Multiparty storytelling in Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the functions of interactional devices used by co-tellers in multiparty stories in Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u, two closely related dialects of a Paman language of Cape York Peninsula, Australia. Within the Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u speech community there is a strong cultural preference for multiparty storytelling – a preference which has been noted in a number of Aboriginal Australian contexts. This paper seeks to understand the mechanisms through which co-tellers in these multiparty narratives contribute to the story. It first discusses co-teller roles, and distinguishes three key narrator roles and orders of conduct associated with each. The analysis then focuses on the use of questions and evaluative comments used by one type of co-teller, supporting narrators. The following discussion demonstrates that questions and evaluative comments go beyond immediate functions of seeking information or spontaneous expressive reactions. They help to fulfil expectations on supporting narrators to engage actively in the talk. It is additionally shown that these devices have functions in highlighting key aspects of the story and developing stance in intricate ways that complement the main line of the storytelling. The analysis demonstrates the close coordination of co-tellers in constructing a story; piece-by-piece they collaboratively describe and evaluate the story events as a group, prioritizing a local and situated shared telling over other potential story goals like performance and progressivity of a plot. The analysis of Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u storytelling contributes to the field of interaction and narrative studies by furthering our understanding of the organization of storytelling in different cultures and languages contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Multiparty storytelling
• questions
• evaluative comments
• narrator roles
• epistemics

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u speakers who taught me about their language and shared their stories with me, and to the wider Lockhart River community who encouraged and supported this work. I thank the Lockhart River Aboriginal Shire Council and Lockhart Arts and Cultural Centre for invaluable support. My fieldwork was funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (grant MDP0133) and internal grant funding from Language and Cognition Group at The Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. I thank Jean-Christophe Verstraete, Nick Enfield and Stephen Levinson for many insightful comments on the analysis of these stories through my PhD candidature. Part of this material was presented in talks at The Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and The University of Leuven, and also at the Australian Languages Workshop at Marysville, Victoria in 2018. I thank members of the audience for useful comments on all these occasions. I am also grateful to Lesley Stirling and two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments and suggestions on a previous version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available through restricted access (community consent required) in the Endangered Languages Archive at http://elar.soas.ac.uk/deposit/0059, reference number paman-hill-0059.

Notes

1 The main exception being before time narratives (well-known central Australian counterpart referred to as dreaming or dream-time stories) which deal with the activities of mythological beings and/or ancestral peoples and the formation of the natural world as it appears today. A detailed discussion of the proprietary rights that motivate a single-narrator mode of storytelling for these narratives can be found in Hill (2018, pp. 40–52).

2 Relatedly Mushin (2016) and Sansom (1980) showed differences in what epistemic access means for interactional norms for Garrwa and people of Darwin regions respectively.

3 These projects were: (i) Oral Histories and Stories of the Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u Peoples of Lockhart River Language and Culture Documentation in 2004, undertaken in collaboration with Lockhart River Land and Sea Management Centre and Lockhart River Arts and Cultural Centre, funded by Australian Institute of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Studies; (ii) Cape York Peninsula Language Documentation Teams in 2005, undertaken in collaboration with the Lockhart River Arts and Cultural Centre funded by Maintenance of Indigenous Languages and Records Program; (iii) Five Paman Languages of Cape York Peninsula between 2007 and 2011, undertaken in collaboration with Lockhart River Aboriginal Shire Council, which supported PhD fieldtrips of the author and was funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Program.

4 Further specialised participant roles could be teased apart to account for aspects of the narration, e.g. following Goffman (1979, 1981) and related commentaries, roles such as transmitter vs. author and addressed recipient vs. unaddressed recipient may have some bearing on these stories. However, for the purposes of this analysis, the proposed distinction between primary and supporting narrator roles has considerable analytical power and accounts for the orders of conduct observed through stories and through the whole story collection analyzed.

5 Though in some instances the conditioning factors behind the allocation of a primary narrator role are not explained by epistemic access and may be motivated by complex social and cultural factors relating to country and kinship networks/kin avoidance (Hill, 2018, pp. 56–57). Further work on such factors remains a topic for future research.

6 The abbreviations used in glossing follow those of the Leipzig Glossing Rules (https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php) with the addition of these abbreviations, used in example glossing: ♀ female anchor in kinterm, C child, DIR directional, DM demonstrative marker, exc exclusive, IGNOR ignorative, inc inclusive, INT interjection, NF non-future, PRES present. These notation conventions are used to indicate the timing and other aspects of the talk: ::: colons indicate a prolongation in production; ° the degree sign indicates that the talk following it was markedly quiet; = contiguous utterances, an equal sign is placed either side of utterances with no time gap; [ overlapping utterances, left hand square brackets mark the start of the overlap; (0.0) intervals within and between talk are measured in seconds and indicated in brackets; (.) micro-pause, a pause less than (0.2).

7 There are, of course, many interactional contexts where people ask questions they know the answer to: in interviews, in courtroom settings, in class rooms (Atkinson & Drew, 1979; Clayman & Heritage 2002; Levinson 1988).

8 This relates to some other work on questions in Australian Aboriginal languages, like Eades (1993) who suggests there is a preference for question formats which exchange information rather than just seek information. Eades (1993, 2013) and Walsh (1997) suggest Aboriginal Australian people tend to avoid answering some direct information seeking questions, particularly those of a personal nature. Albeit not an everyday interaction, this study finds no interactional issues with speakers producing information seeking questions or responding to them in this storytelling context.

9 Timing between turns in the transcripts (and subset of the analyzed narrative collection) are accurately measured directly from the digital sound file. Following conventions established in Conversation Analysis silences of 0.2 s or more were measured, and silences of less than 0.2 s are indicated by this convention (.) and referred to as a micro-pause (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984; Jefferson, 1989).

10 Some activities in conversation have been described as being achieved chorally rather than serially; e.g. greetings and leave takings (Lerner, 2002) and congratulations (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987).

11 Verstraete (2011) makes a similar point for reported speech in narratives in neighbouring language Umpithamu.

12 In contrast to other parts of the narration which typically use simple human classificatory terms for third person reference (e.g. chilpu ‘old man’, anthaya ‘girl’, kanga ‘initiate’, para ‘white man’), supporting narrator’s evaluative comments often feature self-associated kin-terms. In the King Fred narrative, MP repeatedly refers to the protagonist as maampa ‘(my) son’ as can be seen in the opening example (4) ‘that one, son, I cry out for poor son!’; across the 10 comment utterances in this narrative, there are nine uses of maampa ‘(my) son’ (see Table 3). Often the use of kin-terms in these contexts is strategic and helps to ground the speaker’s assessments and reactions via a demonstration of the genealogical connections to the said character (Hill, 2016, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant CE140100041; Endangered Languages Documentation Programme under Grant ELDP MDP0133; and Max-Planck-Gesellschaft under an internal fieldwork grant within the Language and Cognition group at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Notes on contributors

Clair Hill

Clair Hill is a Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Languages at The University of New South Wales and an Adjunct Fellow in The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development at Western Sydney University. She has a special interest and expertise in Australian languages, especially Paman languages (Umpila and Kuuku Ya’u) of north-eastern Cape York Peninsula. There are two central threads in her work: an exploration of the interaction between language, cognition and culture, and collaborating with communities to translate this research into useful language documentation and language revitalization products.