The Study of Participant Reference in Eight Chapters of Kelileh and Demneh

Abstract
Narrative is a collection of interconnected utterances that create a discourse. According to Levinsohn (2015) one of the essential components of narrative discourse analysis is participant reference. Participants in a narrative may be human and non-human major participants, also human and non-human minor participants such as animals. Languages use different reference devices such as: zero anaphora, noun pronouns and phrases which refer to participants in narrative discourse. This research attempts to describe and examine different ways of participant reference, methods of introducing major and minor participants in some stories of Kelileh and Demneh based on Levinsohn (2015) model. The data examined in this study consists of eight chapters which include twenty stories. In each story, this reference devices were examined in subject and non-subject context and analyzed with SPSS software and Chi-squer test. The results indicated that the examined stories of Kelile and Demne used different reference devices such as: zero anaphora, pronouns and noun phrases which refer to major and minor participants in narrative discourse. Furthermore, the results showed that the reference devices and types of participants had a meaningful relationship. Also, among participant reference devices; zero anaphora had the highest use, noun phrases and pronouns were at the next range.
 

Introduction

As far as the approach of narrative discourse analysis is concerned, Levinsohn (2015) is among the linguists who has presented narrative discourse components in narrative studies. On Levinsohn’s opinion, discourse is a connected series of utterances and narrative is a series of connected events in the form of either spoken or written. Sometimes, the sequence of the occurrence of events is important because it indicates the temporal and spatial distance of each event which, in turn, is a signal of cohesion in a text. Consequently, he deals with the explanation of essential components of the narrative discourse analysis that may exist in a text.  According to Levinsohn’s (2015) model, the narrative discourse components comprise the number of speakers in a text, text genre, text style and text register, being oral or written text, cohesion, coherence, participant reference, thematic grouping, discontinuities, text charting, the main concept of reference, reference strategies, the methodology for analyzing reference patterns and types of speech reporting. So, one of the narrative discourse components is participant reference which refers to types of the participant (major, VIP (very important), minor, human, and animal) and the ways of giving reference to each participant. As Levinsohn (2015) states, languages typically have a fairly extensive range of forms of giving reference to participants in a story which extend from complete ellipsis (in the form of zero anaphora) to an implicit reference conveyed only by the inflection of the verb, to two or more sets of independent pronouns, to a full noun phrase. In addition, he maintains that, in many cultures, the easiest narratives to obtain are traditional folktales such as animal stories; they can be very valuable for text analysis. As he believes, animals are symbolic of humans in folktales stories. They behave and talk like humans. In this regard, the translation of Kelileh and Demneh is one of the examples of animal’s stories in Persian literature in which allegorical stories are narrated from the language of animals appearing in a social link. Therefore, recognizing narrative discourse characteristics of this book will be very effective in its analyzing and understanding. Thus, this research is going to identify, study and describe types of participants and the use of different discourse devices employed to refer to the participants in eight chapters of Kelileh and Demneh stories based on levinsohn’s (2015) model as well as to answer the following questions:
The major research question:

Can we study and describe types of participant reference components in some stories of Kelileh and Demneh based on Levinsohn’s (2015) model?

The minor research questions:
1-1- How are types of participant reference components proposed in Levinsohn’s (2015) model represented in some stories of Kelileh and Demneh?
1-2- What kind of relationship is there between the usage frequency of types of participants in some stories of Kelileh and Demneh?
1-3- What kind of relationship is there between the usage frequency of types of giving reference ways to participants in some stories of Kelileh and Demneh?
1.1. Detailed Research Method
The method of doing this research has been library research. In this regard, first, the related theses, articles and books were studied to describe the theoretical concepts of the research, as well as all the previous research having commonalities whit the present research either in the use of Levinsohn’s (2015) model or in the analysis of Kelileh and Demneh text were reviewed. In this research, eight out of total number of fifteen chapters of Kelileh and Demneh including “Borzoye-y-e Tabib”, “Shir va Gav”,” Bazjoste kar Demneh”, “Kabootar-e motavvagheh” Boom va Gharab”,” Moosh va Gorbeh”, “Shir va Ebne Avi” and “Ebne Malek va Ashab” were selected. Then different types of participant reference used in these chapters were identified and examined. The data analysis method is descriptive-qualitative because the purpose is to describe and compare the usage frequency of types of participants and the ways of referring to each participant. The results were analyzed by using SPSS software which is a statistical package for social sciences. In this analysis, Chi-Square test was used.

Discussion

As above-mentioned, according to Levinsohn (2015), participant reference is one of the discourse components in the structure of a narrative which includes types of the participant and the ways of giving reference to the participants. As to the latter, in each language, there is a range of referential forms of participants in a story. These reference giving devices maybe noun phrases, pronouns or zero anaphora. Based on the data gathered, it was recognized that types of the participant were realized in the form of major, minor, human, and animal participants. In addition, it was specified that zero anaphora had the highest frequency in relation to the way of giving reference to participants where a personal ending refers to a participant that is the agent of the verb in narrative structure. In other words, the participant is syntactically and semantically present but without a phonetic representation. The use of zero anaphora or null subject pronouns in Persian language is one of its grammatical features which causes it to be regarded as a pro-drop language. Also, the use of pronouns and noun phrases were in the next ranges. That is to say, pronouns such as “man (I)”, “to (you)”, “u (she or he)” or noun phrases such as “Demneh” and “Shanzabe” were used to refer to participants in the story.
As a result, this study indicated that the types of participant reference components represented in the stories of Kelileh and Demneh under investigation were in agreement with those presented in Levinsohn’s (2015) model. So, the answer to the question (1-1) is positive. In addition, the analysis and description of different types of participants and also different types of giving reference ways in a number of Kelileh and Demneh stories showed that there was a significant relationship between the usage frequency of types of participants. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the usage frequency of types of giving reference ways to participants. Therefore, due to the frequency, percentage and mean of the usage of different types of participant reference components in the stories under study, the answer to the main question is positive as well.  This, in turn, means that we can study and describe types of participant reference components in some stories of Kelileh and Demneh based on Levinsohn’s (2015) model.
Therefore, due to the theoretical importance of this research and exploring different types of participants and also the ways of giving reference to each of the participants in a number of Kelileh and Demneh stories following Levinsohn’s (2015) model, the present study can be not only a model to the scientific studies of other Kelileh and Demneh stories, but also an outline for exploration and study of narrative discourse of other related literary works. In addition, the findings of this research show that the reference system of Kelileh and Demneh discloses the three functions or tasks suggested by Dooly and Levinsohn (2001): the semantic, discourse- pragmatic and processing functions, by employing different reference devices. In other words, the use of each participant reference devises or components aims at fulfilling the functions of the language reference system. Studying and recognizing these tasks and the reference devises can lead to a better understanding of the narrative discourse structure of the stories of Kelileh and Demneh.

Conclusion

In this research, the participant reference components were examined in the form of types of the participants and the ways of giving reference to the participants in subject and non-subject contexts in eight chapters of Kelileh and Demneh. The data surveyed in this study designated that different types of the participants were identified in Kelileh and Demneh stories, being major and minor participants including humans and animals. Likewise, in order to refer to each of the participants various reference devices such as noun phrases, zero anaphora and pronouns were used to introduce and refer to different types of the participants involved, among which zero anaphora had the highest usage frequency, the pronouns and noun phrases were in the next ranks of the usage.

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