ABSTRACT
This article explores the various insights that ex-slave narratives can provide about discourse strategies, which ex-slaves used to talk about events in the past. Transcripts and audio files of the narratives of ex-slaves were used to evaluate the discourse effects of done and say. The two done constructions that were reviewed were the resultant state/perfect done and narrative done. They both indicate that an event is in its resultant state; however, narrative done has the additional function of indicating that the resultant state started to hold before some subsequent event. The narrators use null subject pronouns preceding forms of the verb say. Null or covert 3rd person subject pronouns were preferred to null 1st and 2nd person pronouns throughout the narratives. The ex-slave recordings provide excellent data, which can help to shed light on discourse structure and rhetorical strategies.
