1. 1 Andrej A. Kibrik (aakibrik@gmail.com) ENCODING DIRECTIONS IN UPPER KUSKOKWIM ATHABASKAN: A CASE STUDY IN FIELD ETHNOLINGUISTICS Field Linguistics Conference Moscow, October 2009

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3. 3 Basic information about Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan (UKA)  About 25 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, 2001, and 2009  As in other Athabaskan:  polysynthesis  highly complex verb morphology and morphophonemics

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5. 5 Welcome to Nikolai

6. 6 Field work environment in Nikolai  Very few speakers  Very little motivation to do linguistic work  Very expensive  But very nice and hospitable people (generally)

7. 7 Domain under consideration  Organization of spatial representation  Directional adverbs  Dimensional directionals Riverine orientation Elevational orientation

8. 8 Data  Natural discourse recordings (transcribed)  Folk stories  Personal stories  Conversation (pre-arranged)  Interview at school  In all – about 8 hours of talk  Elicited examples

9. 9 Abundance of directionals and locatives in discourse noygidigheloye hidenin ghelhe Œ yats’in nehwdadidzi ł ts’e Œ uphillmountain slope perhapsother.side brush.was.piled.up and notsints’e Œ nehulkanh ts’e Œ deghene Œ downhill they.were.pushing.earth Comp he.used.to.say yi Œ ots’ digheloye denin yihw hulkanh from.uphill mountain slope there they.ploughed.out nodigw hwk’oy hwts’inh no Œ in yotsin hidenin hwdinelkanh uphill ridge from further downhill slope it.was.leveled.out

10. 10 Schematic representation of the UKA native area

11. 11 Riverine orientation: upriver vs. downriver  Roots:  -n- ‘upriver’  -d- ‘downriver’  Basic examples  y-o-n-a Œ zido‘He lives upriver’ Pref-Pref-upriver-Idhe.lives  n-o-d-o-ts’tekash Pref-Pref-downriver-Id-Elyou.paddle ‘Come this way (by boat, from downriver)’

12. 12 Elevational orientation: uphill vs. downhill  Roots:  -n(w)g- ‘uphill’  -ts- ‘downhill’  Basic examples:  n-o-ts-intighisyo ł Pref-Pref-downhill-IdI.will.go ‘I will go downhill’  minhy-o-ng-w-t lakePref-Pref-uphill-Id-Punct ‘The lake is up there’

13. 13 Deictic orientation  X is at the river bank, Y is away from the river:  X speaks to Y:  n-o-ng-itighisyo ł ‘I will go uphill’ Pref-Pref-uphill-IdI.will.go  Y speaks to X:  y-o-ts-ets’teyosh Pref-Pref-downhill-Elyou.go ‘Come here (from downhill)’

14. 14 Relevance of scale Nikolai Telida local grand

15. 15 Local vs. grand scale  Local scale:  y-o-ng-i sikayihhi-ts’e Œ notighisdo ł Pref-Pref-uphill-Id my.houseAr-toI.will.go ‘I will go to my house’  Grand scale:  dotron’ n-o-ts-innonot’wh raven Pref-Pref-downhill-Idit.flies ‘A raven flies away from the mountains’

16. 16 Templatic morphology ABCDEF ReferentialPrefix RootIdiosyncratic suffix Localization hw (areal) y (default) n (default) d (relative) o (default)d (downriver) n (upriver) ts (downhill) n(w)g (uphill) o Œ a Œ in i/w w(gh) (regional) (e)t (punctual) (e)ts’(e Œ ) (elative) ts’in (adessive) ghw (diminutive)  Close to 100 forms just from these four roots

17. 17 Examples of meaningful affixes  sichila sungha ghw-ts-et zido my.younger.brother my.older.brother dim-downhill-punct he.lives ‘My younger brother lives a little below my older brother’  n-o-nwh-ts’e Œ tighisyo ł pref-pref-uphill-elI.will.go ‘I will go down (from an elevation)’  y-o-n-wghnoghima ł pref-pref-upriver-regit.is.swimming.across ‘It is swimming upriver across the river’

18. 18 Conclusions  Dimensional directionals display a remarkable variety of forms  They are semantically and morphologically highly complex  They, as well as other types of directionals, are highly abundant in discourse  Specification of directions and locations is a hallmark of UKA ethnic cognitive representation and constitutes an important linguistic phenomenon in this language

19. 19 Methodological comments  This kind of complex phenomena must be preferably explored with the help of best available consultants  Criteria: age; personal life experience; gender; general intelligence

20. 20 Bobby Esai

21. 21 Nick Alexia

22. 22 Tsen Œ an!  Thanks to all speakers of Upper Kuskokwim, both mentioned and unmentioned above  Thanks to many individuals and organizations that helped to collect and process the data, in chronological order:  Michael Krauss  James Kari  Raymond Collins  Alaska Native Language Center  Fulbright Program  Endangered Language Fund  Bernard Comrie  MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig  Russian Foundation for the Humanities  National Science Foundation

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