1 Andrej A. Kibrik Olga B. Markus Dependent clauses in Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan Athabaskan Languages Conference Berkeley, July 2009

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3 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

4 Welcome to Nikolai

5 Data  Natural discourse recordings (transcribed)  Folk stories  Personal stories  Conversation (pre-arranged)  Interview at school  In all – 3 hours 20 minutes of talk

6 Lena Petruska, the oldest speaker

7 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%

8 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 ’

9 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  Attested  Unattested  Not expectable

10 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

11 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]’

12 Complement clauses: quotative  Two clauses form a prosodic complex: (3) ‘I thought that I would set traps around here instead’

13 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?’

14 Complement clauses (mid-frequent)  ‘seem’ (7) ‘It seems he is listening to us’  ‘want’ (8) ‘Do you want that he brews tea for you?’

15 Complementizer ts’e Œ  Attested with the matrix verbs:  ‘want’  ‘learn’  ‘forget’  ‘not know’

16 Exceptional head-dependent word order (9) ‘He heard that the dogs were panting out there’ OR ‘He heard: the dogs were panting out there’

17 Interposition  Not attested in natural discourse, but elicited: (10) ‘John told him that he would come’

18 Adverbial clauses Semantic type Position with respect to the main clause TOTAL Pre-Post-Inter- Temporal11516 Causal156 Conditional33 Locative33 TOTAL

19 Adverbial clauses: temporal  Preposition with respect to the main clause (11) ‘Both when you start eating and when you go to bed, always pray’

20 Adverbial clause: causal  Postposition with respect to the main clause (12) ‘I did not sleep because he was snoring’

21 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’

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

23 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

24 However, compare with a very different language UKARussian spoken corpus Complement clauses without quotatives 2.3%3.6% Quotatives7.5%4.6% Adverbial clauses3.7%2.6% Relative clauses0.4%1.1% TOTAL dependent clauses13.9%11.9%

25 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

26 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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