Introducing Participants in the Maikoti Kham 3rd Person Narrative, the Monk and the Animals

This article describes the grammatical forms used for introducing participants into a Maikoti Kham 3rd person narrative. The participants of The Monk and the Animals were ranked by importance based on the number of references to them as well as with Givón’s measurements for topicality. The grammatical forms used to encode the first reference of each participant are described and discussed according to five factors that Levinsohn (2007) identifies as affecting introductions: participant rank, salience marking, whether the mental representation is being introduced along with them, if the introduction is at a point of departure, and if there is any other grammatical highlighting. Most of the participants were introduced with the salience-boosting numeral tubu ‘one.’ All participants, except for the central participant, were introduced into an existing mental representation. All individual participants, except for the central participant, were introduced at a point of departure. The central participant was introduced with the most prominence and was the only participant introduced with a presentational sentence.