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Abstract:
In 1997 Kalavatu, a 45 year old man living in the village of Tauwema on Kaile'una, one of the Trobriand Islands in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, told a group of children and some adults the story of Kavalokwa. In this talk I first present this tale in morpheme-interlinear transcription and translation (see handout), then I look at the text in detail with respect to both its form and content. This analysis reveals the macrostructure of the tale and isolates the verbal means used by the narrator which indicate the linearization principles that underlie this macrostructure of the story. The talk ends with some concluding remarks on the anthropological-linguistic and cognitive linguistic significance of studies like the present one.
