Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

Figure 1.15: Representation without domain dissociation: P-domain
analysis, I attempt to systematically identify the role of each narrative clause accordingly,
and I explore these roles qualitatively as appropriate. I label clauses according to their
narrative clause type of narrative, restricted, and free. In my quantitative analysis (see
1.4.2), I collapse restricted and free clauses into a single category, because they both differ
from narrative clauses in being able to be displaced without changing the basic storyline.
Also used in narrative analysis are Fleischman’s 1990 four “levels of the linguistic system”
in narrative, including referential, textual, expressive, and metalinguistic.
I use the term episode to describe narrative “scenes” or subparts, which I have subjectively
identified within each narrative, determined by which subparts comprise their own
units. Each episode may be considered a mini-narrative in itself, with a beginning, middle,
and end. Fleischman (1990:199-200) notes that
Even for minimally complex narrative the linearization [of chosen narrative material]
is not a simple matter of packaging information into standardized units
of action and lining them up seriatim along a time line like a string of beads
. . . [T]he beads of narrative are not all uniform; some are more salient than others
. . . Moreover, they are not spaced evenly along the string; typically they
are grouped in clusters corresponding to the “episodes”, “scenes”, and “macroevents”
into which narratives are subdivided, the boundaries between these units
being marked by linguistic signals (Fleischman 1990:199-200).
Fleischman further notes that tense and aspect categories play a major role in marking
these boundaries. This observation proves true both in qualitative and quantitative studies
of Totela narrative. Other devices that mark episode boundaries in Totela may include
prosodic breaks, and the use of interjections, though neither is investigated systematically
in this study.
1.3.7 Examples and sources
In examples, the main forms discussed in the chapter (or, in chapter 2, the section) at hand,
are underlined throughout to make them easy for readers to locate. Other phenomena under
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