Tales from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea : Psycholinguistic and anthropological linguistic alyses of tales told by Trobriand children and adults

This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories, but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other rrative strategies, how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic alyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative alysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic, anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories, the means rrators use to structure them, their structural complexity and their cultural

specificity. [Publisher's text]