Lecture | Descriptive Linguistics Seminars
Participant reference in Boa-Leboale
- Date
- Friday 14 June 2024
- Time
- Series
- Descriptive Linguistics Seminars
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden
Abstract
The study of discourse-level features in narrative texts in the Leboale dialect of the Boa language (C44), spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), reveals undescribed characteristics of participant reference in the language. Several nominal forms are used to refer to participants. This is partly related to different episodes of a text. Narrative texts typically have major and minor participants, i.e. characters which play some kind of role in the story. Participants are introduced and tracked. They may be reactivated after an absence. Attention is also given to narrative functions of demonstratives in the language.
This study is based on ten narrative texts collected since 2018. They are part of a corpus of at present over 70 texts with yearly additions of new material produced by the Boa literacy team. The Boa language community has a provisional orthography made in 2022. The Boa project is a collaboration between LUCL, CITBA (an organization in the DRC), funded through crowdfunding by the Leiden University Fund.