The grammar of interactives in !Xun (Namibia)

• Christa König ^[1] ; Bernd Heine ^[2]
  1. [1] University of Frankfurt
  2. [2] University of Köln
• Localización: The Grammar of Interaction: Epistemicity, information management and discourse in language use / coord. por Susana Rodríguez Rosique, Jordi M. Antolí Martínez, 2025, ISBN 978-90-272-2860-4, págs. 212-242
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Over the last decades, the nature of social exchange has become an increasingly popular topic of discourse linguistics. The present paper focuses on one particular aspect of the on-going debate. It is based on the model of interactive grammar (Heine 2023), resting on the comparative analysis of grammatical descriptions of well over one hundred languages. In this model, ten types of interactives, that is, extra-clausal expressions of linguistic discourse, are distinguished. Interactives form a grammatical domain of their own, to be distinguished from that of sentence grammar. Work on interactive grammar has so far largely been restricted to the analysis of conversational interaction. The goal of this paper is to extend the model to the study of narrative texts. To this end, the paper is concerned with a set of 20 fictional spoken narratives in a little-known African language to explore the role that interactives play in them. This language is !Xun (also known as Ju), spoken by traditional hunter-gatherers in Namibia, Angola and Botswana. The paper demonstrates that interactive grammar provides an important tool for processing narrative discourse.