MAGAR KHAM NARRATIVE DISCOURSE

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.