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Conférence: Clause-Initial Discourse Markers as Main-Event Line Indicators in Miluk and Alsea

(Abstract is attached as LaTeX file below)

In narrative discourse across the world’s languages, a fundamental distinction is made between clauses that advance the story—known as the main-event line (MEL)—and those that provide background information, elaboration, or evaluation. The MEL is typically understood as a sequence of temporally bounded, thematically central, and realis events that correspond to the canonical progression of a narrative plot (Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Hopper, 1979; Payne, 1992). In many languages, the MEL is encoded through verbal morphology, particularly through aspectual categories such as the perfective, or mood distinctions
like the realis/irrealis divide. However, this study focuses on two indigenous languages of the Pacific Northwest—Miluk and Alsea—which diverge significantly from this crosslinguistic norm. In both languages, clause-initial discourse markers, rather than verbal morphology, serve as the primary cues for identifying MEL clauses. This study and its findings extend beyond just the description and analysis of these languages, but push for typological reconsideration and investigation of narrative discourse in TAM systems across the world. It challenges traditional convential models of MEL encoding, and posits that these examples here must not be looked at as outliers or exceptions, but rather as windows into a more broad and more encompassing perspective on narrrative discourse as a whole.