How to not lose the track: tail-head linkage as a mechanism for maintaining cohesion of spatial information in Dâw narratives

Como não perder o caminho: tail-head linkage como mecanismo de manter coesão de informação espacial em narrativas Dâw

Abstract

References to landscape and places are central in traditional narratives by speakers of Dâw (Naduhup, Brazilian Amazon). This emphasis on spatial reference is primarily established through locative adverbial clauses that are often repeated throughout the discourse. Their function is to relate an event to a place, establish reference to locative information mentioned earlier in discourse, and provide cohesion when pre-posed to the main clause. In this syntactic position, they act as bridges connecting sentences and paragraphs by referring to antecedent context. Locative adverbial clauses in clause-initial position are interesting in Dâw because they can occur as exact replicas of a locative adverbial clause that was postposed to the main clause of the antecedent sentence. This strategy has been described in the literature as tail-head linkage. Its central function is to maintain coherence among participants and events along subsequent sentences in discourse and to ensure that the interlocutor is able to track the numerous locations mentioned in the narrative. This paper explores the functional and formal properties of tail-head linkage by focusing on locative adverbial clauses in Dâw, and contributes to the understanding of how processes of subordination can be responsible for tracking spatial information in the discourse of Dâw speakers.

Keywords
Naduhup family; Locative adverbial clauses; Subordination; Tail-head linkage; Space; Discourse