Tense/aspect shifting in Kala Lagaw Ya oral narratives

Abstract

Kala Lagaw Ya is the language of the Western Torres Strait islands, with two main dialects centred around Saibai Island and Mabuiag Island. It exhibits complex tense/aspect marking involving both temporal remoteness distinctions (metrical tense) and aspectual distinctions. This article investigates the discourse-semantics of tense/aspect marking in a small corpus of oral traditional narratives from the Mabuiag dialect. Unsurprisingly, the resources of the 'metrical tense system' are not fully exploited in the 'narrative' texts, which exhibit a restricted range of narrative past tense marking including the Remote Past Perfective, a Remote Past Imperfective and a Present (or Non-Future) tense...