1. INFORMATION STRUCTURE AND THE EXPRESSION OF GIVENNESS IN BUGLERE (CHIBCHAN).
- Author
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QUESADA, J. DIEGO
- Subjects
CHIBCHAN languages ,MORPHOSYNTAX ,PHONOLOGICAL encoding ,NARRATIVES ,LINGUISTICS ,DISCOURSE analysis ,NARRATION ,INDIGENOUS languages of the Americas - Abstract
This paper provides an account of the expression of information structure in general, as well as of the information-structure category of givenness in particular, in Buglere, a Chibchan language of Costa Rica and Panama. Previous accounts of the existing morphosyntactic strategies to encode information-structure categories in Buglere are examined on the basis of a typical Buglere narrative, Additionally, the information-structure category of givenness is briefly inspected by means of two production experiments; the idea is to ascertain whether the tendencies found in natural speech remain in controlled, artificial environments. The analysis of the spontaneous narrative tends to confirm previous accounts of the information-structure patterns in Buglere, while the results of the experiments only partially confirm previous accounts. The emerging discrepancies are explained as being caused by the environment of the experiments, which speakers might have found slightly unnatural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
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