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In:The Grammar of Interaction: Epistemicity, information management and discourse in language use
Edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique and Jordi M. Antolí Martínez
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 46] 2025
► pp. 212–242

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The grammar of interactives in !Xun (Namibia)

 | University of Frankfurt
 | University of Köln
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 17 October 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.46.08kon
Abstract
Over the last decades, the nature of social exchange has become an increasingly popular topic of discourse linguistics. The present paper focuses on one particular aspect of the on-going debate. It is based on the model of interactive grammar (Heine 2023), resting on the comparative analysis of grammatical descriptions of well over one hundred languages. In this model, ten types of interactives, that is, extra-clausal expressions of linguistic discourse, are distinguished. Interactives form a grammatical domain of their own, to be distinguished from that of sentence grammar.
Work on interactive grammar has so far largely been restricted to the analysis of conversational interaction. The goal of this paper is to extend the model to the study of narrative texts. To this end, the paper is concerned with a set of 20 fictional spoken narratives in a little-known African language to explore the role that interactives play in them. This language is !Xun (also known as Ju), spoken by traditional hunter-gatherers in Namibia, Angola and Botswana. The paper demonstrates that interactive grammar provides an important tool for processing narrative discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Interactive grammar
    • 2.1Interactives
    • 2.2Argument structure of interactives
  • 3.The !Xun language
    • 3.1The language
    • 3.2Interactives
      • Attention signals
      • Directives
      • Discourse markers
      • Evaluatives
      • Ideophones
      • Interjections
      • Response elicitors
      • Response signals
      • Social formulae
      • Vocatives
  • 4.Fictional narrative texts
    • 4.1Plot and protagonists
    • 4.2Text organization
    • 4.3Speaker-hearer interaction
    • 4.4Attitudes of the speaker
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
  • Appendix
References (60)
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