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Andrej A. Kibrik Olga B. Markus

Andrej A. Kibrik Olga B. Markus. Local discourse structure in Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan. SSILA Conferenc e Berkeley, July 2009. Basic information about Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan (UKA). About 30 speakers left out of the population of about 200

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Andrej A. Kibrik Olga B. Markus

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  1. Andrej A. KibrikOlga B. Markus Local discourse structure in Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan SSILA Conference Berkeley, July 2009

  2. Basic information about Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan (UKA) • About 30 speakers left out of the population of about 200 • Most speakers reside in the village of Nikolai • Actual use of UKA – in two or three households • Prior work – Collins and Petruska 1979 • Kibrik’s field trips in 1997 and 2001 • As in other Athabaskan: • polysynthesis • highly complex verb morphology and morphophonemics

  3. Data • Natural discourse recordings (transcribed) • Folk stories • Personal stories • Conversation (pre-arranged) • Interview at school • In all – 3 hours 20 minutes of talk

  4. Lena Petruska, the oldest speaker

  5. Theory • Local discourse structure:Elementary discourse units (EDUs) • EDUs are elementary behavioral acts of discourse processing • EDUs are identified on the basis of a cluster of prosodic features: • Tonal contour • Central accent • Tempo pattern • Loudness pattern • Pausing

  6. Example (1): tonal contours a b c d e f

  7. Example (1b): tempo pattern • sighwdlaɁ720ms / 3 = 240 ms per syllable • todoltsitł’ ts'eɁ1800 ms / 4 = 450 ms per syllable a b c d e f

  8. Example (1): pausing a b c d e f

  9. Properties of EDUs • Prosodically identified EDUs display interesting content-related properties • Cognitively: manifest a focus of consciousness (Chafe) • Semantically: typically report event/state • Grammatically: often coincide with clauses

  10. EDUs and clauses • Clausal EDUs • Short EDUs (less than one canonical clause) • Long EDUs (more than one canonical clause)

  11. EDU types in example (1) • Clausal: b, c, f • Short: • a regulatory (discourse marker) • d subclausal (topic) • e fragmentary (false start)

  12. Quantitative data: an overview • 965 EDUs in the data set • Clausal EDUs – 70.8% • Short EDUs – 14.8% • Long EDUs – 14.4%

  13. Clausal EDUs (683 = 100%) • Headed by a lexical verb – 84% (1b, c) • Headed by a verb of being – 6% (1f) • Non-verbal – 10% (2)

  14. Non-verbal clausal EDU (2) ‘(There was) also lots of marten skins’

  15. Short EDUs (143 = 100%) • Regulatory – 13% (1a) • Fragmentary – 20% (1e) • Nominalized – 7% • Subclausal – 50% • Prospective – 42% (1d) • Retrospective – 18% (3)

  16. Retrospective subclausal EDUs Increment: (3) ‘That is why that happened to me then, because of the icon’

  17. Long EDUs (139 = 100%) • Concatenation – 19% (4) • Adverbial – 0% • Relative clause + main clause – 2% • Non-quotative complement clause + main clause – 42% • Quotative clause + main clause – 37% (5)

  18. Concatenation (4) ‘He went inside and lay down’ • danaɁediyo 150 ms • naztanh 385 ms

  19. Quotative clause + main clause (5) ‘You should also come slide with me, I told her’

  20. EDUs and clauses in a typological perspective

  21. A possible explanation • Percentage of clausal EDUs is correlated with the degree of a language’s: • degree of morphological complexity • grammatically marked distinction of inflected verbs from other predicate types • Probably the languages overtly marking verbs as dedicated predicative elements more strongly correlate clauses with EDUs

  22. Conclusions • EDUs as universal building blocks of local discourse structure are perfectly well identifiable in a polysynthetic language • EDUs display a high correlation with clauses • Short and long EDU types, as known in other languages, are also found in Upper Kuskokwim • An account of EDUs and their types is a necessary component of a grammatical description of any language, less studied and endangered languages not excluded

  23. Some directions for further research • Different intonation contours – their discourse semantics • Interaction of discourse prosody with lexical tone, vestigially present in some idiolects

  24. TsenɁan! • Thanks to all speakers of Upper Kuskokwim, both mentioned and unmentioned above • Thanks to many individuals and organizations that helped to collect and process the data, in chronological order: • Michael Krauss • James Kari • Raymond Collins • Alaska Native Language Center • Fulbright Program • Endangered Language Fund • Bernard Comrie • MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig • Russian Foundation for the Humanities • National Science Foundation

  25. Welcome to Nikolai

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