Personal pronouns in the narrative discourse of San Pedro el Alto Mixtec
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15381/lengsoc.v23i1.25553Keywords:
personal pronouns, Mixtec, continuity, ambiguity, contrastivityAbstract
In San Pedro el Alto Mixtec (SPA) pronouns have enclitic forms, compound forms, and independent forms. For this study, four narratives from speakers of different ages have been selected. The methodology of Dooley and Levinsohn (2007) has been partially followed for the organization of the data. This article addresses the topic of the factors that determine the speaker’s choice regarding the use of enclitic, compound, and independent pronouns in narrative discourse. This problem is examined
in two ways: first, by measuring the persistence of the pronouns and describing the contexts of ambiguity based on Givón’s (1983) proposal; second, by describing and determining the factors involved in the choice of personal pronouns based on Chafe’s (1976) concept of contrastivity. The hypothesis we propose is that enclitic pronouns are referential devices that track and maintain in an active state the discourse-level topic. For their part, compound pronouns are chosen to disambiguate participants claiming the same coding device at the sentence level. Finally, independent pronouns, when they appear in the contrastive focus, when independent pronouns appear in the contrastive focus, they are utilized to contrast participants, since they permit either the establishment of changed information in the listener’s consciousness or the reinforcement of the current information.
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