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Andrej A. KibrikOlga B. Markus

Dependent clauses in Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan

Athabaskan Languages 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

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Welcome to Nikolai

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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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Quantitative data: an overview

750 clauses in the data set Independent clauses – 86.1% Dependent clauses – 13.9%

• Complement clauses – 9.8%• Quotative clauses – 7.5%

• Adverbial clauses – 3.7%• Relative clauses – 0.4%

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Independent clauses

The strongly preferred clause type Simple clause concatenation often appears

even in case of clear adverbial meaning Always finite: no analog of converbal forms

Effect – Cause:(1)‘I did not take the dogs to the upriver portage

(because) the grass was too tall, and <…>’

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Complement clauses Noonan 1985/2007 – a

classification of complement taking predicates: Utterance predicates Propositional attitude predicates Pretence predicates Commentative predicates Predicates of knowledge Predicates of fearing Desiderative predicates Manipulative predicates Modal predicates Achievement predicates Phasal predicates Immediate perception predicates Negative predicates Conjunctive predicates

AttestedUnatteste

dNot

expectable

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Complement clauses

Matrix predicates attested in the UKA data, in the order of decreasing frequency say, tell be become used to want seem think hear see be true learn forget pretend feel

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Complement clauses: quotative

Quotative clauses: by far the most frequent class among complement clauses, and in fact among all dependent clauses

All instances of quotation are direct quotations

(2) ‘ “Feed them [the dogs]”, he [the giant] told him [the brother]’

OR ‘He [the giant] told him [the brother] to feed them [the dogs]’

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Complement clauses: quotative

Two clauses form a prosodic complex:

(3) ‘I thought that I would set traps around here instead’

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Complement clauses (frequent)

‘be’(4) ‘The fact is that is baptized our way’

‘become’(5) ‘Your children will become such that they steal

things’

‘used to’(6) ‘What was it that they mostly used to hunt for?’

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Complement clauses (mid-frequent)

‘seem’(7) ‘It seems he is listening to us’

‘want’(8) ‘Do you want that he brews tea for

you?’

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Complementizer ts’eŒ

Attested with the matrix verbs: ‘want’ ‘learn’ ‘forget’ ‘not know’

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Exceptional head-dependent word order

(9) ‘He heard that the dogs were panting out there’

OR ‘He heard: the dogs were panting out there’

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Interposition

Not attested in natural discourse, but elicited:

(10) ‘John told him that he would come’

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Adverbial clauses

Semantic type

Position with respect to the main clause

TOTALPre- Post- Inter-

Temporal 11 5 16

Causal 1 5 6

Conditional

3 3

Locative 3 3

TOTAL 15 13 0 28

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Adverbial clauses: temporal

Preposition with respect to the main clause

(11) ‘Both when you start eating and when you go to bed, always pray’

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Adverbial clause: causal

Postposition with respect to the main clause

(12) ‘I did not sleep because he was snoring’

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Relative clause

Extremely rare Almost no examples of noun-headed

relative clauses

(13) ‘The one whom they call Big Foot took her, that one’

Elicited:(14) ‘I saw a long boat’

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Unusually complex construction

(15) ‘ “When you grow up, your children will become such that they steal things”, she told me instead’

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Impressionistic conclusions

Extreme preference for independent clauses clause chaining finite verbs

Very little interclausal syntax The only statistically salient type of dependent

clause: quotative Relatively frequent are only those dependent

clause types that are lexically predetermined, that is, complements

More discourse-oriented dependent clause types, including adverbial and relative clauses, are very rare, even when the appropriate grammatical equipment is available

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However, compare with a very different language

UKA Russian spoken corpus

Complement clauses without quotatives

2.3% 3.6%

Quotatives 7.5% 4.6%

Adverbial clauses 3.7% 2.6%

Relative clauses 0.4% 1.1%

TOTAL dependent clauses 13.9% 11.9%

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Reassessment

Scarcity of dependent clauses in UKA is due primarily to universal factors than to specifics of the given language

The impression of scarcity stems from our intuitive judgments based on written and normative language

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Positive conclusions

Strong dispreference for relative clauses Absence of non-finite forms

in complement clauses (cf. infinitives or deverbal nouns or other non-finite forms in many languages)

• Navajo -ígíí is used in some complements in adverbial clauses (cf. converbal forms in

many languages)• Navajo –go is massively used in “cosubordination”

Syntax of complex constructions is maximally simple

Real specialty of Athabaskan lies in morphology, not in syntax

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