Embodied Discourse and Viewpoint in Northern Pastaza Kichwa Storytelling

Abstract

Viewpoint is the locus of consciousness in a given space or conceptual model of the world. Human beings make use of several linguistic resources to project their own viewpoint as well as viewpoints of other entities. These resources are organized into “semiotic channels” which are categories based on the mode of information being conveyed. These channels run the gamut from the manipulation of the acoustic signal to the choice and arrangement of words and even facial expressions and gestures. The objective of this dissertation is to describe how and why speakers of Northern Pastaza Kichwa, a Quechuan language of Ecuador, use their speech and bodies to project viewpoint in narrative. In Chapter 1, I introduce Northern Pastaza Kichwa and its speakers as well as the concept of viewpoint. I also lay out the language corpora used in this dissertation and provide a primer on interpreting the linguistic examples used in this dissertation. Chapter 2 constitutes a grammar sketch of Northern Pastaza Kichwa, which provides the morphosyntactic and phonological underpinnings of the role that the vocal-aural modality plays in the multimodal expression of viewpoint as is described in the following chapters. In Chapter 3, I address the question of how Northern Pastaza Kichwa storytellers project viewpoint in narrative. I show that their viewpoint-projecting resources can be conceptually organized into three semiotic channels: the Speech Channel (phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena), the Body Channel (posture, facial expression, gaze, etc.), and the Hands Channel (manual gesture). Crucially, I argue that storytellers can make use of these channels to project multiple viewpoints simultaneously. For example, a speaker may project the viewpoint of a character in a narrative in the Speech Channel by using a reported speech construction and, simultaneously, by using her hands to represent the action of another character in the Hands Channel. In Chapter 4, I deploy descriptive and inferential quantitative methods to detect patterns in viewpoint projection and tackle questions relating to why Northern Pastaza Kichwa storytellers use said patterns. To this end, I conducted three case studies that each examine a different aspect of viewpoint projection. The first case study in Section 4.1 concerns the interaction between viewpoint and the language’s system of evidential clitics. Using logistic regression models, I show that the genre of the narrative and the viewpoint a storyteller uses in the Speech Channel at a given time are significant predictors of the storyteller’s choice of evidential clitic. The second case study in Section 4.2 uses logistic regression models to examine how frequently storytellers project multiple viewpoints simultaneously and what may motivate these mixed-viewpoint projections. I show that mixed-viewpoint projection is comparatively rare and, when occurring, is likely motivated by high-transitivity events. The third case study in Section 4.3 is qualitative in nature and explores the kinds of character viewpoints to which the storytellers prefer to allocate their resources. Here, I demonstrate that the storytellers often devote significant resources to projecting the viewpoints of supernatural spirit characters compared to the viewpoints of animal characters. In Chapter 5, I provide an overview of the findings of this dissertation and discuss their relevance to language documentation and description as well as to linguistic inquiry more generally. More specifically, I argue that the linguistic encoding of viewpoint is inherently multimodal and describe how Northern Pastaza Kichwa storytellers use their voices and bodies to create virtual environments to better represent the viewpoints of entities in narrative. These findings provide insight into human cognition and contribute to a growing body of knowledge that highlights the importance of storytelling practices in minority-language communities and oral culture at large. The use of the body in traditional storytelling practices is an undervalued component in models of language revitalization that are hyper-focused on developing literacy often at the expense of supporting oral and social language skills.