This article describes strategies for clause-combining in oral and written Balochi narratives in three different types of texts: purely oral texts which have not been edited before publication (O-texts), written texts based on oral counterparts (OW-texts), and purely written texts (W-texts). Two texts in each type were selected and analysed.
The issue of syntactic complexity in the three types of texts was viewed from the perspective of coordination and subordination. The six texts in this study indicate that both oral and written narrations in Balochi are complex, although in different ways. The O-texts are made up of longer sentences than the OW- and W-texts. The volume of direct speech in the texts is also significantly different between the O- and OW-texts, where direct speech is frequent, and the W-texts, where it is rather infrequent. As for the conjoining of coordinate clauses, the oral texts and the written texts show opposite preferences. While conjoining with a conjunction is the preferred strategy in the OW- and W-texts, the O-texts prefer conjoining by juxtaposition. Subordination is more complex in the W-texts than in the OWtexts, which in turn are more complex than the O-texts.
Based on the results of our analysis, we do not describe the difference between oral and written narrative texts as a binary opposition but rather as a continuum with spontaneous oral narratives being at one end and written narratives at the other end. Written texts based on oral narrations share some characteristics with both forms and lie between the two ends of the continuum.