Bridging Repetition in Liangshan Yi:A Narrative Feature of Orality Culture
The present research describes the bridging repetition in Liangshan Yi,sometimes also known as tail-head linkage.It is a narrative phenomenon beyond the level of the clause and a discourse pattern of high frequency.The related phenomena include multi-verb construction,clause-chaining,and subordination.The present study proposes four defining features of bridging repetition in Liangs-han Yi.The core requirement is for the bridging clause to repeat the complete or partial predicate of the reference clause,including its arguments.It is also found that the repetition in Liangshan Yi must cover the verb(s)of semantic head.After examining the folk stories,four methods of repetition are i-dentified,viz.simple copy,modification of verbs of non-semantic head,structural simplification and structural expansion.They can act,either individually or interactively,to produce three kinds of rep-etition results.The main functions of the bridging repetition are to maintain the discourse cohesion,carry forward the event line,and reduce the workload of information processing for both narrators and hearers under the changing oral context.Bridging repetition is a prevalent construction in languages of the world,such as Papuan languages and Tibeto-Burman languages.The common feature shared by those speech communities is that they have either no writing writings at all,or a highly confined writ-ing system which has not been mastered by the ordinary ethnic speakers.Finally,the present research presents the different distributions of bridging repetition in written stories and oral stories of Liangs-han Yi.
Liangshan Yibridging repetitiontail-head linkagemorphosyntaxrepetition of the predicateculture of orality
万方数据
维普
