Discourse Organization and Referent Tracking in Gorwaa Narratives

There are many ways in which a story can be told, and languages throughout time and across the world have developed strategies that work in tandem with the linguistic structure to create organized narratives. This is also the case for Gorwaa, a South Cushitic language spoken by around 133,000 people in the Tanzanian Rift Valley. There is a plethora of strategies that can be included in a narrative structure, but in this paper I will be focusing on two essential parts: referent tracking and discourse organization. By the former I mean keeping track of the participants in a story, both semantically and grammatically, and by the latter I mean the structuring of events as to create a coherent, understandable, sequence in a narrative. Gorwaa shows a remarkable interconnection between lower-level discourse organizational elements, such as interjections and rhetorical questions, and the organization of a narrative as a whole – showcasing the importance of a broad perspective when analysis narrative structures. Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change. Acknowledgement and citation: Mayer, Clemens. 2020. Discourse organization and referent tracking in Gorwaa narratives. Talk given at the Gorwaa Symposium, Leiden University, the Netherlands. 27/08/2020.