Thematic Participants in a Kriol Story

Working on the assumption that meaningful choices made by a speaker are realized by linguistic devices in a text, this paper proceeds from an interpretation of a Kriol story to a partial explanation of that interpretation. The three parts of the article are divided as follows: part 1 outlines the contents of the story; part 2 examines the introduction of the main characters with the use of the near form of the demonstrative; part 3 looks at how the major participants are staged. The focus is on topicalization and on how the use of this and other devices contributes to the overall structure of the story.