Person reference and interaction in Umpila/Kuuku Ya'u narrative

Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u storytellers of north-eastern Cape York Peninsula in Australia describe the way they tell most narratives as “we all talk one time”. This expression characterises a highly interactive mode of multi-party storytelling, where two or more narrators take turns or even co-produce turns to jointly tell a story. In this narrative style, storytellers prompt and prod each other, enthusiastically repeat or elaborate on each other’s narration, building up the story incrementally across turns. This storytelling technique is not unique in this region, having been posited as a distinguishing feature of Aboriginal Australian narratives more generally (Walsh 2016), however it remains relatively unexplored (exceptions being Black 2010; Haviland 1991; McGregor 1988b, 2004). This study aims to fill this gap in the literature, by presenting a thesis-sized, data-driven examination of a significant collection of narratives of the Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u people.

The study employs person reference as a window into the organisation of Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u narratives. It examines what the selection, formulation and distribution of person reference expressions reveals about the various contingencies at play in the production of a story: how a group of narrators negotiate rights and roles in the joint delivery of the story; how different narrators’ stances and attitudes are conveyed; how miscommunications and misunderstandings between narrators are resolved; what devices are used to craft the story and develop themes across multiple narrators, and so on. Person reference formulation is well fitted to this analytical task. It is context-sensitive and culturally patterned and has been a recurrent and important topic in interaction and narrative studies. The analysis utilises person reference design principles from Conversation Analysis, while also supporting the investigation by drawing on relevant literature from narrative studies and interactional linguistics.

The two topics of narrative and person reference underlie the basic structure of this thesis, which consists of two parts. The first part of the study provides information on the structural repertoires in Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u relevant to the study. Chapter 2 provides an overview of aspects of narrative, dealing with modes of narration, narrative genres and the narrative corpus. It also discusses some basic aspects of the structure of multi-party narratives, including narrator roles. In this discussion primary and supporting narrator roles are distinguished based on clear linguistic and behavioural correlates. This chapter also shows that one of the most fundamental aspects of the delivery of narratives, i.e. whether they are narrated by multiple narrators and a single narrator, is affected by socially sanctioned rights to talk about a topic, determined by kin-based land ownership. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the linguistic resources available for person reference in Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the person reference repertoire, such as kin-terms, social status terms, denizen expressions and pronouns. In this chapter the reader is introduced to the semantic complexities of the Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u kinship domain, which has the largest number of specific terms, coding the finest semantic distinctions of all the person reference resources. Other notable person reference resources in this system are a suite of special reference expressions to talk about denizen membership, which code both linguistic affiliation and land connection. Chapter 4 moves onto analysing the structure of the noun phrase, i.e. the morphosyntactic unit that is central to inserting these reference resources into clauses and narrative structures. This chapter demonstrates that in Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u NP units are more clearly defined and structured than has been often reported in the Australian context. A key finding is the ways in which the Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u NP structure encourages use of multiple NPs to express some information. These include combinatorial tendencies restricting the use of possessive pronouns and basic determiners with human classificatory terms and kin-terms respectively, and restrictions on the use of multiple modifiers in a single phrase.

The second part of this thesis uses person reference to examine the nature of multi-party narratives, in three contexts: (i) initial reference; (ii) subsequent reference; and (iii) reference at major thematic junctures. In all distributional parameters explored, person reference formulation is shown to be a central tool in the Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u narrator’s development of narrative topic and in the management of the socio-interactional contingencies of storytelling.

Chapter 5 studies initial person reference. This analysis applies a set of person reference design principles, developed to account for cross-linguistic patterns in person reference, to Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u narrative. The principles are shown to respond in predictable ways to the particularities of the organisation of interaction and interlocutor goals associated with the Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u narrative context. Narrators were shown to prioritise topic-fittedness (preference for a speaker to fit the reference expression to the topic or action being pursued) over all other principles. In unmarked references this generates the preferential use of simple descriptive expressions, which effectively convey action within the storytelling world by casting persons in terms of social role. Chapter 5 also shows a number of marked deviations from default person reference in initial contexts, specifically the use of special constructions consisting of multiple referring expressions. The discussion shows that these have dual functions in indicating thematic importance and affording collaboration between co-narrators.

Chapter 6 studies subsequent references to participants. Particular attention is paid in this chapter to the role of person reference in moments of high collaboration in the narration.  The use of multiple co-referential expressions is found in the form of in elaborative constructions, comments and exclamations, and question sequences. In these contexts supporting narrators contribute to building up the referential profile of important characters. Notable in this discussion are the findings related to other-initiated repair. Contrary to widely noted cross-linguistic patterns, co-tellers and recipients are shown to postpone dealing with problems achieving recognition of a character’s identity until well after initial reference. This pattern suggests that displays of a lack of shared knowledge and shared comprehension of some fundamental elements of the story are viewed as counter to the fundamental collaborative nature of the co-telling task narrators are undertaking.

Chapter 7 takes some of the fundamental observations made throughout the preceding chapters, and examines how they relate to the macro-organisation of narratives. Here the focus is on how narrators and recipients treat and receive thematic transitions in the story. The analysis shows how the launch of new thematic sequences, specifically those that constitute a notable change of location in the story, are associated with marked person reference devices. This chapter also considers the motivation behind differences in person reference design between multi-party narratives and the rarer category of single-party narratives. Primary narrators are shown to design the main thematic junctures in the multi-party stories differently, because the collaborative nature of narrative allows for high levels of recipient feedback, and in order to encourage co-teller participation in the narration.

In sum, in all distributional parameters explored, person reference formulation is shown to be a central tool in the Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u narrator’s management of the narrative structure and the socio-interactional contingencies of storytelling. The roll-call of pragmatic actions person reference aids is extensive. Implicated in, and overarching all these actions, person reference affords and manages collaboration between co-narrators. This is most striking when looking at narrators who have limited or no knowledge of the events that they assist in narrating. In such contexts it is clear that the embellishment and embroidery of person reference information is the crucial means for a narrator to fulfill the cultural preference for joint narration.