Schedule 18. Sprachwissenschaftliche Tagung für Promotionsstudierende

When describing endangered languages, prosody is often an afterthought. In my presentation, I will discuss how I am currently using previous documentation and archived materials of languages in Northeast India to investigate the relation between prosody and information packaging, especially for multi-verbal expressions. Unfortunately, the lack of previous description of prosody above the word or phrase level for the languages in question means that I face many challenges in deciding how to capture the phenomena under review.

The investigation of any kind of spoken language requires an understanding of intonation units. Following Chafe (1994), I take intonation units to be bursts of speech delimited by single coherent pitch contours, and the cognitive purpose of these units to be the regulation of information flow, whether it be an expression of the current focus of consciousness of an interlocutor, or as a way of mediating the flow itself. Chafe furthermore hypothesises that the amount of information expressed within a single intonation unit is limited by the “one new idea” constraint, representing the amount of new information that interlocutors can process at one time (1994:109). This suggests that if a multi-verbal expression (for example) is realised within a single intonation unit, it could potentially constitute one single idea, despite comprising of multiple verbs which could feasibly constitute ideas of their own.

To test this hypothesis, I am utilising open-access corpora from three previously described languages of Northeast India: Duhumbi (Bodt 2020), Galo (Post 2007), and Karbi (Konnerth 2020). Although all three works describe prosody at a word-level (as well as at a phrase-level for Galo), there is little discussion of prosody at the intonation unit-level. Furthermore, while Duhumbi is non- tonal, both Galo and Karbi exhibit tonal systems of differing types. The varying prosodic profiles of these languages means that any simple comparison of f0 contours would be misleading and careful consideration is required to properly assess any surface similarities between languages. Additionally, the data from these three languages come from naturalistic texts as opposed to controlled elicitation, which complicates the task of analysis itself considerably.

In this talk, I will outline my research topic and the issues that I have encountered so far, before presenting some possibilities for prosodic description and comparison that I have come across. I hope that the varying backgrounds of participants will lead to a fruitful discussion of how to research prosody, especially for those working with endangered languages and archival materials.

References

Bodt, Timotheus Adrianus. 2020. Grammar of Duhumbi (Chugpa). Leiden: Brill.
Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious
experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Konnerth, Linda. 2020. A grammar of Karbi. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Post, Mark W. 2007. A grammar of Galo. PhD Thesis. Bundoora: LaTrobe University.

Info

Day: 2021-09-25
Start time: 10:30
Duration: 00:40
Room: Die Zauberflöte

Language: en

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