Sophie Nicholls, University of New England, Australia
The discourse function of det: A determiner in Roper River Kriol
The subject of this paper is to present an analysis of a discourse particle used in an English lexified creole spoken in an Australian indigenous community, Roper River Kriol. This includes investigating a part of speech that looks like (and is historically derived from) the English demonstrative ‘that’ or ‘those’, and at first glance seems to function as an adnominal demonstrative (i.e. it is syntactically dependant on the head of the NP). It occurs in the configuration NP -> DET N. i.e.
(1) Yu-mob luk det dubala jet
2pl look DET two aeroplane
Look at those two aeroplanes
I will present evidence to suggest it can also behave as an article. As in the English ‘the’, to refer to previously mentioned referents in the discourse e.g.
(2) gat det ki-holda ai bin bayim
INST DET keychain 1.sg PST buy
With the key-chain I bought
But on further analysis this determiner-like prenominal marker does not exhibit the expected distribution to fit either of these categories. Not only does it occur with unusual frequency in the doscourse, but it can also precede proper nouns such as place and peoples’ names. As in:
(3) maitbi im jeya, pobala det Birna
Maybe 3sg there poor.thing DET [personal name]
Maybe she’s there, poor thing (that) B.
This evidence suggests that the determiner is similar to ‘articles’ found in (at least some) of the substrate languages of Kriol (which are all Pama-Nyungan Australian languages), as these can also precede proper names and mark topic and also, most interestingly precede generic nouns (e.g. from Ngalagkan and Marra, Baker (to appear); Nunggubuyu, Heath 1984; and Munro 2004).
(4) womborrort en larrpburniny, tu neim im lib la keib, det larrpburniny
[two wallaby species names] two names, it lives in caves, the [species name]
Thus using theories of discourse analysis as developed by Myhill (1992) and Givon (2001; 1983) as well as frameworks employed by Himmelman (1996) and Lyons (1999) this analysis aims to investigate and explain the function and distribution of det in Kriol discourse.
The data is drawn from a corpus of naturally occurring conversations, as well as from Kriol speakers’ intuition about what constructions sound ‘good’ and what sounds ‘strange/unusual/wrong’.
References:
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