Upper Kuskokwim (Athabaskan, Alaska): Elementary Discourse Units and Other Aspects of Local Discourse Structure

Abstract:I investigate local discourse structure in Upper Kuskokwim (Athabaskan, Alaska), drawing on a corpus of discourses that includes a variety of genres. Local discourse structure consists of minimal steps in speech production, so-called elementary discourse units (EDUs). As in other languages, prosodically identified EDUs correlate strongly with clauses; subclausal EDUs (e.g., increments to a preceding clause) and superclausal EDUs (e.g., matrix clause plus complement) occur. Larger units are spoken sentences, identifiable on prosodic grounds; sentence-final and sentence-medial prosodic patterns can be distinguished. The approach is extended to conversation, which shows shorter EDUs and pervasive code mixing. I also report an experimental study in which minimally trained participants were rather reliably able to identify EDUs in an unfamiliar language, relying exclusively on prosodic cues.