Paper at the 5th International Conference on Cognitive Science

1. Prosody and local discourse
structure
in a polysynthetic language
Andrej A. Kibrik (Institute of Linguistics RAN and Lomonosov Moscow State
University)
Athabaskan language family
Central Alaska
About 25 speakers, mostly in Nikolai village
U PPER KUSKOKWIM AT H ABA SKAN
RESULTS
Clausal EDUs Deviations from canonical
clausal EDUs
See (1 b, c, f)
Short EDUs – those that are smaller in their
Clausal EDUs constitute about 70% of all
propositional content than a clause (14.8%)
Long EDUs – those that contain more than one
predicative element and thus are larger than a
Proportion of clausal clause (14.4%)
EDUs
in Upper Kuskokwim Subtypes of short EDUs
and other languages Regulatory: consisting of a discourse marker, such as a
connector or an epistemic particle – (1a)
Language Percentage Fragmentary: EDU that was started but not completed
of clausal (false start) – (1e)
EDUs
Subclausal: prospective or retrospective increments,
English (Chafe 1994) 60% semantically belonging to a clause but prosodically
isolated into a separate EDU – (1d), (2b)
Mandarin (Iwasaki and 39.8%
Tao 1993) (2) Bobby Esai
BACKGROUND Sasak (Wouk 2008) 51.7% a. 4.7 yats’ese di’isdiyok dine
that’s.why it.happened.to.me that time
Elementary discourse units (EDUs) Japanese (Matsumoto 68%
Local discourse structure consists of elementary discourse units (EDUs) 2000) b. 2.1 k’inodle ghoda
(Chafe 1994, Kibrik and Podlesskaya eds. 2009)
Russian (Kibrik and 67.7% icon because.of
EDUs are identified on the basis of prosodic criteria (tempo, loudness, Podlesskaya eds. 2009)
intonation contours, pitch accents, and pausing) ‘That is why that happened to me then,
Upper Kuskokwim 70.8% because of the icon’
EDUs constitute a “focus of consciousness” (Chafe 1994) and typically
coincide with clauses
Long EDUs
Polysynthetic languages
Morphological complexity of the verb substantially exceeds cross-linguistic Quotative clause + main clause – 37% Relative clause + main clause – 2%
average Non-quotative complement clause + main Adverbial – 0%
Much of what is encoded by function words of nominal morphology in other clause – 42% Concatenation – 19%
languages, is encoded in verbs
Typically, clause arguments are encoded by pronominal affixes inside the
verb (him-she-saw)
Usual tempo Usual intonation
Research questions patterns in long contours in long
Is local discourse structure in polysynthetic languages same or EDUs EDUs
different compared to more “usual” languages?
Do grammatical peculiarities of polysynthetic languages relate to (3) Miska Deaphon (4) Lena Petruska
local discourse structure? 1.4 noygi dana’ediyo ts’e’ naztanh 5.1 ninh ch’iha’ sił tsedelzut miłdisne
inside he.went and he.lay.down you too with.me you.slide I.told.her
‘He went inside and lay down’ ‘You should also come slide with me,
150 ms 385 ms I told her’
DATA
Discourse genres
Personal stories, folk stories, conversations, interviews
Materials
Transcript plus translation About 3hrs 20 min 965 EDUs
Method DISCUSSION
Usual prosodic criteria were used; they proved to be applicable
The validity of the familiar prosodic criteria is an important finding: it appears that EDUs constitute
Example a basic building block of the on-line cognitive process of discourse production, independent of
(1) Bobby Esai grammatical properties of individual languages
a. 1.6 hwndine ’ił chu Generally, the stratification of EDUs in Upper Kuskokwim is quite typical
suddenly with Particle The most surprising fact is the equifrequency of short and long EDUs
b. 2.2 sighwdla’ todoltsitł ' ts'e’ For comparison, in the Russian corpus studied in Kibrik and Podlesskaya 2009, short EDUs
my.sled it.broke.through.ice and strongly outnumber long EDUs: 26% vs. 6.3%
c. 5.5 sileka ch'ildon' nich'i toghedak ’edinh Most likely, this peculiarity of Upper Kuskokwim is related to its polysynthetic character:
my.dogs some too they.fell.in.water though • if measured in the number of words, EDUs in a polysynthetic language are shorter
d. 0.9 ch'ildon' chu’da • more information is packed in the inflected verb.
some though As a result, more additional lexical elements fit inside an EDU:
e. 0.2 tinh k'its' == • there are fewer regulatory and subclausal elements finding themselves outside an EDU
• more than one verb more often fits inside an EDU.
ice on
f. 0.9 tinh k'its' ’ohighet'a ts'e’ Main conclusion:
ice on they.are.there and The profile of a language in the domain of local discourse structure depends on two
‘Suddenly, my sled broke through the ice, and some of my dogs also fell into major factors:
the water, while others remained on top of the ice, and <…>’ •universal, cognitively based requirements on discourse segmentation
sighwdla’ todoltsitł’ •language-specific grammatical peculiarities of the language.
240 ms per syll. 450 ms per syll.
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.
aakibrik@gmail.com