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Andrej A. Kibrik Olga B. Markus

Andrej A. Kibrik Olga B. Markus. Dependent clauses in Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan. Athabaskan Languages 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 Dependent clauses in Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan Athabaskan Languages 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

  3. Welcome to Nikolai

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

  5. Lena Petruska, the oldest speaker

  6. Quantitative data: an overview • 750 clauses in the data set • Independent clauses – 86.1% • Dependent clauses – 13.9% • Complement clauses – 9.8% • Quotative clauses – 7.5% • Adverbial clauses – 3.7% • Relative clauses – 0.4%

  7. Independent clauses • The strongly preferred clause type • Simple clause concatenation often appears even in case of clear adverbial meaning • Always finite: no analog of converbal forms Effect – Cause: (1) ‘I did not take the dogs to the upriver portage (because) the grass was too tall, and <…>’

  8. Complement clauses • Noonan 1985/2007 – a classification of complement taking predicates: • Utterance predicates • Propositional attitude predicates • Pretence predicates • Commentative predicates • Predicates of knowledge • Predicates of fearing • Desiderative predicates • Manipulative predicates • Modal predicates • Achievement predicates • Phasal predicates • Immediate perception predicates • Negative predicates • Conjunctive predicates • Attested • Unattested • Not expectable

  9. Complement clauses • Matrix predicates attested in the UKA data, in the order of decreasing frequency • say, tell • be • become • used to • want • seem • think • hear • see • be true • learn • forget • pretend • feel

  10. Complement clauses: quotative • Quotative clauses: by far the most frequent class among complement clauses, and in fact among all dependent clauses • All instances of quotation are direct quotations (2) ‘ “Feed them [the dogs]”, he [the giant] told him [the brother]’ OR ‘He [the giant] told him [the brother] to feed them [the dogs]’

  11. Complement clauses: quotative • Two clauses form a prosodic complex: (3) ‘I thought that I would set traps around here instead’

  12. Complement clauses (frequent) • ‘be’ (4) ‘The fact is that is baptized our way’ • ‘become’ (5) ‘Your children will become such that they steal things’ • ‘used to’ (6) ‘What was it that they mostly used to hunt for?’

  13. Complement clauses (mid-frequent) • ‘seem’ (7) ‘It seems he is listening to us’ • ‘want’ (8) ‘Do you want that he brews tea for you?’

  14. Complementizer ts’eŒ • Attested with the matrix verbs: • ‘want’ • ‘learn’ • ‘forget’ • ‘not know’

  15. Exceptional head-dependent word order (9) ‘He heard that the dogs were panting out there’ OR ‘He heard: the dogs were panting out there’

  16. Interposition • Not attested in natural discourse, but elicited: (10) ‘John told him that he would come’

  17. Adverbial clauses

  18. Adverbial clauses: temporal • Preposition with respect to the main clause (11) ‘Both when you start eating and when you go to bed, always pray’

  19. Adverbial clause: causal • Postposition with respect to the main clause (12) ‘I did not sleep because he was snoring’

  20. Relative clause • Extremely rare • Almost no examples of noun-headed relative clauses (13) ‘The one whom they call Big Foot took her, that one’ • Elicited: (14) ‘I saw a long boat’

  21. Unusually complex construction (15) ‘ “When you grow up, your children will become such that they steal things”, she told me instead’

  22. Impressionistic conclusions • Extreme preference for • independent clauses • clause chaining • finite verbs • Very little interclausal syntax • The only statistically salient type of dependent clause: quotative • Relatively frequent are only those dependent clause types that are lexically predetermined, that is, complements • More discourse-oriented dependent clause types, including adverbial and relative clauses, are very rare, even when the appropriate grammatical equipment is available

  23. However, compare with a very different language

  24. Reassessment • Scarcity of dependent clauses in UKA is due primarily to universal factors than to specifics of the given language • The impression of scarcity stems from our intuitive judgments based on written and normative language

  25. Positive conclusions • Strong dispreference for relative clauses • Absence of non-finite forms • in complement clauses (cf. infinitives or deverbal nouns or other non-finite forms in many languages) • Navajo -ígíí is used in some complements • in adverbial clauses (cf. converbal forms in many languages) • Navajo –go is massively used in “cosubordination” • Syntax of complex constructions is maximally simple • Real specialty of Athabaskan lies in morphology, not in syntax

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