Verbal arts

This chapter from Telling Stories in the Face of Danger explores language ideologies of traditional storytelling in the Village of Tewa (NE Arizona, US).  After introducing the notion of discursive discriminations, the chapter details the aesthetics and cultural significance of traditional storytelling which was widely regarded as essential for proper socialization into adulthood.  This study demonstrates that while most of the criteria for producing and understanding cultural performances in this genre require considerable attention to tradition, there is also a value on "carrying it hither"--in recontextualizing a story so that it speaks effectively to the present audience.  But widespread language shift in the Village of Tewa has weakened the continuity of this important cultural practice.  Many Tewa see the value of a program of language documentation and revitalization that would potentially make the traditional stories available in new ways (written, translated, bilingual formats) and in new places (schools, after-school programs) to youth and young adults most of whom do not have access to Tewa as a language of the home.  But others, in acts of generic regimentation (Bauman 2004) aimed at suppressing these linguistic innovations oppose any deviation from traditional narrative practice.  This can be understood as an internal culture war with the Tewa community between the discourse of storytelling (with its flexibility and recipient design) and the discourse of the kiva which looks to ceremonial ideals of performance replication.

This paper offers an introduction to 'multiforms' as associated systems of verbal elements that develop in the memory of an individual and are used in text production. It examines these in the highly conservative kalevalaic mythological poetry of Finns and Karelians, where such multiforms become are sufficiently conservative in social circulation that they can become referentially meaningful. This paper looks briefly at general variation in production, variation by dialect, variation by situation and also the meaningful application of kalevalaic epic multiforms in exceptional contexts to produce new meanings

This paper presents some of the same information in the Finnish language "Multiformit kalevalamittaisessa epiikassa" (2010), but it presents a more general introduction to the poetic system and does not open formal typologies of multiforms in this poetic system.

This paper proposes a multidisciplinary analysis method for freestyle rap performance. In its first part is presented the inquiry of the poetic, linguistic, musical and performance dimensions of freestyle rap. In its second part, so this approach could be enriched, it is presented a case study: the poetic dimension analysis of one freestyle performance by Acru, an Argentinian rapper, as well as an analysis of some aspects of Parry & Lord’s Oral-formulaic Theory. This will shed light on some of the poetic resources used by the freestyler in the discourse’s certain production context.

Este artículo plantea un método de análisis multidisciplinario para el rap improvisado. En su primera parte se sugiere el estudio de cuatro dimensiones del freestyle rap: la dimensión poética, la lingüística, la musical y la del performance. Para enriquecer esta propuesta, en la segunda parte se presenta un estudio de caso: el análisis de la dimensión poética de un freestyle del rapero argentino Acru, así como un análisis de algunos aspectos desde la teoría oral-formulaica propuesta por Parry y Lord. Esto arrojará luz sobre algunas de las herramientas poéticas de las que hace uso el freestyler en el contexto inmediato de ejecución de su arte verbal.

Material de clase o diario de aprendizaje que actualizo cada cierto tiempo.

En el capítulo 1, delimito qué se entiende por arte verbal mientras explico por qué este término en particular tiene mayores beneficios analíticos que, por ejemplo, folklore; asimismo, propongo comprender el arte verbal desde el canto y como objeto de estudio lingüístico. De hecho, esta última afirmación es la columna vertebral de todo mi escrito. Luego, en el capítulo 2, discuto una serie de conceptos que considero necesarios para empezar a estudiar y comprender el arte verbal. Así, me apoyo en los siguientes cuatro trabajos: la aproximación a la lengua y la cultura a través el discurso, la Teoría Oral Formulaica, la función poética del lenguaje del estructuralismo jakobsoniano, y una comparación de la teoría musicológica de Curt Sachs y las ideas de sobre la oralidad de Walter Ong. En el tercer capítulo, ofrezco un esbozo de análisis comparativo de un conjunto de formas poéticas que van desde sistemas de versificación o sílabas sin sentido al paralelismo semántico, repetición, encabalgamiento, entre otros; además, finalizo dicho capítulo proponiendo un análisis de la combinación de estas formas poéticas situado en mi experiencia de trabajo con el canto kakataibo y propongo un continuo de productividad para fines comparativos. En el cuarto capítulo, me aboco a estudiar el mapeo del texto a estructuras musicales desde los estudios de textsetting; además, también discuto otros temas de interés como lenguas percusionadas, vocales musicales y escalas, etc. Finalmente, en el quinto capítulo doy un breve recuento histórico sobre el registro de la música y el canto de los grupos indígenas de la Amazonía, y presento tendencias y características del canto amazónico, tanto formales como socioculturales en las que relaciono las mismas con los capítulos anteriores.

NOSTALGIC LOVE AND SADNESS SONGS AMONG THE AYOREO
OF NORTHERN PARAGUAYAN CHACO
(an ethnography of broken ties)

In this thesis I analyse the nostalgic love songs and the sadness songs of the Ayoreo of northern Paraguayan Chaco, combining a discourse centered approach with an ethnography of everyday life. My aim is to show that discourse is not an illustration but a crucial element of social life. Following Ayoreo theories of discourse, I have explored the diverse modalities of speech agency. The powerful speech — healing spells and myths — gains its efficacy through a meta-discourse, while the “profane” speech — not associated with shamanism or the original times — has subtler but nevertheless very neat effects on Ayoreo social life, specially through the nostalgic love songs and the sadness songs. I analyse the vocabulary of emotions and establish that the concept of nostalgia — jnusietigai — plays a fundamental social part at various levels. Among the Ayoreo, every remarkable social fact in their life can be turned into a song. In fact, the more than seven song genres constitute lyric tools that produce a repertory of anecdotes. These anecdotes become though repetition an example-based guideline for accepted and non-accepted behaviour. The Ayoreo discourse is an interpretative practice that shapes everyday social events through entextualisation and subsequently influences events to come. The songs — performed and heard every night — establish an aesthetics of nostalgia, which is at the same time a social ethics of conviviality. Social values are highlighted and antisocial values disapproved through the prism of affectivity. 

Key words : speech — affectivity — conviviality — everyday life — Gran Chaco — Ayoreo


LES CHANTS DE NOSTALGIE ET DE TRISTESSE DES AYOREO
DU CHACO BOREAL PARAGUAYEN
(une ethnographie des liens coupés)

Dans cette thèse, j’ai abordé les chants de nostalgie d’amour et de tristesse des Ayoreo du Chaco paraguayen autant du point de vue de l’ethnographie du discours que de l’ethnographie de l’intimité, dans le but de montrer que le discours n’est pas illustratif, mais constitutif du social. M’appuyant sur les théories ayoreo du discours, j’ai exploré les modalités diverses de l’agentivité des mots. La parole puissante — formules de guérison et mythes — achève son efficacité par le biais d’un métadiscours, tandis que la parole « profane » — non associée au chamanisme, ni aux temps premiers — a des effets plus subtils, mais très nets sur la vie sociale, notamment à travers les chants de tristesse et de nostalgie d’amour. L’étude attentive du vocabulaire des émotions m’a permis d’établir que l’idée de nostalgie    — jnusietigai — joue un rôle d’opérateur social à plusieurs niveaux. Chez les Ayoreo, tout événement est susceptible de devenir une composition chantée. En fait, plus de sept catégories de chants constituent des dispositifs lyriques qui permettent de créer un répertoire d’anecdotes. Ces anecdotes constituent par addition une référence, un point de repère des comportements par le biais de l’exemplification. Le discours est alors une pratique interprétative qui donne forme aux événements sociaux quotidiens par le biais de l’entextualisation et qui conditionne ainsi les événements postérieurs. Les chants, interprétés et entendus tous les soirs, établissent une esthétique de la nostalgie qui est en même temps une éthique sociale de la convivialité. Les valeurs sociales sont exacerbées et celles antisociales condamnées à travers le prisme de l’affectivité.
Mots-clés : discours — affectivité — convivialité — vie quotidienne — Gran Chaco — Ayoreo

Metre is a living thing. It exists in and is shaped by an environment that includes language, genres and practices as well as oral and/or written identity-bearing texts, and these are reciprocally affected and shaped by metres with which they are connected and potentially also by those metres to which they stand in resonant, or perhaps contrastive relations. All of these features furthermore exist and operate within broader environments of societies and cultures, linking them to social roles, identities, classes and situations that shape how they are perceived, valued and apprehended as meaningful. Taken together, all of these factors, with their complex and often subtle relations constitute what we would like to call the ecology of metre.
The articles assembled in the present collection bring the ecology of metre into focus, addressing it from a variety of complementary angles and disciplinary perspectives with a range of methodologies. Discussions treat poetic forms from periods as wide-ranging as the Viking Age to some still found today, and that occur in a variety of languages including Old Norse and Icelandic of different periods, both Old English and Modern English, Nenets, and a trans-lingual Finno-Karelian poetic idiom. The genres addressed extend from vernacular mythological epics to Christian theological poems and from skaldic praise poetry of royal courts to popular literary ballads. The strength of this volume lies precisely in the diversity of these contributions that are simultaneously brought into dialogue with one another through a number of common thematic topics and shared concerns.

This essay sets out an approach to parallelism in verbal art as a semiotic phenomenon that can operate at multiple orders (or levels) of signification. It examines parallelism in the sounds through which words are communicated, in language communicated by those sounds, in symbols or minimal units of narration communicated through language, and then in more complex units of narration communicated through those symbols or units. Attention is given to how these different levels of parallelism interrelate and may diverge, while revealing that parallelism at all of these levels reflects a coherent semiotic phenomenon.

"Parallelism in Verbal Art and Performance: An Introduction" (in collaboration with Lotte Tarkka), "Parallelism and Orders of Signification (Parallelism Dynamics I)" and "Multimedial Parallelism in Ritual Performance (Parallelism Dynamics II)" can be read together as a monograph-length study.

In this contribution I analyse Ayoreo laments, which are composed and performed when someone has passed away or is in danger of dying. The lyrics of these mourning songs, although highly spontaneous and created in that very moment, follow certain rhetoric rules. One of these poetic regularities is the systematic mentioning of plants and animals. In order to understand these puzzling allusions to non-humans in such intense moments, I study everyday interactions, such as gossiping and teasing jokes at mealtimes. These everyday scenes reveal that the common thread running through songs, non-humans and humorous provocations is the notion of conviviality.

This paper has two goals, distinct but linked. The first goal, as the title suggests, is to remember the work of the late thinker, writer, and linguist Ruqaiya Hasan (1931-2015) in just the way she herself would have had it remembered: in the form of a short, practical manual of her method of linguistic analysis. This is based on the work of her teacher Basil Bernstein and her co-thinker and companion, M.A.K. Halliday. The second goal is to link this manual and this analysis to a kind of manifesto of her ideal of human progress. This progress is always revolutionary, i.e. crisis-ridden and critical, and it takes place on three timescales: the long-term sociological, the mid-term child-developmental, and the short-term textual. The link between the two goals of this paper is a defense of Hasan's legacy against criticisms that her work is essentialist, elitist and easily weaponized and turned against against the daughters and sons of working people. Hasan's work may be ignored; but, without first disabling its comprehension, it cannot be so compromised. In a 2007 paper, Ruqaiya Hasan recalled a British Marxist remarking, sometime in the early forties, that the key problem of capitalist education lies in creating a system that will somehow enable the operation of a Bren light machine gun but disable the comprehension of the Communist Manifesto. As a sociolinguist, she thought of problems in three overlapping timescales-the sociogenetic (the cultural-historical timescale spanning millennia, centuries and decades), the ontogenetic (the child-developmental timescale spanning decades, years and months), and the 'logogenetic' (the timescale of making meaning in an oral or written text over years, months, and even classroom moments). On the sociogenetic timescale, the problem was one of forming a whole class capable of producing surplus value and reproducing cannon fodder but incapable of the awareness of being made to do so. On the ontogenetic timescale, the problem was one of training individual children to be capable soldiers without educating any working-class intellectuals. On the logogenetic timescale, the problem was one of forging a register of language that cements technical skills as habits but consistently stops these habits short of developing into

Parallelism may indeed be fundamental to poetic discourse, but the very degree to which it appears fundamental makes the concept as a whole challenging to pin down.  This is an introduction to the pre-print of working papers for the seminar-workshop Parallelism in Verbal Art and Performance (26-27 May 2014, Helsinki, Finland).  After introducing the event, it prefaces the working papers of this event with a review of some of the topics and themes that are found across them, as well as some of the significant questions concerning parallelism that connect and relate the different papers to one another.  This preliminary survey and discussion has two primary intentions as a prelude and introduction to Parallelism in Verbal Art and Performance.  The first is to survey some of the basic ground that is covered or addressed in individual papers and discussions as a preliminary frame in which the papers can be approached and deliberated.  The second is to stimulate thinking about parallelism and ways to relate perspectives from the different approaches offered by different materials and produced by focus on parallelism of different types.

Vienne, XXIe congrès de l’Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, 21 – 27 juillet 2016, 17503 - La «forme pure», «l’art absolu», la «littérarité»: utopie artistique ou impulsion à la création? Organizer(s): Tchougounnikov, Serge (Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France); Werth, Eva (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, Marne-la-Vallée, France)

En este trabajo se analizan las fórmulas de apertura de un corpus de textos pertenecientes a la narrativa de tradición oral maya tojolabal, con una doble finalidad, describir sus elementos y la obligatoriedad de los mismos y analizar su función tanto literaria como pragmática. Este trabajo contribuye a probar que la narrativa tojolabal de tradición oral es un arte verbal que los propios narradores distinguen de la oralidad cotidiana mediante estas estructuras que enmarcan el comienzo y el fin de cada relato. También veremos cómo las fórmulas de apertura son estructuras convencionales con elementos comunes con cierto margen de variación compartidas por una comunidad cultural.

This paper analyzes the opening formulas of a set of Maya Tojolabal oral traditional folktales. It argues that oral traditional indigenous folktales constitute a verbal art that the narrators themselves distinguish from daily orality by framing the beginning and end of each story with these devices. The paper aims at both de- scribing these elements and their obligatory character, and analyzing their literary as well as pragmatic function. Also, it shows how opening formulas have common elements with a certain margin of variation. All this confirms the idea that the oral narrative tradition is a conventionalized verbal art, with certain aesthetic rules and variable elements that are common to a cultural community.

Los Iskonawa, un pueblo pano de la Amazonía peruana, todavía guarda en la memoria un conjunto de canciones que eran parte de la fiesta de toma de chicha de maíz, la cual se fue dejando de celebrar después de su contacto en 1959 y su posterior desplazamiento al río Callería. El cantarlas nuevamente es un proceso de activación de su memoria histórica y cultural que nos permitirá aproximarnos al análisis del iskonawa, una lengua que hoy es considerada en peligro de extinción. Además, nos ofrecerá la memoria del contexto desde donde estas canciones eran enunciadas, a partir del cual el análisis de este tipo de uso del lenguaje cobra mayor claridad y sentido.

The Iskonawa, an indigenous group of the Peruvian Amazon, still remember a set of chants that formed part of the celebration of drinking chicha, a drink made of corn, which they gradually stopped celebrating after being contacted in 1959 and later displacement to the Callería River. Singing these songs again is a way to activate their historical and cultural memory and allows us to approach the analysis  of  the  musical  genre  in  Iskonawa,  a  language  that  is  nowadays  considered  in  danger  of extinction. Moreover, it off ers us the opportunity to understand the context in which these chants were sung, adding greater clarity and meaning to the analysis.

In this paper, we explore the genre of shamanic incantation (bi'id ɨd) among the Hup people of the northwest Amazon. We consider the artistic features that characterize bi'id ɨd as both verbal art and powerful shamanic action-most notably the intersecting layers of parallelism, the leveraging of metaphor from both literal and figurative perspectives, and the strategic use of evidentials. We also consider the astonishingly complex taxonomy and cosmography the genre embodies, with its ontological classification of the plants, animals, and other beings within the diverse environments of the Hup world (rivercourse, forest, sky, water, etc.). As we lay out here, Hup bi'id ɨd provides an example par excellence of Sherzer's conception of discourse as the nexus of language and culture, and an illustration of the fact that a rich understanding of language and culture must make reference to both together. [shamanic language, incantation, verbal art, cultural ontology, cosmography] It is in verbally playful and artistic discourse that we find language turned on to its fullest potential and power, possibilities inherent in grammar made salient, potentials actualized.

In a small community in the Andean-Amazonian transitional zone of Southern Peru, speakers of Matsigenka use recapitulative linkages in myth narrations. These constructions establish a kind of rhythm, distinctive to the myth narration dis- course genre, through which the events of the narrative unfold, information is introduced and elaborated, and suspense and surprise are achieved. This chapter describes the structural and discursive properties of these linking devices and their use in myth narrations. Bridging clauses generally recapitulate reference clauses verbatim or with minor modifications, and are usually linked to discourse-new information as simple juxtaposed clauses (though there is much variation in the structure and pragmatic functions of these constructions). Though the construc- tions contribute to discourse cohesion, their function is primarily poetic in nature. Furthermore, when Matsigenka speakers narrate the same myths in Spanish and in mixed Matsigenka-Spanish speech, they use the same kinds of linking construc- tions (which are otherwise uncommon in Spanish). Thus, the transfer of this kind of pattern from Matsigenka to Spanish is regimented by discourse genre, and offers an illustration of the cultural (i.e., metapragmatic) mediation of language contact.

This paper examines the speech of two Meknassi rappers who have adopted linguistic features of Casablancan Arabic in the course of their hip-hop careers in order to emulate the speech of their colleagues in Casablanca. The paper seeks to answer the questions: How and why do Moroccan rappers from outside of Casablanca incorporate Casablancan features into their speech? What acoustic and phonological cues do they access in producing such features? What, if any, social capital are they attempting to access through usage of another regional dialect? This paper proposes that Meknassi rappers adopt Casablancan phonological features in order to claim the linguistic capital associated with the Casablancan dialect within the Moroccan hip-hop community, where Casablanca constitutes one of the most important rap scenes.

The paper compares the realization of the phoneme /t/ between two male Casablancan and Slaoui rappers who natively produce the variant [t͡ʃ] and two male Meknassi rappers who do not natively produce the variant [t͡ʃ] but began to produce it when they began their rap careers. Within Morocco, the phoneme /t/ displays regional allophonic variation, and the variant [t͡ʃ] is specifically produced in the region between the coastal cities of Salé and Casablanca; these two cities are also home to two of the oldest and most important rap scenes in the country. Analysis is based on 2 hours of data collected during a field trip to Morocco in the summer of 2016, focusing solely on sociolinguistic interview data. Preliminary results indicate that these rappers converge to [tʃ] to varying degrees, dependent upon their role in the linguistic market of the Moroccan rap scene – as predicted by Bourdieu’s model of the linguistic market, the speakers accessed this linguistic capital at a rate inversely proportional to the amount of power they held in the linguistic market. The Meknassi rapper who had never lived in Casablanca or Salé, in particular, showed the most variation in his speech, alternately producing his native variant [ts] and the non-native [t͡ʃ] variant, in order to access the Cassaoui variant’s legitimacy within his community of practice. The author’s prior research has suggested that this variant in particular indexes masculinity and toughness within the Moroccan rap scene.

This article focuses on the textual aesthetics of the Congolese-born (later Tanzanian naturalized) Swahili singer-songwriter Remmy Ongala. In the first part, I argue that a textual approach is also important for songs. The theoretical discussion is mainly based on the studies by Karin Barber (“Popular Arts in Africa.” African Studies Review 30, no. 3 (1987): 1–78, “African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism.” Research in African Literatures 26, no. 4 (1995): 3–30, “Quotation in the Constitution of Yorùbá Oral Texts.” Research in African Literatures 30, no. 2 (1999): 17–41, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), which offer a fundamental perspective on these issues. On this basis, I propose a more literary perspective, related to the ideas of the father of aesthetics Baumgarten (1714–1762), the American writer Susan Sontag (1933–2004) and the Swahili writer Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944–2020). Since Ongala belongs to different textual traditions, Congolese and Tanzanian, I use texts from these traditions for a comparative analysis of style and thought. On the Congolese side the comparison is based on elements of oral literature, like folk tale and song, both in relation to the proverb Kipendacho roho hula nyama bichi (A soul in love eats raw meat), while on the Tanzanian side the comparison is based on Swahili literature of that time.

References to landscape and places are central in traditional narratives by speakers of Dâw (Naduhup, Brazilian Amazon). This
emphasis on spatial reference is primarily established through locative adverbial clauses that are often repeated throughout
the discourse. Their function is to relate an event to a place, establish reference to locative information mentioned earlier
in discourse, and provide cohesion when pre-posed to the main clause. In this syntactic position, they act as bridges
connecting sentences and paragraphs by referring to antecedent context. Locative adverbial clauses in clause-initial position
are interesting in Dâw because they can occur as exact replicas of a locative adverbial clause that was postposed to the
main clause of the antecedent sentence. This strategy has been described in the literature as tail-head linkage. Its central
function is to maintain coherence among participants and events along subsequent sentences in discourse and to ensure that
the interlocutor is able to track the numerous locations mentioned in the narrative. This paper explores the functional and
formal properties of tail-head linkage by focusing on locative adverbial clauses in Dâw, and contributes to the understanding
of how processes of subordination can be responsible for tracking spatial information in the discourse of Dâw speakers.

In times of social upheaval, people create and engage with verbal art for entertainment and a feeling of connection. While millions of people were forced to stay home to reduce the spread of COVID-19 from March to July 2020, verbal artists posted recorded performances online and viewers had more time than usual to watch and share them. COVID verbal art refers to songs, poems, and comedy skits that mention social and physical distancing, quarantine and isolation, hygiene and cleaning practices, everyday experiences during the pandemic, as well as social and political critiques of policies and practices that explicitly mention COVID-19 or coronavirus. An examination of 227 verbal art performances posted on YouTube and TikTok provides an ethnographic record of how everyday life has changed over time during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the focus shifted from initial confusion to political critique.

O  presente  artigo  é  resultado  de  dois  anos  de  pesquisa,  a  qual  teve  como  um  dos seus objetivos investigar  a história da prática da tradução de  cantos Tupi-Guarani de  1970  até  a  atualidade.  A  pesquisa  foi  dividida  em  duas  etapas:  primeiramente, realizou-se um levantamento para se construir um corpus de traduções, complemen-tado  com informações  extratextuais  relacionadas  aos  textos  e  a  suas/seus  respecti-vas/os tradutoras/es; a segunda etapa focou na realização de uma “arqueologia da tradução” (D’HULST, 2001, 2010; PYM, 1998) baseada no corpus mencionadocom vistas a mapear o cenário da tradução de cantos Tupi-Guarani dos últimos 50 anos. O  mapeamento  consistiu  na  análise  quantitativa  de  um corpusde  233  traduções. Houve uma preponderância significativa de traduções originais (211) sobre retradu-ções (apenas 11), bem como de traduções não comentadas (186) sobre as comentadas (47). Os textos estão distribuídos em 21 publicações: nove livros, sete teses e disser-tações, três artigos de periódicos, um material didático e um produto de projeto de documentação linguística. Do total de publicações, 15 apresentam os cantos traduzidos em formato bilíngue (juntamente com o texto em língua indígena), enquanto quatro apresentam apenas as traduções e duas contém textos nos dois formatos. Foram  identificados  11  tradutoras/es  indígenas  (duas  mulheres  e  nove  homens)  e  17 tradutoras/es não indígenas (nove mulheres e oito homens).
Palavras-chave: Cantos Tupi-Guarani; história da tradução no Brasil; arqueologia da tradução; levantamento; corpus.

Réservée au départ au vocabulaire spécialisé de la psychologie et des sciences sociales, la notion de parentalité est largement utilisée aujourd'hui pour désigner les fonctions et les pratiques parentales. Elle permet plus précisément de bien distinguer le fait d'être parent, au sens biologique du terme, des fonctions parentales, qui peuvent ne pas être assumées par les géniteurs ou par eux seuls, selon les situations et les sociétés. De nos jours, en Afrique, ces nouvelles données que sont l'urbanisation, le développement de la scolarisation, la migration de travail des enfants ou les déplacements de population ont des répercussions sur la manière dont est vécu le partage de ces fonctions parentales, créant parfois des tensions dans les familles. Notre attention s'est concentrée, dans cet ouvrage, sur la manière dont la parentalité est mise en scène dans les arts de la parole et nous avons cherché à évaluer dans ce domaine les relations entre normes et pratiques. En effet, si la littérature, orale ou écrite, exprime souvent des idéaux, son pouvoir subversif lui permet également de faire entendre des positions ou des avis qui ne sauraient se dire autrement et qui peuvent s'opposer aux normes. Les différents genres étudiés, dans les contextes ouest et centre-africains, invitent ainsi non seulement à réfléchir sur l'expression des relations parentales, mais aussi à envisager le rôle que peuvent jouer ces pratiques langagières que sont le roman, le conte, la poésie ou la composition des noms sur les représentations des relations parents/enfants, voire sur la configuration de ces relations elles-mêmes.

Page 133. " Hijos de la refolufia": Performing the pachuco in the Mexican American" Carpa" Peter C. Haney University of Texas at Austin Introduction It might at first seem almost impossible to write about the image of the pachuco ...

Repetition is not an uncommon element of storytelling; it helps the listeners keep track of actors and events. Referring to places is also a common feature of narratives; it is typically employed by storytellers at the onset of a narrative to set the stage and even to foreshadow the type of a story to be told (e.g. Dingemanse et al. 2017). In this talk, I present data from Dâw, a Naduhupan language of northwestern Brazil (ISO: kwa), whose speakers, and in particular senior storytellers, deviate from these standards in two ways. First, the repeated elements in Dâw narratives seem to be restricted to chunks that establish place-reference, while in other languages spoken in the region the repetition of actual events are more common (e.g. Franchetto 2003). Second, such place-references are found throughout Dâw narratives in the form of parallelistic movements, that is, they are not restricted to the onset of the story alone but form an underlying chain of interlocking place-references.
In grammatical terms, such movements involve syntactic strategies such as tail-head linkage as well as the repetition of locative adverbial clauses and locative postpositional phrases across sentence and stanza boundaries. The skillful employment of these linguistic strategies is a quality of an experienced and revered Dâw storyteller. Their central function is maintaining coherence of participants and events tied to places as discourse develops and helping the listener track the numerous locations named in the narrative. Parallelistic structures in Dâw narratives can therefore be understood as a prime source of verbal artistry that functions as a “walking stick” throughout a narrative that anchors the events to the real world, that is, the Dâw people’s landscape. This anchoring can be best visualized by mapping the repeated clause chunks of Dâw narratives onto the Dâw territory. As such, place-references function as imprints in the local geography mirroring the path of the storyline, similarly to what Santos-Granero (1998) describes as “topographic writing”: the connecting of individual place names (topograms) into extensive systems (topographs), reiterated, for instance, through the means of ceremonial chanting, or more generally, through various forms of verbal art (ibid. 128).
In sum, I will show how syntactic repetition can turn place-reference into main events of the storyline and entertain the idea that locative information, expressed syntactically as adjuncts, on the pragmatic discourse level becomes the central axis of Dâw narratives.