Prosody and local discourse structure

in a polysynthetic language

BACKGROUNDElementary discourse units (EDUs)Local discourse structure consists of elementary discourse units (EDUs) (Chafe 1994, Kibrik and Podlesskaya eds. 2009)

EDUs are identified on the basis of prosodic criteria (tempo, loudness, intonation contours, pitch accents, and pausing)

EDUs constitute a “focus of consciousness” (Chafe 1994) and typically coincide with clauses

Polysynthetic languagesMorphological complexity of the verb substantially exceeds cross-linguistic average

Much of what is encoded by function words of nominal morphology in other languages, is encoded in verbs

Typically, clause arguments are encoded by pronominal affixes inside the verb (him-she-saw)

Research questionsIs local discourse structure in polysynthetic languages same or different compared to more “usual” languages?

Do grammatical peculiarities of polysynthetic languages relate to local discourse structure?

DISCUSSIONThe validity of the familiar prosodic criteria is an important finding: it appears that EDUs constitute a basic building block of the on-line cognitive process of discourse production, independent of grammatical properties of individual languages

Generally, the stratification of EDUs in Upper Kuskokwim is quite typical

The most surprising fact is the equifrequency of short and long EDUs

For comparison, in the Russian corpus studied in Kibrik and Podlesskaya 2009, short EDUs strongly outnumber long EDUs: 26% vs. 6.3%

Most likely, this peculiarity of Upper Kuskokwim is related to its polysynthetic character:• if measured in the number of words, EDUs in a polysynthetic language are shorter•more information is packed in the inflected verb.

As a result, more additional lexical elements fit inside an EDU:• there are fewer regulatory and subclausal elements finding themselves outside an EDU•more than one verb more often fits inside an EDU.

Main conclusion:

The profile of a language in the domain of local discourse structure depends on two major factors: •universal, cognitively based requirements on discourse segmentation•language-specific grammatical peculiarities of the language.

Andrej A. Kibrik (Institute of Linguistics RAN and Lomonosov Moscow State University)

1. Chafe W. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.2. Collins R., Petruska B. 1979. Dinak'i (Our words). Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan Junior Dictionary. Anchorage: NBMDC.3. Iwasaki S., Tao H.-Y. 1993. A comparative study of the structure of the intonation unit in English, Japanese, and Mandarin

Chinese. Paper presented at the annual meeting of LSA.4. Kibrik A. A., Podlesskaya V. I. (eds.) 2009. Rasskazy o snovidenijax: Korpusnoe issledovanie ustnogo russkogo diskursa

[Night Dream Stories: A corpus study of spoken Russian discourse]. Moscow: JaSK.5. Matsumoto K. 2000. Japanese intonation units and syntactic structure. Studies in Language 24: 525-564.6. Wouk F. 2008. The syntax of intonation units in Sasak. Studies in Language 32: 137–162.

RESULTS

Proportion of clausal EDUs in Upper Kuskokwim and other languages

UPPER KUSKOKWIM ATHABASKAN

Athabaskan language familyCentral AlaskaAbout 25 speakers, mostly in Nikolai village

DATADiscourse genresPersonal stories, folk stories, conversations, interviews

MaterialsTranscript plus translation About 3hrs 20 min 965 EDUs

MethodUsual prosodic criteria were used; they proved to be applicable

Example(1) Bobby Esaia. 1.6 hwndine ’ił chu

suddenly with Particleb. 2.2 sighwdla’ todoltsitł ' ts'e’

my.sled it.broke.through.ice andc. 5.5 sileka ch'ildon' nich'i toghedak ’edinh

my.dogs some too they.fell.in.water thoughd. 0.9 ch'ildon' chu’da

some thoughe. 0.2 tinh k'its' ==

ice onf. 0.9 tinh k'its' ’ohighet'a ts'e’

ice on they.are.there and‘Suddenly, my sled broke through the ice, and some of my dogs also fell into the water, while others remained on top of the ice, and <…>’

Language Percentage of clausal

EDUs

English (Chafe 1994) 60%

Mandarin (Iwasaki and Tao 1993)

39.8%

Sasak (Wouk 2008) 51.7%

Japanese (Matsumoto 2000)

68%

Russian (Kibrik and Podlesskaya eds. 2009)

67.7%

Upper Kuskokwim 70.8%

Deviations from canonical clausal EDUs

Short EDUs – those that are smaller in their propositional content than a clause (14.8%)

Long EDUs – those that contain more than one predicative element and thus are larger than a clause (14.4%)

Subtypes of short EDUsRegulatory: consisting of a discourse marker, such as a connector or an epistemic particle – (1a)

Fragmentary: EDU that was started but not completed (false start) – (1e)

Subclausal: prospective or retrospective increments, semantically belonging to a clause but prosodically isolated into a separate EDU – (1d), (2b)

Long EDUs

Quotative clause + main clause – 37% Relative clause + main clause – 2%Non-quotative complement clause + main Adverbial – 0%

clause – 42% Concatenation – 19%

Clausal EDUs

See (1 b, c, f)Clausal EDUs constitute about 70% of all

(2) Bobby Esaia. 4.7 yats’ese di’isdiyok dine

that’s.why it.happened.to.me that time

b. 2.1 k’inodle ghodaicon because.of

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

Usual tempo patterns in long EDUs

(3) Miska Deaphon1.4 noygi dana’ediyo ts’e’ naztanh

inside he.went and he.lay.down‘He went inside and lay down’

150 ms 385 ms

Usual intonation contours in long EDUs

(4) Lena Petruska5.1 ninh ch’iha’ sił tsedelzut miłdisne

you too with.me you.slideI.told.her‘You should also come slide with me,

I told her’

sighwdla’ todoltsitł’240 ms per syll. 450 ms per syll.

aakibrik@gmail.com