How to not lose the track: tail-head linkage as a mechanism for maintaining cohesion of spatial information in Dâw narratives

Abstract

References to landscape and places are central in traditional narratives by speakers of Dâw (Naduhup, Brazilian Amazon). This emphasis on spatial reference is primarily established through locative adverbial clauses that are often repeated throughout the discourse. Their function is to relate an event to a place, establish reference to locative information mentioned earlier in discourse, and provide cohesion when pre-posed to the main clause. In this syntactic position, they act as bridges connecting sentences and paragraphs by referring to antecedent context. Locative adverbial clauses in clause-initial position are interesting in Dâw because they can occur as exact replicas of a locative adverbial clause that was postposed to the main clause of the antecedent sentence. This strategy has been described in the literature as tail-head linkage. Its central function is to maintain coherence among participants and events along subsequent sentences in discourse and to ensure that the interlocutor is able to track the numerous locations mentioned in the narrative. This paper explores the functional and formal properties of tail-head linkage by focusing on locative adverbial clauses in Dâw, and contributes to the understanding of how processes of subordination can be responsible for tracking spatial information in the discourse of Dâw speakers.

Complex structures in Brazilian Indigenous languages

“…He also discusses the differences in the interpretation of additive and conjunction constructions by showing that the former is associated with a distributive interpretation and the latter with a collective interpretation. Obert (2021) describes the formal and functional properties of tail-head linkage in Dâw (Naduhup family). She shows that the repetition of place references in Dâw narratives is a strategy used by its speakers for the establishment of event and participant coherence.…”