Storyline Concerns and Word Order Typology in East and West Africa

Abstract

Diagram II. Etic bands of salience in narrative Word Order TypologiesIn assuming these word order typologies I am speaking here of surface structures and of contemporary languages.It may, indeed, be strongly challenged as to whether deep structure order as opposed to surface structure order is a tenable distinctive.Wallace Chafe's arguments that linearization belongs to the surface carry with me considerable weight.I therefore dismiss such concerns as whether Amharic (surface structure SOY) is basically VSO or not [Bach 1970] and side with Hudson [ 1972 [ that this is not really a question rightly put.I also dismiss Creidler Storyline Concerns and Word Order Typology Miscellaneous ConcernsIn the following chapters I consider, in order, the SOY languages of Ethiopia (Chapter 1), then certain Sudanic languages, especially Nilotic (Chapter 2).In the course of the latter chapter, the concept of the "consecutive tense" is introduced and illustrated, and the mirror image parallelism of right-chaining SOY languages to left-chaining YSO and SYO languages is established.In Chapter 3 there is further attention to other (non-Sudanic) languages with a consecutive tense, and in Chapter 4, to languages without such a consecutive tense, thus concluding our three-way exemplification of storyline consideration in right-chaining, left-chaining, and coranking languages.Before closing this introduction, I want to acknowledge the cooperation of the following organizations in facilitating this research project: The Bible Society of Ethiopia, The Sudan Interior Mission, The Mekane Yesus Evangelical Church of Ethiopia, The Summer Institute of Linguistics, and the Nigerian Bible Translation Trust.These organizations provided facilities for text analysis workshops in various African countries and provided individual linguist-translators who cooperated in the project.My thanks to all the latter for their patience with me in my efforts to wrestle with problems of text analysis in languages with which I had had no previous experience.The good things which turned up are largely their discoveries, and whatever errors and misconceptions are found here are mine.I acknowledge individual contributions in various places in this volume, which could almost be considered to be multiply authored.For concerns clustering around the privileges and rights of my colleagues, both African and expatriates, I do not accompany this volume with a volume of texts.I, furthermore, look forward to the time when many of my colleagues who have collected research data on languages cited in this volume will publish research results in their own right.Not only do the data underlying this volume deserve longer and more explicit treatment, but there is also a considerable amount of preliminary writeup on participant reference in narrative discourse and on hortatory discourse which needs to see the light of publication.I also acknowledge a summer stipend from my home university, the University of Texas at Arlington.This stipend has facilitated my writing of this report volume and made possible a delightful summer (1985) spent in working over the field notes and preliminary write-ups which we brought with us from our June-December 1984 research on the African continent.Finally, I acknowledge on-field support funding from the Town North Presbyterian Church (PCA), Richardson, Texas, and a grant from the Griset Foundation to subsidize the publication of this volume.

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