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Information Structure In Mangghuer: A Narrative Text Analysis Of Topic And Focus In A Mongolic Language Of Northwestern China, Cory Christopher Coogan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes information structure in Mangghuer, a Mongolic language spoken in northwestern China. My analysis relies on a set of twenty-three narrative texts published in the 2005 volume, Folktales of China's Minhe Mangghuer (Chen et al. 2005), and I also draw from the text "Lu Buping," published in the 2001 Mangghuer Folktale Reader (Stuart & Zhu 2001). I rely on Lambrecht's (1994) approach to information structure as a theoretical framework to analyze these texts. I also apply methods from Levinsohn's (2015) "Self Instruction-Materials on Narrative Discourse Analysis." Default information structure in Mangghuer is the topic-comment sentence. The default form …