| Popis: |
Comparative analysis of the discourse of five female and six male speakers of American English sampled during identical narrative tasks reveals that, all things being equal, male speakers are more likely to use the 5 position as a slot for new referent introduction. In other words, neutralization of 5 and O categories seems to happen in the male narratives. In the male data examined, the manner of new referent distribution seems closer to that found in a morphologically ergative language such as Sacapultec (Du Bois 1987). This discrepancy between male and female discourse calls for further analysis of the discourses of the twelve remaining male speakers. This will allow us to extend the comparison to Kumagai's data on twenty female speakers (2004a, b), and furthermore, to examine whether the manner of new referent distribution in argument positions in male speech is as ergative as it is in Sacapultec, or whether the alignment pattern is, like female speech, constrained by the extent to which English is morphologically accusative. |
