Particles of concatenation and of reference in Amharic

Abstract

Stimulated by Z. Harris's ‘Discourse analysis’ which raised the problem of continuing linguistic analysis in a particular connected discourse beyond the limits of a single sentence and by K. L. Pike's hints at the existence of a formal and semantic supra-sentence unit, such as the paragraph, American linguists produced some systematic and coherent descriptions of larger stretches of discourse, pointing towards certain grammatical, lexical, and stylistic relations reaching across sentence boundaries. Although most of these works deal with Amerindian languages, the method of analysis and the terminology they use can readily be applied to other languages, as was done, for instance in English, by V. Waterhouse in ‘Independent and dependent sentences’. This author draws a parallel between independent and dependent morphemes, phrases, and clauses on the one hand, and independent and dependent sentences, on the other, pointing out that ‘not all sentences are independent’ and that ‘there are in fact grammatical constructions which indicate that some sentences are dependent and therefore to be included in some larger linguistic form such as paragraph or discourse’.