Karitiâna Clauses

The Karitiâna texts which have been gathered so far fall into three groups, historical narrative texts, folk tales, and speeches. They are distinguished on the basis of the clauses and other elements, which occur in them. Narrative clauses are found only in historical narrative and folk tale texts. Folk tales are distinguished from other texts by their use of two modals, sarut 'they say' and õm 'it appears'. The third type of text, speeches, is completely made up of ideophonic and reported speech clauses, with no narrative clauses. Ideophonic and reported speech clauses also occur in the other types of text. Narrative folk tale texts have been selected for study both because they form the bulk of the present corpus, and because they contain allclause types. The three types of clauses already mentioned, narrative clauses, ideophonic clauses and reported speech clauses, are the ones most frequently observed, forming over seventy per cent of the folk tale texts. Each of these carries particular kinds of information within the text, each has its own typical structure, and there is some interlocking between the various types.