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Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 36:2 (2021) ► pp.264–297

The discourse marker ale in Bislama oral narratives

 | Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
 | James Cook University, Australia
This study takes us to the South Pacific and concentrates on Bislama, one of the dialects of Melanesian pidgin (Siegel 2008: 4) and one of the official languages of Vanuatu. We take a discourse analysis perspective to map out the functions of ale, a conspicuous discourse marker in conversations and narratives. Using Labov & Waletzky (1967) model, we analyze the use of ale in narratives from the book Big Wok: Storian blong Wol Wo Tu long Vanuatu (Lindstrom & Gwero 1998) and determine that ale is a discourse marker which indicates temporal sequence and consequence, frames speech reports and closes a digression. We conclude our study by considering a possible historical development of ale. We map out how French allez could have become Bislama ale using imposition and functional transfer (Siegel 2008; Winford 2013a) of vernacular discourse markers (such as go in Nguna).
Keywords: Bislama, Vanuatu, discourse marker, narrative analysis, functional transfer, imposition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Discourse markers: A roadmap
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1The corpus, the cohort
    • 2.2The method
    • 2.3Bislama in a nutshell
  • 3. Ale in spoken Bislama
    • 3.1Prosodic properties of ale
    • 3.2Functions of the connective ale
    • 3.3More than a simple connective
      • 3.3.1Framing ale
      • 3.3.2Resumptive ale
    • 3.4Interim summary
  • 4. Allez! and Ale
    • 4.1 Allez!
    • 4.2 Ale as ‘encouragement to act’
    • 4.3From allez to ale
    • 4.4Imposition
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 14 January 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00076.alv
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