Progression Markers in Vietnamese Narrative

Abstract

This article aims to study the progression markers in six Vietnamese folktales. Progression markers refer to the grammatical devices that characterize any happenings that push the story forward. These markers highlight the temporal sequence of succeeding events, which form the backbone, or storyline of the Vietnamese folktales. They are rồi ’already’, xoan ’finish’, đoạn ’end, terminate’, thì ’then’, bèn ’then, consequence’, and đã ’have experienced’. The paper begins with the structural description of these progression markers and proceeds to their discourse functions both on the narrative timeline and out of the line. As the default timeframe of the narrative is past time or accomplished time, when these markers occur in past time, they indicate temporal succession and a cause-effect relationship of foregrounded events. In projected time as in quotations, the progression markers rồi, xoan, đoạn, thì, bèn, and đã are compared with the progression markers lǽ:w, sèt, còp, k:, cɯɳ, dâ:j in Thai respectively to show that despite the morphological difference, at the level of discourse syntax, their discourse structures are quite common.