Research Articles

Conversation in Upper Tanana Athabascan: syntactic and prosodic patterns

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Abstract

This paper is an initial exploration of conversational patterns in Upper Tanana, an Athabascan language spoken in eastern interior Alaska.

While there are a small number of discourse and narrative studies on Athabascan languages in general (Thompson 1989, McCreedy 1989, Saxon 1993, Lovick 2005, 2010a; Berez forthcoming, Lovick & Tuttle forthcoming, to name but a few) and at least one study of conversational patterns in Navajo (Field 2007), the present study is, to our knowledge, the first concerned with the structure of conversation in a Northern Athabascan language. We believe there are several reasons for this. First, the great complexity of Athabascan phonology and morphology is often forbidding to researchers interested in speech above the sentence level. A substantial amount of linguistic analysis (transcription, translation, and at least some morphological analysis) has to be done before analysis of texts and conversations can take place. Second, the severe endangerment of many Athabascan languages makes it difficult to record naturalistic conversation. Many fluent speakers are capable of producing monologues, but at least in the setting of our work, most conduct their everyday conversations in English, even when the other speakers present are all fluent. As a result, conversation in the native Athabascan...

Keywords: Upper Tanana, Athabascan language, Alaska, conversational patterns, endangered languages, turn construction, turn allocation, prosodic patterns, syntactic patterns

How to Cite:

Lovick, O. & Tuttle, S., (2011) “Conversation in Upper Tanana Athabascan: syntactic and prosodic patterns”, Language Documentation and Description 10, 132-176. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd193