Event and story schemas in australian aboriginal English discourse

The Yamatji people of Western Australia, although largely monolingual speakers of English, maintain an Aboriginal English variety for purposes of intra-group communication. A corpus of forty oral narratives by young Yamatji speakers was analysed and interpreted by a cross-cultural research team. Thirty-three of the texts were isolated as informed by four schemas: “travel”, “hunting”, “observing” and “encountering the unknown”. One text of each type is reproduced here, and the discourse strategies and markers involved are discussed. It is argued that the maintenance of these schemas (and associated genres) is related to longstanding cultural survival strategies and represents a skill which should be taken account of in education.