LEXICAL DYNAMICS IN TRADITIONAL ORAL NARRATIVE

Abstract

Lexical choice has caught the attention of a number of disciplines, including psychology, linguistic anthropology and discourse studies. Although it has been demonstrated referentiality and lexical choice play a key role in the cohesion and management of information in narrative obtained through semi-experimental means; such phenomena have been little explored in traditional oral narrative. Based on Downing’s approach (1980), this work discusses the influence of cognitive, contextual and textual factors on the narrator’s decisions as to how to verbally express, as the interaction unfolds, the set of states, events and characters he or she has in mind. In this way, this paper evidences the interactive nature of the narrator’s decisions and the dynamic interplay between the discursive frames and the communication event as a whole, on the one hand, and the participants’ roles and the respective points of view, on the other. In addition, this paper addresses the narrator’s resources to select and articulate the stories displayed in the communication event as such, as well as the interplay between the traditional knowledge and the narrator ´s agentivity in terms of their relevance for the lexical choice. The data were obtained from three communication events recorded in Spanish between bilingual storytellers from neighboring villages in the Papantla region, State of Veracruz, Mexico.