Identificability and identificability pathways in a traditional oral narrative in Eastern México

Abstract

Du Bois and Thompson (1991) have contributed to the study of the information flow (Chafe, 1985, 1993), by identifying five dimensions which have proved to be particularly useful in the understanding of a range of grammatical phenomena, especially those concerning noun phrases: identifiability, identifiability pathway, activation state, generalizability and discourse referentiality. My concern here is to discuss the aplicability and relevance of the concepts and specificities of identifiability and identifiability pathway to a traditional oral narrative recorded in Spanish in a Mexican village. Since Du Bois and Thompson’s study relies on English conversational data, the aim here is to broaden the scope of the original proposal in order to confirm the applicability and relevance of those dimensions in a discourse that is qualitative distinctive in two aspects: first, because it is a traditional oral narrative; second, because it was narrated in a different language, Spanish.