Expressing time in the autobiographical discourse of internally displaced persons (IDP) from Kosovo and Metohija

The oral corpus of recorded conversations with displaced persons from Kosovo and Metohija was formed in 2003. The transcript of a three-hour conversation with a female interlocutor originally from the environs of Suva Reka (Metohija) has been subjected to discourse analysis, an oft-used technique within linguistic anthropology. The focus of the contribution is on the interlocutor’s ways of expressing time. Her autobiographical discourse, as well as that of displaced persons from Kosovo and Metohija in general, shows that the war/bombing/displacement functions as a temporal divide, as a time marker in relation to which the past, present and future are expressed. The results of this pilot study into time expressions may be used as the starting point in studying the entire oral corpus.