Nicolle, Steve

This thesis presents discourse patterns observed in eleven third-person narrative texts in the Magar Kham language. Narrators in this study make extensive use of clause-chaining to describe the main events of a story. The clause-chaining sentences in this study exhibit continuity across the three thematic domains associated with narrative texts. Magar Kham narrators adhere to a subject-oriented anaphoric reference strategy across clauses. Functioning with this basic strategy is a local VIP reference strategy for major participants. Magar Kham narrators prefer to begin a sentence with a point of departure and favor those which reactivate previously narrated events. Narrators make extensive use of the particle te to perform a number of pragmatic tasks, including thematic highlighting and developmental marking. Some of the narrators of this study contrast both prominent and backgrounded events from the main event line by nominalizing the main verb of the independent clause describing those events.

In this thesis, I outline a functional typology for categorizing internet memes using the cognitive linguistic theory of Conceptual Integration (CIT) and related concepts from Construction Grammar and Relevance theory. Although cognitive linguists have analyzed the communicative power of memes, their endeavours have yet to result in a typology that can organize all types of memes for extensible future analysis. Some meme categorization schemes have been proposed, but memes evolve too rapidly for these to be helpful long-term. I argue that CIT provides the necessary tools to construct a robust typology that can support descriptive meme analysis, emphasizing the importance of emergent dynamic meaning creation and phatic socio-pragmatic function to meme communication. I organize memes based on two functional concerns: 1) whether form and function explicitly correspond and 2) whether the meme’s meaning structure applies top-down from conventionalized instructions or bottom-up from a non-conventionalized pattern recognition process.