A Comparative Discourse Analysis of Some Bantu Languages in Tanzania

This report compares the discourse features of Bantu narrative texts using data from the Ngoreme, Ikizu and Kabwa languages of the Mara region of Tanzania and reports written on this data. The particular discourse features under examination fall into the categories of event line construction, where background, foreground, highlighting, text conclusions and points of departure are considered, and participant reference, where participant introduction, further reference to active participants and reactivation of participants after an absence are the subject areas. After an introduction to relevant theoretical material, general lexical and grammatical patterns are observed for each of the languages in every subject area with similarities and differences highlighted in the following comparison sections. Any variation caused by manner of production or text genre is also noted. In general, a high level of unity among the discourse features of the languages of the corpus is seen, though many exceptions are observed and analysed.