A Study of the Ngadha Text Tradition: a Linguistic Investigation of the Collective Mind of the Ngadha People on the Island of Flores, Indonesia.

Abstract

The structure of an oral narrative text is examined in order to discover the strategies used by the narrator in the building of the text. The main body of data under analysis is a traditional Ngadha legend entitled "The legend of Penu and Vegu the orphan" which has been taped, transcribed, translated, and put into writing for the first time. Additional data presented in this study are the Ngadha goo-laba (bronze gongs and skin drums) music and a traditional song. The objective of the study is to extract the principles of order and coherence from the diverse realms of social thought and action, whether they be manifest in language, text structure, rituals, concepts of time and space, attitudes connected with the social relations and place of individuals in the society, or the symbolisms contained in the text, ritual music and song. The thesis is concerned primarily with collective representations manifest in language, in the text and its performance, and the social discourse that it evokes. The text under analysis is viewed as a form of knowledge h and ed down from generation to generation by word-of-mouth and the content and symbolisms contained in it reflect the collective mind and imagination of the Ngadha people. The secondary purpose of the study is to present the basic mechanisms of the Ngadha grammar. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 describes the old tradition of Ngadha and the goals of the dissertation. It summarizes the consecutive chapters in the dissertation and presents a brief review of some literature within linguistics, literary criticism and anthropology that serve as a theoretical background of the study. Chapter 2 presents the text, "The legend of Penu and Vegu the orphan" and its translations (i.e. morpheme-by-morpheme gloss and free translation in English). Some background about the story-teller, the performance setting, and the conventions adopted for the transcription and gloss of the text is included. Chapter 3 presents a sketch grammar of the Ngadha language. The sketch grammar is meant to provide a foundation for the discussion of the higher level structure of the legend text (presented in Chapter 4) and to introduce the reader to the basic mechanisms of the grammar of the Ngadha language. Chapter 4 presents the higher level structures of the legend text. The analysis is concerned with the coherence systems which provide the basic framework of the text (i.e. time, location, and identity), the interplay between the story world and the real world, and the episodic and paragraph subdivisions of the text. Finally, the Appendices consist of three parts: Appendix I presents the calendrical systems which explain the traditional Ngadha concept of time, Appendix II presents a brief description of the goo-laba ensemble and music, and Appendix III presents a brief analysis of a traditional Ngadha song (The song of the indigo rooster).