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Andrej A. KibrikOlga B. Markus

Local discourse structure in Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan

SSILA ConferenceBerkeley, July 2009

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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

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Data

Natural discourse recordings (transcribed) Folk stories Personal stories Conversation (pre-arranged) Interview at school

In all – 3 hours 20 minutes of talk

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Lena Petruska, the oldest speaker

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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

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Example (1): tonal contours

a b c d fe

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Example (1b): tempo pattern

a b c d fe

sighwdlaɁ 720ms / 3 = 240 ms per syllable todoltsitł’ ts'eɁ 1800 ms / 4 = 450 ms per syllable

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Example (1): pausing

a b c d fe

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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

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EDUs and clauses

Clausal EDUs Short EDUs (less than one canonical

clause) Long EDUs (more than one canonical

clause)

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EDU types in example (1)

Clausal: b, c, f Short:

a regulatory (discourse marker) d subclausal (topic) e fragmentary (false start)

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Quantitative data: an overview

965 EDUs in the data set Clausal EDUs – 70.8% Short EDUs – 14.8% Long EDUs – 14.4%

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Clausal EDUs (683 = 100%)

Headed by a lexical verb – 84%(1b, c)

Headed by a verb of being – 6%(1f)

Non-verbal – 10% (2)

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Non-verbal clausal EDU

(2) ‘(There was) also lots of marten skins’

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Short EDUs (143 = 100%)

Regulatory – 13% (1a) Fragmentary – 20% (1e)Nominalized – 7% Subclausal – 50%

Prospective – 42% (1d) Retrospective – 18%(3)

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Retrospective subclausal EDUs

Increment:

(3) ‘That is why that happened to me then, because of the icon’

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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)

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Concatenation

(4) ‘He went inside and lay down’

danaɁediyo150 ms naztanh 385 ms

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Quotative clause + main clause(5) ‘You should also come slide with

me, I told her’

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EDUs and clauses in a typological perspective

Language Percentage of clausal

EDUsEnglish (Chafe 1994) 60%Mandarin (Iwasaki and Tao 1993) 39.8%Sasak (Wouk 2008) 51.7%Japanese (Matsumoto 2000) 68%Russian (Kibrik and Podlesskaya 2009)

68.6%

Upper Kuskokwim 70.8%

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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

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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

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Some directions for further research

Different intonation contours – their discourse semantics

Interaction of discourse prosody with lexical tone, vestigially present in some idiolects

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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

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Welcome to Nikolai

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