Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

Putting oral narratives into writing 333
complement clause as its direct dependents in (9b) so that the complement
clause only consists of the complementiser tea and the verb tara ‘see’:
(9) a. … o re goe
… 3sg.pron- conj will.not
‘… then she won’t’
tea tara vahaa anaa.
compl see again 1sg.obj.pron
‘see me again.’
(Sha_01R.054)
(9) b. … eve re goe vahaa anaa tea tara.
…3sg.pron conj will.not again 1sg.obj compl see
‘… then she won’t see me again’ (lit. ‘she won't again me see’)
(Sha_01E.053)
Note that in (9a) the speaker uses a prefixed variant of the third person singular
pronoun that is exclusively used with the consecutive conjunction re ‘then, so,
so that’.
5.2 Compression of paratactic constructions
While in the preceding examples certain linking strategies increased the cohesion
between clauses, but still preserved their clausal status, compression
merges two clauses into a single clause. The comparison of oral and edited
legends shows three strategies:
1. The second clause may be merged with the first clause by a serial verb
construction.
2. The second clause can be nominalised and become a constituent of the
first clause.
3. If the first clause describes that someone takes an instrument to do the
action described by the second clause, the two clauses can be merged into
a single ditransitive clause in which the second argument denotes the instrument.
(Mosel 2010b)
5.2.1 Serial verb construction
The oral version of the example below shows two clauses, the second of which
is linked to the first one by the consecutive conjunction re ‘then, so that, in
order to’: