The rhetorical organisation of Maori discourse: An illustration

Abstract

Almost 20% all Māori students in New Zealand schools are involved in some form of Māori-medium education. These students need to develop competence in using the language for a wide range of purposes. They need, therefore, to understand a range of written discourse conventions. In seeking to assist them in this task, elders and scholars are turning to the works of major Māori figures of the past, works composed when the language was used widely in a range of discourse contexts. However, scholars need ways of analysing these texts and of communicating their findings to others. The primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate one such approach. A single letter of condolence written in Māori is analysed here in terms of rhetorical discourse structure. On the basis of the analysis, a number of hypotheses concerning epistolary discourse in Māori are put forward. The primary hypothesis is that letters of condolence written in Māori by highly competent users of the language are likely to be characterized by an overall Problem-Solution rhetorical prototype involving spiral multilayering.