Discourse Features in Balochi of Sistan (Oral Narratives)

Abstract: This work presents a first study of discourse features in Balochi narratives of Sistan. Discourse analysis investigates what are the properties that make for well-formed texts in a language. There are many approaches to discourse analysis and most approaches focus on a particular aspect of text formation. The approach to text linguistics or discourse analysis taken in this work is based on Dooley and Levinsohn’s Analyzing Discourse: A manual of basic concepts (2001). Their methodology has been refined over years of practical use and, among diverse methodologies, they follow a functional and cognitive approach. In this dissertation, Roberts’ (2009) application of Dooley and Levinsohn’s methodology to Persian is followed in the study of our Sistani Balochi text corpus.In chapters 2-7 this approach is applied to Balochi narrative text. Chapter two introduces the reader to the discourse-pragmatic structuring of sentences in BS and chapter three shows how different syntactic devices can distinguish foreground and background information in BS oral texts. In chapter four we study the deixis of time and place and how the concept of proximal and distal deixis applies across a range of deictic elements. Chapter five examines some basic connectives and how they link propositions in the discourse context, and in chapter six reported speech is studied. Chapter seven illustrates how different participants are introduced into a discourse and how their activation status is signalled throughout the discourse.Appendix 1 contains details of the Balochi text-corpus used, and Appendix 2 contains interlinearized versions of ten of the main texts used in the study. A CD with nine audio files and one video file of the ten texts from Appendix 2, plus one extra video file, is also included.