Abstract
Abstract References to landscape and places are central in traditional narratives by speakers of Dâw (Naduhup, Brazilian Amazon). This emphasis on spatial reference is primarily established through locative adverbial clauses that are often repeated throughout the discourse. Their function is to relate an event to a place, establish reference to locative information mentioned earlier in discourse, and provide cohesion when pre-posed to the main clause. In this syntactic position, they act as bridges connecting sentences and paragraphs by referring to antecedent context. Locative adverbial clauses in clause-initial position are interesting in Dâw because they can occur as exact replicas of a locative adverbial clause that was postposed to the main clause of the antecedent sentence. This strategy has been described in the literature as tail-head linkage. Its central function is to maintain coherence among participants and events along subsequent sentences in discourse and to ensure that the interlocutor is able to track the numerous locations mentioned in the narrative. This paper explores the functional and formal properties of tail-head linkage by focusing on locative adverbial clauses in Dâw, and contributes to the understanding of how processes of subordination can be responsible for tracking spatial information in the discourse of Dâw speakers.
Highlights
Repetition is a recurrent element of storytelling;1 it helps the listeners keep track of actors and events
This work has discussed the form and functions of tail-head linkage in Dâw narratives – a syntactic strategy which is deployed for the specific discursive purpose of tracking spatial information
We first explored this strategy from a typological perspective in order to identify its main characteristics, and examined processes of subordination with an emphasis on locative adverbial clauses in Dâw, as they are the core element of Dâw tail-head linkage constructions
Summary
Repetition is a recurrent element of storytelling;1 it helps the listeners keep track of actors and events. Tail-head linkage constructions mirror the general strategy of dependency, that is, it is assigned to subordinated locative adverbial clauses in Dâw A prototypical tail-head linkage construction in Dâw primarily links clauses found at paragraph boundaries introducing a turn or a new event in the storyline that is linked to the place expressed by the repeated locative adverbial clause.
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