| Plang is a language in the northern branch of the Mon-Khmer language family. This language is spoken by people in Yunnan Province (China), Shan State (Myanmar), and Chiang Rai Province (Thailand).After a brief grammatical sketch of relevant noun and verb phrases and clause types, this thesis focuses on several aspects of Longacre's approach to discourse analysis as it applies to the Plang language. The corpus of data for this research consists primarily of three first person narrative texts. Each text is discussed with a summary of the major episodes and proposed macrostructures.Three aspects of discourse analysis are examined: macrosegmentation (the chunking of a discourse into episodes) plot structure and profile (surface structure features used to mark the peak that reflects the tension in the notional structure) and a tentative salience scheme (the ranking of verb phrases and clauses). |
