottal Stops—voiceless
Stops—aspirated
Stops—implosive Stops—voiced
Fricatives h
Nasals Liquids
Approximants
Table 2: Monophthong vowel inventory
Front Central
Back High
Mid Low
