Tense/Aspect Shifting in Kala Lagaw Ya Oral Narratives

Abstract

Kala Lagaw Ya is the language of the Western Torres Strait islands, with two main dialects centred around Saibai Island and Mabuiag Island. It exhibits complex tense/aspect marking involving both temporal remoteness distinctions (‘metrical tense’) and aspectual distinctions. This article investigates the discourse-semantics of tense/aspect marking in a small corpus of oral traditional narratives from the Mabuiag dialect. Unsurprisingly, the resources of the ‘metrical tense system’ are not fully exploited in the narrative texts, which exhibit a restricted range of ‘narrative’ past tense marking including the Remote Past Perfective, a Remote Past Imperfective and a Present (or Non-Future) tense. The focus of the article is on patterns of distribution and shift between the Remote Past Perfective and the Present tense. Both these tenses are used extensively with ‘Narration’ function: to mark sequences of events on the narrative timeline. In some stories the Remote Past Perfective functions as the default framing tense, with the Present tending to be used in the middle of the story, and in particular in subjectively evaluated narrative ‘highpoints’. However stories are also found which are told predominantly in the Present tense. Patterns of consistent clustering vs. rapid alternations of the two tenses are also discussed and compared with the episodic and expressive structure of the stories. The article illustrates the usefulness of considering discourse data in understanding the meanings and functions of forms within an inflectional paradigm of this kind, and contributes to the range of language types for which tense/aspect shifting has been investigated.