Gary R. Butler

Indexicality, Authority, and Communication in Traditional Narrative Discourse

Recognizing the distinction between narrative as text and narrative as discourse is fundamental to an understanding of the spoken and unspoken dimensions oforal tradition as communicative process. The role relationship that develops between narrator and audience within the performance context is a function of communicative intent, as the narrator molds the performance in a manner consistent with the audiences receptive competence to recognize and correctly interpret encoded traditional knowledge. A narrative is thus a combination of reference and inference, which together make the narrative a highly indexicalized mode of communication. For these reasons, the discourse objectives are as highly variable as the discourse situations within which they are deployed.

First-person plural in Prince Edward Island Acadian French: The fate of the vernacular variant je...ons

In Atlantic Canada Acadian communities, definite on is in competition with the traditional vernacular variant je ...o ns(e.g., on parle vs. je parlons “we speak”), with the latter variant stable only in isolated communities, but losing ground in communities in which there is substantial contact with external varieties of French. We analyze the distribution of the two variants in two Prince Edward Island communities that differ in terms of amount of such contact. The results of earlier studies of Acadian French are confirmed in that je ...o nsusage remains robust in the more isolated community but is much lower in the less isolated one. However, in the latter community, the declining variant, while accounting for less than 20% of tokens for the variable, has not faded away. Although it is not used at all by some speakers, it is actually the variant of choice for others, and for still other speakers, it has taken on a particular discourse function, that of indexing narration. Comparison with variation in the third-person plural, in which a traditional variant is also in competition with an external variant, shows that the decline of je ...o nsis linked to its greater saliency, making it a prime candidate for social reevaluation.

New insights on an old rivalry: The passé simple and the passé composé in spoken Acadian French

This study investigates the expression of past temporal reference in a highly conservative variety of Acadian French spoken in the Baie Sainte-Marie region of Nova Scotia, Canada. Variationist analysis of data from a sociolinguistic corpus for the village of Grosses Coques reveals a split between narrative and conversational discourse, with variation mainly between use of the passe simple and the imparfait in the former and between the passe compose and the imparfait in the latter. The passe simple remains in robust use in this variety and is constrained in a manner similar to that found in 17th-century representations of colloquial speech involving narration.

Personal Experience Narratives and the Social Construction of Meaning in Confrontational Discourse

Toronto’s African Caribbean community is marked by the different, sometimes conflicting perspectives on oral traditions held by those who had acquired primary enculturation in their home countries and those who had been raised in the metropolitan Canadian context. This article analyzes an instance of naturally occurring discourse where the interactants hold asymmetrical cultural definitions of the tradition of Trinidadian obeah. It demonstrates how narrative is used to construct authoritative evidence during verbal conflict, illustrating how negotiated discourse and status-role identities are emergent attributes of the interaction itself and not qualities of the performer or the text when considered independently of this situational context.

The French Discourse Marker Mais Dame: Past and Present Functions

We examine the evolution and current use of the French discourse marker mais dame, whose usage was first attested in Metropolitan French early in the 19th century. This expression has since fallen into disuse, to the point that many present-day Metropolitan French speakers do not even know it. We first determine the discourse functions of mais dame in literary texts (comedies and farces) from the 19th century. We then consider the use of mais dame in naturally occurring discourse, from conversational and narrative discourse with Newfoundland Franco-Acadians—descendants in part of 19th-century immigrants from France who speak a conservative variety of the language—who use the marker frequently. We find that the 19th-century literary usages anticipate the use of mais dame in Newfoundland French. Moreover, we show that mais dame plays an important role as an evaluative marker in oral narration. Nous examinons l’évolution diachronique et les fonctions synchroniques du marqueur du discours mais dame, usage qui date du début du XIXe siècle en français métropolitain. Considéré comme vieilli par les lexicologues de nos jours, il n’est pas surprenant que beaucoup de nos témoins de la Métropole l’ignorent. Tout d’abord, nous établissons les fonctions de mais dame dans des pièces de théâtre françaises (comédies et farces) du XIXe siècle. Ensuite, nous considérons ses fonctions dans une variété conservatrice de la langue—le franco-acadien de Terre-Neuve, issu des colons acadiens et français—où ce marqueur est encore vivant. L’examen d’une base de données de la langue parlée (y compris la conversation et la narration) identifie des fonctions qui reflètent l’usage dans les pièces. De plus, nous démontrons l’importance de mais dame comme marqueur évaluatif de la narration orale.