LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 20:11 November 2020
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Discourse Analysis of Seven Brothers and their Sister –
A Story of Eravalla, a Dravidian Tribal Community

N. Vijayan, Ph.D. and N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.

Eravallan

Abstract

Language is used to express the objectives, motives, plots, and the socio-cultural attitudes of the community through literature. The organization and structure of a text has influenced several researchers to explore texts of different genres to gain insights into the flow of texts. This has gained importance in both literature teaching and research. In addition to the linguistic features and structures, the knowledge of the structure of organization of the story/text is very important to comprehend it. This study proposes six conceptual moves and their patterns in the organization. This ‘moves model’ has been applied in three of the Tamil ‘Sangam’ literatures and found them appropriate to be applicable to other genres as well. Keeping its usefulness in teaching and research, an attempt is made, here, to apply it to a tribal story of ‘Eravallan community’ of Tamil Nadu. The objective of the study is to find out whether the proposed ‘conceptual moves’ are applicable to storytellers also.

Keywords: Eravalla, Seven Brothers and their Sister, Discourse Analysis, tribal-lore, genres, Moves, meta-language.

1. Introduction

Language is used as a tool to express the ideas and the literature, spoken or written, is used to express and represent the life style, the thoughts that the society wants to expose, the philosophy of life and the tradition of the language speaking community, etc. The literary tradition used to change along with time and the conceptual style the community undergoes. They were approached differently in different periods keeping in view of the theoretical development such as Linguistics, Ecology. Environmental science, Anthropological studies, Stylistics, Psychology, Structural analysis, Feministic approach, Sociological approach, etc. This paper tries to analyze the oral story named ‘Seven brothers and their sister’ of ‘Eravallan’ Tribe / Eravalla community with the principles of Discourse approach.

‘Eravallan’ is a Dravidian Tribe dwelling in the areas between Pollachi and Udumalaippettai of Tamilnadu and Palacaud of Kerala states of India. The story was told by Mrs. Palaniammal of the community. (Gnanasundaram, 2012).

In a conversational or stylistic analysis, one may study the vocabulary, the phrases, semantic features, inner meaning, style, conversational patterns, etc., which would be considered as linguistic analysis. Nevertheless, when we approach the literature with the discourse approach we have to find out the features such as: the perception, the content, the design, the message, expression, ordering of them, character formation, the techniques used, the cultural features expressed in the story, etc. Along these lines, this study proposes a ‘conceptual moves’ model to analyze the organizational structure of the story in ‘Eravallan’ language.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

N. Vijayan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics
Bharathiar University, Coimbatore 641046
vijayan733@hotmail.com

N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
Professor-cum-Deputy Director (Retd.)
Central Institute of Indian Languages, Govt. of India
Mysore 570006
nadarajapillai53@gmail.com
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