Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

7.6 Narrative morphology
In extended discourse in Totela – basically, anything greater than one clause – speakers may
employ verb forms uninflected for person, tense, or aspect. 22 Nurse (2008) describes what
he calls narrative “tense” as follows:
The time of the situation is first established, either explicitly in the first verb in a
string, or implicitly, because the participants know the context, which therefore
doesn’t need mentioning. All following verbs in the sequence are then marked
by a special narrative marker, which replaces the tense marker appropriate to
the time established by the first verb. . . [It is] most frequent in past narratives,
less frequent in timeless events. . . [and] occurs across sentences and utterances, in
which case the context most often crosses sentence boundaries and characterizes
a long utterance (Nurse 2008:120)
Nurse (2008:121) also notes that a distinction may be possible between “consecutive” or
“narrative” marking, on the one hand, which occurs with identical subjects, and “subsecutive”
or “sequential” marking, on the other hand, where the subjects are different.
Cover (2010:106-118) discusses narrative morphology in Badiaranke, an Atlantic Niger-
Congo language, which she shows to be neither a tense nor a marker of situations that are
necessarily consecutive.
Based on definitions of “tense” noted in this study, e.g. the relationship between perspective
time and topic time (similar to Klein 1994), or the relationship between temporal
domains (as in Botne & Kershner 2008), Totela narrative marking should also not be considered
a tense. I therefore refer to it, following Cover (2010), as narrative morphology. I
have not found clear examples of narrative morphology on non-sequential situations, so it
may be taken as generally describing sequential events.
Totela narrative morphology consists of an augmentless infinitive form, as in (517):
(517) Kúkwààtà kùnènsà kùnènsà.
ku-kwaat-a ku-nens-a ku-nens-a
narr-grab-fv narr-beat-fv narr-beat-fv
‘[then she] caught [him and] beat [him and] beat [him]’ (ZT2009NarrA15.VB.41,
Kañandu)
Narrative forms may also appear with proclitic na= ‘and, with’; I treat the resulting
form noku-, which appears with the infinitive augment o-, as another possibility for narrative
morphology.
(518) Bésì nòkúsèsà yùmwí (ò)mwánàkázì
besi
na=oku-ses-a yumwi (o)mwanakazi
cl2a.father.3sg com=narr-marry cl1.other cl1.woman
‘And his father married another woman’ (ZT2009NarrA15.VB.6, Kañandu)
22 In Namibian Totela and many other languages, narrative forms do take person subject markers.
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