Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

Putting oral narratives into writing 339
(18) a. na vaa-kukan bata=na, a bai he kuu.
tam caus-three along=3sg.ipfv art mango when fall
‘(she) did (it) a third time, when a mango fell down.’
(lit. ‘make three …’)
(Mat_01R.020)
b. tasu vaa-kukan vai, me=a peha bai paa kuu maa.
throw caus- three now and=art one mango tam fall dir
‘(she) threw a third time now, and a mango fell down.’
(Mat_01E.020)
In (18b) the verb tasu ‘throw’ is put in front of vaa-kukan lit. ‘make three’ so
that tasu vaakukan ‘throw a third time’ becomes a serial verb construction with
tasu as its head and vaakukan as its modifier. Furthermore, maa ‘hither’ is
added after kuu ‘fall’ to explicitly express that the mango fell down where the
woman stood.
6 Summary of observations and conclusions
This final section first briefly summarises the observations described in the
preceding sections and then tries to evaluate them. The comparison of the transcriptions
and the edited versions shows:
1. The lexicon of the edited narratives is semantically more refined than the
lexicon used in the oral narratives.
2. All constructions found in the edited versions are also found in the oral
versions.
3. Elaboration often results in complex structures (e.g. adjectival attributes,
serial verb constructions, relative clauses, clausal adjuncts).
4. The edited versions make more use of Tail-Head constructions, adverbial
and relative clauses.
5. A complete merger of two paratactic clauses is reached when the second
clause is nominalised and becomes a nominal argument of the predicate
of the first clause (§ 5.2.2), or when a sequence of two clauses is changed
into a serial verb (§ 5.2.3) or a ditransitive construction (§ 5.2.4).
As a consequence, the edited versions show more complex constructions. With
respect to language maintenance and revitalisation, the editorial work supports
the preservation of the vernacular lexicon and grammar and, consequently,
the expressive potential of the language. There are many examples where