Estructura de los relatos sobre experiencias personales en hablantes del otomí de Santiago Mexquititlán

Abstract

This research paper analyzes, from a discursive approach, 28 texts relating to personal experiences of bilingual speakers of Otomi-Spanish. We describe the components of the texts based on the proposal of Labov (1972) in order to identify if their characteristics correspond to the structure of the narratives in languages already described. The data analyzed belongs to the Otomi variant of Santiago Mexquititlán, Amealco. The corpus is based on interviews with speakers; five women and five men, between 45 and 65 years of age, with Otomi as L1 and Spanish as L2. These collaborators migrated from their originating village and they have been living in the city of Querétaro for approximately 20 years. The texts refer to two cultural topics; games played during their childhood and their first day in the city. The data shows that the structure of the texts relating to the first topic tend to be scripts (Schank and Abelson, 1977). While the texts, with regard to their first day in the city, have a tendency to be personal narratives. Of the six components that Labov (1972) proposes, the latter presents at a mínimum 'evaluation', 'orientation' and 'complication'. Finally, the scripts achieve the 'entry conditions',the 'props' and 'roles'; therefore, the revised texts share the structural characteristics found in other languages with a particular distribution in Otomi.