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Planned vs Unplanned Discourse: Oral Narrative vs Conversation in Woods Cree

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Donna Starks
Donna Starks*
Affiliation:
The University of Auckland
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Extract

Most research on Algonquian languages, of which Cree is a typical example, is based on collections of narrative texts (Wolfart 1973; Dahlstrom 1986; James 1986). Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, the use of one particular type of database in such an extensive amount of research lends itself to a genre-biased description of the language. In oral cultures, many narrative texts are typically preplanned (Chafe 1985) and therefore will have, according to researchers in discourse analysis, many of the features of preplanned texts such as complete and longer sentences, higher clause density and a larger proportion of subordinate clauses (Brown and Yule 1985:151–117; Biber 1988:47). In addition, other language-specific features may occur.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , December 1994 , pp. 297 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1994

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