Participant reference and tracking in San Francisco Ozolotepec Zapotec

This study analyzes the encoding devices that refer to and track participants throughout thirdperson narrative texts in San Francisco Ozolotepec Zapotec (SFOZ). SFOZ is an Oto-Manguean language of southern Mexico. Without a third-person pronoun (other than that used to show respect), SFOZ relies on null reference, nouns, focused nouns, NPs and focused NPs to refer to participants. Givón's (1983, 1994) quantitative method and Dooley and Levinsohn's (2001) charting method for analyzing participant references were applied to three SFOZ texts. Dooley and Levinsohn’s method proved most helpful by showing general default encodings for varied contexts, use of overencoded references following episode boundaries, frequent use of nouns for nonsubject references, as well as distinct referential patterns based on participant rank.

This book is a slightly-revised version of the author's thesis presented to the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics in partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics, 2003.