Discourse Analysis – an example

As I’m working on my take-home final exam for my Discourse Analysis class, I thought I should take a break and give you a glimpse into what we’re learning. One thing we talk about in Discourse Analysis is Participant Reference. In regular-people terms, it means, “How do you introduce new characters into your story, keep track of all the ones you’ve got, and signal that they leave when they do?”
Here’s an example. In the next sentence, can you tell me who did what?
Jim said that even though he threw him the ball, he never ran and touched the tree.
If Jim is talking about a game he was playing with his friend Bob, who threw the ball to whom? And who didn’t touch the tree? Jim or Bob? The person who threw the ball or the person to whom it was thrown?
Even though all the words in the sentence are easy, it’s hard to know what actually went on. That’s why, in English, we’d often say something more like the following sentence.
Jim said that even though he threw Bob the ball, Bob never ran and touched the tree.
Ahh, that makes more sense, and now you know exactly how it happened.
But different languages can make it clear in different ways. In Jula, for example, this can be all sorted out by two different pronouns that both mean “he/she.” The normal pronoun for this is “a,” but there’s another special one that also means “he/she.” “Ale.”
“A” and “ale” have different uses outside of speech, but if you’re talking about what someone said using indirect speech (that means it looks like the English example above where it’s saying what Jim said, though there are no quotation marks and it’s not Jim’s exact words), “ale” refers to the person speaking and “a” refers to the other person/people.
That means that if the sentence above meant, “Jim said that even though Jim threw the ball to Bob, Bob never ran and touched the tree,” in Jula it would be said, “Jim said that even though ALE threw the ball to A, A, never ran and touched the tree.” And they can get away with only using the equivalent of “he,” because it’s clear based on the two different “he”s that you use.
Here’s another example in a Jula story that we’ve been looking at the last couple of months. “God said that A should go take ALE’s people out of Egypt.” In English we’d say, “God said that he should take His people out of Egypt.” If you know the story you know that God is talking to Moses, and you’d know which HE is used in which place (even though in Jula the “he” referring to God wouldn’t have a capital letter), but now you can understand, too, how Jula uses those two pronouns to get the same point across.
Wasn’t God creative when He created the languages? And our job as linguists is to figure out what God did and then use that to communicate. Isn’t it great?